Fred Allen was one of the most successful radio personalities during the 1930s and 1940s. Allen's forte was topical humor. He was a satirist, drawing much of his material from the day's events. While he occasionally commented on the headlines, he more often zeroed in on the smaller "filler" items that graced the newspapers. Even though his greatest appeal was to the "thinking" audience, Allen also enjoyed enormous popular appeal. Author John Steinbeck once called Allen "unquestionably the best humorist of our time." Among his many fans were Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, and George Burns. By the end of his career Fred Allen became one of the country's leading authorities on humor.

Origins

      Fred Allen was born John Florence on 31 May 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His mother died when he was very young and his father died when he was 15. After their father's death, he and his brother, Bob, lived with their aunt. At 18 he began performing on the "amateur night" circuit of vaudeville around Boston. His ability to juggle led to a hokey comedy routine. He was billed as Paul Huckle, European Entertainer, for his first appearance. He later became Fred St. James, the juggler. He soon changed his name to Freddie James and billed himself as the world's worst juggler. As time went on, the juggling became a smaller part of his act and the comedy became more prominent; he eventually abandoned juggling altogether.

     In 1914 he left for New York City to try to break into big­ time vaudeville. Not finding much success, in 1916 he left for a tour of Australia. While there, he polished his act and returned to the United States a year later. Upon his return he joined the New England vaudeville circuit. By 1920 he was an established vaudeville headliner, now known as Fred Allen. In 1922 Allen took his act to Broadway and there met his future wife, Portland Hoffa.

Radio

     By the early 1930s radio had established itself as an important venue for many of vaudeville's top talent; by the fall of 1932 most vaudeville acts had made the switch to radio. Among the medium's new performers were singers Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, and Paul Robeson and comedians Jack Benny, Ed Wynn, the Marx Brothers, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Fred Allen. Allen's first radio program The Linit Bath Club Revue, premiered on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Sun­ day night, 23 October 1932. Allen put his all into the weekly show, regularly working 80-hour weeks to prepare each week's program. The Linit show was heavily influenced by the vaudeville style-stiff stage comedy and stand-up patter backed by music. His show changed its sponsors and its name three times during the next year, first to The Salad Bowl Revue then to The Sal Hepatica Revue, then to The Hour of Smiles. Finally in 1934 Allen's show became famous as Town Hall Tonight.

     Like most programs of the era, Allen's followed a formula from the beginning. In his earlier series each episode would be built around a different occupation. One week he would play a plumber, the next week a banker, then a druggist, etc. By the time Town Hall Tonight emerged, the formula had evolved to what is now commonly known as the "comedy variety" format. This format includes different comedic skits or monologues interspersed with music. Another feature of Town Hall Tonight was a regular amateur talent segment. In fact, almost half of each episode was devoted to amateur talent. Like the other elements of the program, the amateur segment was extremely popular with the audience. It was also popular with the sponsor and the network because it was very inexpensive to produce. In fact, the amateur talent segment proved so popular that it spawned a number of amateur talent programs, the most notable being The Original Amateur Hour of Major Bowes. Some of the amateur talent that was discovered on Allen's program included comic, and later radio and TV host, Garry Moore, actress Ann Sheridan, and a young Frank Sinatra.

     It was on Town Hall Tonight on the evening of 30 December 1936 that Allen started his famous on-air "feud" with Jack Benny. The feud began inadvertently when Allen ad-libbed a joke about Benny's inability to play the violin well. The following week Jack Benny responded to this remark on his own program and the feud was on. The feud played out over the next three months. In March 1937 on The Jack Benny Program a mock fistfight, called "the battle of the century" was staged to resolve the feud once and for all. The fight was to have taken place in the ballroom of the Hotel Pierre on March 14. There was no actual winner of this contrived fistfight, and both men returned from the boxing ring tattered but friends. This was all in good fun, of course, because Allen and Benny had always been and continued to be the best of friends off the air. Although the fistfight was to have been the end of this feud, the public enjoyed it so much that Allen continued it until he left the air in 1949.

     After a six-year run, Town Hall Tonight ended in 1939 and became simply The Fred Allen Show. The new weekly program contained musical numbers, a feature comedy skit by the newly created Mighty Allen Art Players (a device that was so successful it was paid homage to many years later on television by Johnny Carson in the form of the Mighty Carson Art Players), and a "News of the Day Newsreel." The newsreel was typically a satire about some obscure recent event. Harry Von Zell was the announcer and Peter Van Steeden was the musical conductor on the program.

     In the fall of 1940 Allen returned to CBS and his program was renamed The Texaco Star Theatre, after its sponsor Texaco Gasoline. The CBS version was initially scaled down to 30 minutes; in 1941 it went back to an hour-long format for a year , but in 1942 the program returned to the 30-minute format that it would retain until its end; the show was aired on Sunday nights.

Allen's Alley

     The 1940s brought change to radio. Old-style vaudeville comedy had lost its appeal. The public was becoming more sophisticated and thus expected its comedy to be more sophisticated as well. During the early 1940s "Allen's Alley" emerged. The Alley was not your typical street. In fact, it might have been the most atypical street anywhere. The actual description of the Alley was always left to the imagination of the listener. Very few details about its appearance were ever offered. The residents of "Allen's Alley" became household names, and were among the best-known characters of radio's golden age. On "Allen's Alley," Fred often visited the Brooklyn tenement of Mrs. Nussbaum (Minerva Pious). Mrs. Nussbaum was always relating her weekly problems with her husband Pierre. The network executives were concerned that Mrs. Nussbaum's thick Jewish accent might offend some listeners, but the overwhelming reaction by the audience was favorable. Also on the Alley were the farmhouse of Titus Moody (Parker Fennelly), the shack where Ajax Cassidy (Peter Donald) lived, and the antebellum mansion of southern Senator Beauregard Claghorn (Kenny Delmar). Moody was one of the funniest characters on the show, always greeting Allen with the friendly "Howdy, Bub." Cassidy, the loudmouth Irishman, was probably the least popular character on "Allen's Alley," while Senator Clag­ horn became the star of the Alley. His famous refrain "that's a joke, son" became part of the popular lexicon of the day.

There were other characters that became audience favorites-Senator Bloat; John Doe, the angry average citizen; and poets Falstaff Openshaw, Humphrey Titter, and, of course, Thorndyle Swinburne, the poet laureate of Boston Post Road. In addition to the appearances of his regular characters, some of Allen's most memorable moments came when he would spoof musicals. On one program in the early 1940s he and Orson Welles did a hilarious five-minute version of "Les Mis­erables." A few years later, his parody of Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Mikado," called "The Radio Mikado," was a smash with the audience and still remains a classic.

Throughout the 1940s Allen was frequently at odds with network officials. His battles with the networks usually involved the content of his remarks, which were often derogatory about network officials. Although ordered to stop these remarks, Allen continued. As a result he was required to submit verbatim scripts to the networks before air for their approval. The network often required him to change or delete items. Allen eventually started to include items in the script that he had no intention of using on air, so that he could use those items as bargaining chips; he would agree to cut one of those items in exchange for keeping something else. In addition Allen would often ad-lib material. As radio programs were broadcast almost live (there was a delay of a few seconds), the audience would sometimes hear a bleep in place of a word or phrase. On 20 April 1947 his show had 30 seconds of dead air because he refused to delete a controversial joke. Finally an angry public forced the bleeping to stop. Sometimes Allen's shows ran over­ time and were cut off. Once a show ended in the middle of a skit. The following week Allen began the show with the remainder of the skit and an angry, but witty, tirade against the network for being so fussy about staying to a regular schedule.

Demise

     Allen left the air for health reasons (high blood pressure) in 1944. In 1945 he returned and the title of his program returned to The Fred Allen Show, which it kept until its cancellation in 1949. A young Arthur Godfrey served briefly as Allen's announcer during the program's later years. Airing ​​under different titles, The Fred Allen Show had a very successful 17-year run on network radio. Allen's final radio show was on 26 June 1949 and, fittingly, his last guest was Jack Benny. The program finally ended owing to a combination of competition (Stop the Music) and an unchanging format that had begun to wear as radio gave way to television.

     Although Fred Allen was the driving force on the air and behind the scenes, many people contributed to the success of Allen's programs throughout its long run. Some of the more prominent were writers Nat Hiken, Larry Marks, and Herman Wouk; announcers Kenny Delmar, Jimmy Wallington, and Harry Von Zell; directors Vick Knight and Howard Reilly; and musical directors Al Goodman, Ferde Grofe, Lennie Hayton, Lou Katzman, and Peter Van Steeden. The most prominent sponsors during Allen's run included Bluebonnett Margarine, the Ford Motor Company, Hellmann's Mayonnaise, Ipana and Sal Hepatica, Shefford’s Cheese, Tenderleaf Tea, Texaco Gasoline, and V-8 Vegetable Juice. Allen’s long-standing theme song was “Smile, Darn Ya, Smile.”

     Like many radio personalities of the day, Fred Allen tried to make the transition to television. Unlike many of his contemporaries, the transition was difficult for Allen, because he had an inherent distrust of television. He once said of television, “They call it a medium because nothing on it is ever well done.” In the same vein, he once quipped “Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in the navel of a flea and still have enough room beside them for a network vice president’s heart.”

     Allen's first venture into television was on NBC as one of the rotating hosts, along with Eddie Cantor and the team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, of The Colgate Comedy Hour. The program debuted in September 1950 and ran for a number of years, but Allen was dropped from the rotation after only three months. His next venture was also as a rotating host (along with Bob Hope and Jerry Lester) of NBC's Chesterfield Sound Off Time in October 1951. The program lasted just three months. In 1952 he was to start another TV series when his first heart attack forced him into retirement. He came back in the fall of 195 3 to host an NBC quiz show called Judge For Yourself. The program was cancelled after one season. Finally, in 19 5 4 Allen took a panelist spot alongside Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Dorothy Kilgallen on the successful CBS quiz program What's My Line? Allen remained on What's My Line? until his death on 17 March 1956.