‘Mister AL-len!” was the screechy cry of Portland Hoffa, announcing the entrance of Fred Allen on his popular radio show, Town Hall Tonight. Portland was Fred’s wife and sidekick on the show, at the time when it was one of the top three radio programs in the 1930s. (The others were Jack Benny’s and Eddie Cantor’s.) The popularity of Fred Allen’s several programs lasted into the 1940s, when the last one finally expired in 1949. By that time, radio entertainment itself was beginning to fade, as television began replacing it as the favorite source of home entertainment.
Fred Allen (1894-1956) had been on radio since 1932, when he, like so many old vaudevillians, turned to the new medium for a living. Vaudeville was slowly dying, wounded by the Depression, and Allen was not only looking for work but also searching for a steady income. He had married Portland Hoffa in 1927 and was tired of the hop-skip-and-jump life of the vaudeville circuit—as well as the uncertainties of work in stage shows. For besides appearing in vaudeville, Allen had also been performing on Broadway since 1929, in stage revues such as The Little Show and Three’s A Crowd, both with Clifton Webb and Libby Holman.
In September 1932, when he and Portland returned from their summer vacation, they found that a show promised to open that month had been canceled. “With the advance of refrigeration,” Allen wrote later,
Faced with unemployment, or a return to three-a-day vaudeville shows, Allen investigated the option of radio. The new medium was burgeoning as a source of home entertainment, especially since radios were no longer awkward apparatuses with headphones and difficult reception, and entertainers such as Eddie Cantor, Amos ’n’ Andy (Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll), and Ben Bernie were on the air, attracting listeners. Allen was willing to adapt his comic juggler routine, with Portland as stooge, and offer his humor in a variety format.
At the time, the Linit Bath Soap Company was looking for someone to host a half-hour program, and hearing of this, Allen proposed himself as host and producer. He had his own idea of what the program would be like: “Hoping for longevity in the new medium, I planned a series of programs using a different business background each week.” The format would entail interviewing comic characters and feature topical repartee. Allen was hired, and on October 23, 1932, the Linit Bath Club Revue went on the air. Allen himself wrote the entire script—but soon hired a cowriter, thereby saving his nervous system.
Knowingly or not, Fred Allen was creating a unique format: news spots and comic interviews of “everyday” people—workers, politicians, ethnic characters—with musical interludes. And “guest stars” and, of course, advertising.
The Linit program lasted only six months, but then Allen was hired by Hellmann’s Mayonnaise to produce The Salad Bowl Revue, with the same format, ending in December 1933. His next opening came from Bristol Myers, which was promoting a laxative called Sal Hepatica. So in January 1934, listeners heard a new program, The Sal Hepatica Revue, an hour program of which Fred Allen had a half-hour. The format remained the same—satirical interviews, music, skits—but being the second half of a one-hour program was not to Allen’s liking, and he persuaded Bristol Myers to give him the entire hour, which he renamed Town Hall Tonight.
A circus atmosphere pervaded this one: Crowd noises were heard, alongside with bands playing, and the show was divided into segments, one of which was “The Mighty Allen Art Players,” where the cast performed comic skits (later borrowed by Johnny Carson for his “Mighty Carson Art Players”). The show was a hit: Millions tuned in, and it competed with the top-rated Jack Benny and Eddie Cantor. In 1936 Allen initiated his mock-feud with Benny, during which both exchanged barbs on their shows. “Benny was born ignorant,” said Allen, “and has been losing ground ever since.” Benny replied: “Until you were born, no one knew what a cramp looked like.”
What made Fred Allen’s humor so unusual? Why was he so popular? It wasn’t his voice, which was flat and nasal; but he was a master ad-libber, a genial satirist of American life, and he always sounded as if he were enjoying his program as much as the audience. By the 1940s, Allen had reduced his format to a topical review, where Allen and Portland strolled down a mythical city alley, asking comic characters their opinions of questions of the day, most derived from the newspapers: “Are children as smart today as they were 10 years ago?”
The characters he interviewed were much the same each week and gained as much fame as Allen himself: Falstaff Openshaw, a poet of doggerel, Senator Claghorn, a bombastic southern politician, Titus Moody, the wry New Englander, Mrs. Pansy Nussbaum, a Jewish housewife, Ajax Cassidy, an Irish rapscallion. The characters formed part of what came to be called, from 1942 on, “Allen’s Alley.”
Today, of course, many of the jokes are dated, along with the sensibility; but Allen pioneered a kind of topical humor—with riffs on Fiorello La Guardia, Wendell Willkie, Harry Truman—which endures.
When Allen’s radio show ended, in 1949, it was a blessing to his blood pressure. But it troubled him to be sidelined: He made occasional personal appearances on radio and television, and sometimes joined the panel of the new television quiz show What’s My Line? Writer-friends John Steinbeck and Edwin O’Connor encouraged him to write his memoirs. There were two volumes: Treadmill to Oblivion (1954), the story of his life in radio, and Much Ado About Me (1956), which began with his childhood in Boston and ended on Broadway in 1929. This was the literary side of Allen, not always noticeable in his shows, but reflective of the man who read voraciously, closely followed the news, and enjoyed the friendship of Groucho Marx and James Thurber.
Fred Allen’s last hurrah was also radio’s. In 1950 he appeared on an NBC extravaganza called The Big Show, which premiered in the desirable Sunday night slot, 99 minutes hosted by Tallulah Bankhead. It featured a lineup of famous entertainers, including Allen (who also did a bit of scriptwriting), as well as music, drama, and comedy. The critics were delighted, but sponsors were not, falling away one by one over the next two years. By the time The Big Show was canceled by NBC, Allen’s health was in decline. Walking down a Manhattan street in 1956, age 61, he died of a heart attack.
For all his sophistication, Allen was a man of simple habits: He neither smoked nor drank; he avoided nightclubs; he didn’t own a car. He vacationed in a small town in Maine. Of his life’s work, his biographer wrote: “His great contribution to life in America came in the marvelous 18-year run of weekly satiric invention which was the Fred Allen Show on radio.”
Philip Brantingham is a retired editor in Chicago.
