Humor reflects and gives expression to social change. In the early twentieth century, as the frontier closed and Americans concentrated in commercial and industrial cities, rural comic types gave way to urban ones in the nation’s popular literary and stage presentations. The mighty deeds and brash confidence of the mythical Davy Crockett, and the “humor of audacious exaggeration—of perfect lawlessness” that characterized Artemus Ward’s platform performance, yielded to the nervous imaginary triumphs of Walter Mitty under the impact of twentieth-century change. I Some observers have identified a “new humor,” which emerged around the turn of the century. Reflecting urban...

John Lawrence Sullivan, the champion prizefighter and idol of Boston’s Irish, once called his home city “the greatest Sullivan town in the whole world.” Without the Sullivan listings, he added, “the Boston Directory … ’ud look like the Bible would if it didn’t say nothing about God.”¹ Sullivans lived in the city and in its streetcar suburbs, and their number increased by one with the birth of a son to Cecilia (HerlihyJ and James Henry Sullivan at their Somerville home on the last day of May 1894. Christened John Florence Sullivan by parents who admired the boxer, the future Fred...

Thirty minutes before airtime, uniformed ushers filled the large studio with a mixed crowd of New Yorkers and tourists, eager to participate in a major network radio show. Although he had performed radio programs in auditoriums seating several hundred visitors, during the late 1930s and again in the late 1940s Fred Allen broadcast from NBC’s huge Studio 8-H in the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Twice each Wednesday in the late 1930s—at 9:00 p.m. for most of the nation, followed three hours later by a rebroadcast for the West Coast—a throng of 1,318 curious radio fans crowded into...

By 1930, the electronic media had revolutionized popular writing in America. The motion picture and broadcasting industries had introduced new narrative forms—silent film scenarios, sound film dialogue, and live radio drama—and had altered such older kinds of mass communication as advertising copy and news reporting. Radio’s use of writers from the mid-1920s to the late 1940s illustrates important aspects of the larger change. The demand was great, given radio’s staggering appetite for words. American radio stations broadcast 17,000 different programs daily by 1938j in the same year, radio voices on the four major networks spoke a total of...

Mark Twain had his Mysterious Stranger say that “against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”¹ Whether or not that rhetorical claim applied in Twain’s day and to his own writing, its relevance to radio comedy is most doubtful—if for no other reason than that radio censored its comedians. If Twain had worked in radio, and it flourished within two decades of his death in 1910, he would have observed a timid bureaucracy carefully filtering the programming that reached audiences and thus blunting much of its satiric content. At the time of Fred Allen’s death in 1956, Herman Wouk...

The 1930s and 1940s were years of mighty as well as mighty interesting events in the United States and abroad. For Fred Allen, the Great Depression, the world war—especially on the home front—and postwar tensions with the Soviet Union all found a place in his skeptical observance of current events, as did “human interest” stories from the newspapers’ back pages. Allen’s scripts were especially sensitive to goings-on in his own town, New York City. More than on any other network radio program, the metropolis of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Coney Island, immigrant neighborhoods, the subway, and the Brooklyn...

Among the most popular and durable American entertainers of the twentieth century, Bob Hope may also be its most typical comedian. His gags are purely “a vehicle for laughs,” his biographers write. “His comedy was not meant to be social satire or to be used for didactic purposes.”¹ In contrast to Hope’s comedy style, which is representative of the mainstream of popular humor, Fred Allen’s humorous social comment belongs to the tradition of satire.

The function of satire is to criticize, to expose, continually to reexamine and question contemporary values, institutions, and elites. Both the entertainer and the satirist draw...

It was a time of questioning and inquiry, those radio years of the 1930s and 1940s. The communication media intensified the long-standing American hunger for information, and they solicited data from the “mass man” as well as supplying facts to him. Reporters with microphones interviewed “typical” citizens on street comers. Radio listeners mailed questions to the program “Information Please,” hoping to win an encyclopedia for stumping well-read panelists Franklin P. Adams and John Kieran. While motion picture and sport celebrities fed their fans’ demand for information in countless magazine and newspaper interviews, members of studio audiences appeared on broadcasting’s quiz...

If “Stop the Music’s” popularity and the giveaway shows’ cost advantages were the proximate cause of Allen’s professional demise, television’s rapid displacement of radio would very likely have ended his career soon anyway. For Allen created a comedy uniquely aural in achievement and appeal, one crafted to meet radio’s technical qualities and aesthetic demands, but one that was inappropriate for television. His talents as a writer and performer were particularly unsuited to the comedy vehicle that dominated television by the time of his death in 1956, the situation comedy.

Continuing under contract to NBC after his final radio show on...