In the decades following their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, the comedy team of Mitzi McCall and her husband Charlie Brill had a successful career, appearing in nightclubs and on television; both individually and together, they acted on television, in films and on the stage.

But that one performance remained indelibly in the couple’s memory: It was also the night the Beatles made their American television debut, and that was all the screaming young fans in the audience cared about. Their nearly three and a half minutes in the national spotlight came just before the Beatles returned for their second performance. They flopped – in front of 73 million viewers.

“We almost wanted to kill ourselves,” Ms. McCall told the Washington Post in 2004.

“I find it hilarious,” Mr. Brill said in a telephone interview. “We laid the biggest egg ever.”

Mrs. McCall died on August 8 in a hospital in Burbank, California. She was 93 years old. Her death was confirmed by Mr. Brill.

When their manager, Mace Neufeld, told Ms. McCall and Mr. Brill that they would be appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” – a Sunday night concert that was often seen as a springboard to fame at the time – it seemed like the kind of breakthrough a young act needed. And when Mr. Neufeld told them they would be on the bill with the Beatles, Ms. McCall later recalled, “We weren’t really sure who they were.”

When they rehearsed the sketch, which they had spent a year perfecting—”it was beautiful,” Brill said—Sullivan rejected it as too sophisticated for an audience consisting mostly of teenage girls (who knew exactly who the Beatles were). Instead, he had them run through their entire nightclub act, plucking out parts he thought were appropriate, creating a strange mess.

While they were revising their sketch, a young man with long hair and glasses came into their dressing room and borrowed ten cents to buy a Coke from the vending machine. He stayed nearby and sketched the couple with a pen on a napkin.

“All we thought was that this boy was going to leave so we could work on our act,” Ms. McCall said in a 2015 episode of the public radio program “This American Life,” recalling her encounter with John Lennon. “Get out of here.”

After the Beatles’ first performance, the mix of entertainers was as diverse as ever on the Sullivan show: Fred Kaps, a Dutch magician; the cast of the Broadway musical “Oliver!” (which included the then-unknown Davy Jones, soon to become a member of the Monkees); the impersonator Frank Gorshin; the music hall singer and actress Tessie O’Shea; and finally McCall & Brill.

At this point, the audience had already been waiting for the Beatles’ return for half an hour.

In their sketch, Mr. Brill played a producer who casts a young actress in a new film. Ms. McCall played his secretary and three other roles: a nervous former Miss Palm Springs, a pushy stage mother and a method actor. The sketch was a flop, except for a few giggles when Ms. McCall threw in an improvised role as the stage mother.

“My little girl was waiting outside, you know,” she said. “She used to be one of the Beatles.”

“Oh, what happened?” asked Mr. Brill.

“Someone stepped on her.”

When Mr. Sullivan didn’t call them over after their performance to congratulate them, they knew they had failed and were lost in early Beatlemania. After a commercial for Pillsbury cake mix, the Beatles returned.

Ms. McCall and Mr. Brill drove to Miami to visit Mr. Brill’s grandparents instead of returning home to Los Angeles.

Her agent didn’t call her for six months, but her career eventually recovered.

Mitzi Joan Steiner was born in Pittsburgh on September 9, 1930. Her father, Emil, was a manager of a sofa store and her mother, Gizella (Klein) Steiner, was a household keeper.

Mitzi began acting at a young age and had roles at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in the late 1940s. In the early 1950s, she hosted a television show called “Kiddie Castle,” where she sang backing tracks to records by singers such as Ethel Merman and Carol Channing.

“She is, if you can call it that, 5 feet 6 inches tall and loves children because ‘nobody understood me as a child,'” wrote Win Fanning, the radio and television editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in 1952.

In 1953, she moved to San Diego with her first husband, television director Jack Tolen, where she appeared on the television variety show “Studio 10.” With the help of a friend of her mother’s, Dolores Hope, Bob’s wife, she soon found a Hollywood agent and signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. Her first role was a teenager in Norman Taurog’s “You’re Never Too Young” (1955), which starred Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

Inspired by reading McCall’s magazine, she had given herself a new last name.

After several other films, she attended a comedy workshop run by Mr. Lewis and met Mr. Brill there. She formed a comedy group with Joan Shawlee (who had played bandleader Sweet Sue in “Some Like It Hot”) before teaming up with Mr. Brill. They married in 1960.

“Mitzi did a few little things and exercises,” said Mr. Brill, recalling his first impressions of her. “She was so funny and so charming. The sweetest in the world.”

They performed their act – which Brill says was influenced by the comedy of Mike Nichols and Elaine May – until the mid-1980s, opening for Ann-Margret, Ella Fitzgerald and Marlene Dietrich. They had a recurring role as a quarrelsome “funny couple” on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” appeared on many variety and talk shows, as well as game shows such as “Tattletales,” and played a detective and his fun-loving wife in the 1990s crime drama “Silk Stalkings.”

In addition to her husband, Mrs. McCall is survived by her daughter, Jenny Brill.

Ms. McCall has appeared in numerous sitcoms of her own, including “Maude,” “Roseanne” and “Ellen,” and has written episodes of “One Day at a Time” and “ALF.”

She also played a small but crucial role in a 1994 episode of “Seinfeld,” as a loose-moraled cleaning lady who secretly borrows Jerry’s mother’s fur coat from storage. When Jerry confronts her behind the door of a department store dressing room, the camera shows only her shuffling feet. When the door opens, she looks indignant and he is wearing the coat.

Then she meets Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a customer at the dry cleaners. Elaine asks her if she can remove the salt stain on the expensive dress she wore outside in order to find a more accurate mirror than the “thin” one in the store.

“A piece of cake,” Ms. McCall says confidently. “Bring it over.” Then she eyes the dress as if imagining it for herself and asks, “What size is it?”