Fred Allen hated television. Allen was a radio comedian for nearly two decades who, as early as 1936, had a weekly radio audience of about 20 million. When he visited The Jack Benny Show to continue their longrunning comedy feud, they had the largest audience in the history of radio, only to be later outdone by President Franklin Roosevelt during a Fireside Chat. The writer Herman Wouk said that Allen was the best comic writer in radio. His humor was literate, urbane, intelligent, and contemporary. Allen came to radio from vaudeville, where he performed as a juggler. He was primarily self-educated and was extraordinarily well read.

Allen began his network radio career in 1932, after working vaudeville and Broadway with such comedy icons as Al Jolson, Ed Wynn, George Jessel, and Jack Benny. This was a time when the United States was in a deep economic depression, and radio in its infancy. In his autobiography Treadmill to Oblivion, Allen wrote that he thought radio should provide complete stories, series of episodes, and comedy situations instead of the monotonous, unrelated jokes then popular on vaudeville. With this idea in hand, he began his first radio program on NBC, called The Linit Bath Club Review (named after the sponsor).

Allen’s world of radio was highly competitive and commercial, just as TV would be many years later. He wrote most of the material for his weekly shows himself, usually working 12-hour days, six days a week. Most comedians, like Bob Hope, had an office filled with writers, but Allen used only a few assistants when writing his comedy. Some of these assistants went on to have successful careers in literature and comedy, such as Herman Wouk, author of The Caine Mutiny and The Winds of War, and Nat Hiken, who created Phil Silver’s The Phil Silvers Show for TV. Allen’s program was imbued with literate, verbal slapstick. He had ethnic comedy routines in Allen’s Alley, appearances by celebrities such as Alfred Hitchcock, musical numbers with talent from the likes of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, and social commentaries on every conceivable subject, especially criticisms of the advertising and radio industry. His radio producer, Sylvester “Pat” Weaver (later to become head of NBC TV programming), observed that Allen’s humor was so popular that three out of four homes in the country were listening to Allen at the zenith of his popularity. To inform the writing of his comedy scripts, Allen compiled a personal library of more than 4,000 books of humor and read nine newspapers (plus magazines) daily. According to the scholar Alan Havig, Allen’s style of comedy had more in common with such literary giants as Robert Benchley and James Thurber than with media comedians such as Jack Benny and Bob Hope.

In the 1946–47 season, Allen’s program was ranked the number one show on network radio. World War II was over, Americans were beginning a new era of consumerism, and a very few consumers had recently purchased a new entertainment device called television. When Fred Allen was asked what he thought of television, he said he did not like furniture that talked. He also said television was called a medium because “nothing on it is ever well done.” Allen dismissed TV as permitting “people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.” But, after nearly two decades on radio, he fell in the ratings from number one to number 38 in just a few months. Such a sudden loss of audience was due to a new ABC radio giveaway show called Name That Tune, starring Bert Parks, as well as a general decline in listeners for all of radio. Listeners of radio were rapidly becoming viewers of TV. And where the audience went, so went the advertisers. In a few short years the bottom fell out of radio. Fred Allen quickly, but not quietly, left radio in 1949.

Allen was first to leave radio, but Bob Hope, Jack Benny, George Burns, and Gracie Allen soon followed. They all went on to star in their own TV shows—all but Fred Allen. He made a few attempts at TV, but nothing more. He first appeared on the Col- gate Comedy Theater, where he attempted to bring to TV his Allen’s Alley from radio. For example, the characters of the Alley were performed with puppets. Such attempts seldom successfully made the transition to the new medium. On the quiz show Judge for Yourself (1953–54), he was supposed to carry on witty ad-libbed conversations with guests. But as Havig states, Allen’s “ad-libbing was lost in the confusion of a half hour filled with too many people and too much activity.” In short, Allen’s humor needed more time and more language than TV allowed. He then was on the short-lived Fred Allen’s Sketchbook (1954) and finally a became a panelist on What’s My Line? from 1955 until his death in 1956.

Fred Allen’s contributions to TV were in two forms. First, he became one of the true critics of TV. He has remained, many decades after his death, the intellectual conscience of TV. His barbs at network TV censorship still hit at the heart of contemporary media (“Heck . . . is a place invented by [NBC]. NBC does not recognize hell or [CBS]”). Second, his comedy style has become part of the institution of TV comedy. His Allen’s Alley created the character Titus Moody, who turned up on TV as the Pepperidge Farm cookie man. His Senator Claghorn, also of the Alley, was transfigured into Warner Bros. TV cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn the rooster. And later, the “Senator” appeared on the Kentucky Fried Chicken TV commercial. A variety of TV comedians have done direct takeoffs of Allen’s performances. For example, Red Skelton’s “Gussler’s Gin” routine and Johnny Carson’s “Mighty Carson Art Players” can be traced back to Fred Allen. Allen’s “People You Didn’t Expect to Meet” is an idea that has worked for David Letterman. Finally, Garrison Keillor’s tales “Lake Wobegon” (as heard on National Public Radio’s A Prairie Home Companion) are a throw- back to Allen’s comedic style.

Allen wrote in Treadmill to Oblivion,

Ability, merit and talent were not requirements of writers and actors working in the industry. Audiences had to be attracted, for advertising purposes, at any cost and by any artifice. Standards were gradually lowered. A medium that demands entertainment eighteen hours a day, seven days every week, has to exhaust the conscientious craftsman and performer.

He was talking about radio, but his remarks could apply just as well to television many decades later.