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All American Old Time Radio Show Classic

Fred Allen's Town Hall Tonight
2 CD Set

For a small taste of this great series,
listen to the preview below.

This show comes on 2 CDs In MP3 Format

Fred Allen’s real name was John Florence Sullivan . He was born on May 31, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we lost him on March 17, 1956 in New York City). A fantastic comedian whose absurdist, pointed radio show (1934–1949) made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the classic era of American radio.

Fred Allen's first taste of radio came while he and Portland Hoffa waited for a promised slot in a new Arthur Hammerstein musical. In the interim, they appeared on a Chicago station's program, WLS Showboat, into which, Allen recalled, "Portland and I were presented... to inject a little class into it." Their success in these appearances helped their theater reception; live audiences in the Midwest liked to see their radio favorites in person, even if Allen and Hoffa would be replaced by Bob Hope when the radio show moved to New York several months afterward. His full-time entry to radio was in 1932.

Allen first hosted The Linit Bath Club Revue on CBS, moving the show to NBC and becoming The Salad Bowl Revue (in a nod to new sponsor Hellmann's Mayonnaise) later in the year. The show became The Sal Hepatica Revue (1933-34), The Hour of Smiles (1934–35), and finally Town Hall Tonight (1935–40). Allen's perfectionism (odd to some, considering his deft ad-libs) caused him to leap from sponsor to sponsor until Town Hall Tonight allowed him to set his chosen milieu (either an urbane small town or a small neighborhood in the big city, depending on your interpretation) and finally established Allen as a bona fide radio star.

The hour-long show featured segments that would influence radio and, much later, television. Such news satires as Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In's "Laugh-In Looks at the News" and Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" owed their genesis to Town Hall Tonight's "The News Reel," later renamed "Town Hall News".

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson's Mighty Carson Art Players routines owed much, including its name, to Allen's Mighty Allen Art Players. Allen and company also satirized popular musical comedies and films of the day, including and especially Oklahoma!. Allen also did semi-satirical interpretations of well-known lives — including his own.

The show that became Town Hall Tonight was the longest-running hour-long comedy-based show in classic radio history. In 1940, Allen moved back to CBS with a new sponsor and show name, Texaco Star Theater (every Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. EST on CBS). By 1942, he shortened the show to half an hour — under network and sponsor edict, not his own. He also chafed under being forced to give up a Town Hall Tonight signature, using barely-known and amateur guests effectively, in favor of booking more recognizable guests, though he liked many of those.

He took over a year off due to hypertension and returned in 1944 with The Fred Allen Show on NBC. Blue Bonnet Margarine, Tenderleaf Tea and Ford Motor Company were the sponsors for the rest of the show's life. Texaco revived Texaco Star Theater in 1948 on radio, and more successfully on television, making an American icon out of star Milton Berle).

Allen again made a few changes. One was adding the singing DeMarco Sisters, to whom he'd been tipped by arranger-composer Gordon Jenkins. "We did four years with Mr. Allen and got one thousand dollars a week," Gloria DeMarco remembered. "Sunday night was the best night on radio." Sunday night with Fred Allen seemed incomplete on any night listeners didn't hear the DeMarco Sisters — whose breezy, harmonious style became as familiar as their cheerfully sung "Mr. Al-len, Mr. Alll-llennnn" in the show's opening theme. During the theme's brief pause, Allen would say something like, "It isn't the mayor of Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga, kiddies." That device became a signature for three of the four years.

The other change, born in the Texaco days and evolved from his earlier news spoofs, proved his most enduring, premiering December 13, 1942. "Allen's Alley" followed a brief Allen monologue and comic segment with Portland Hoffa ("Misssss-ter Allll-llennnn!"), usually involving gags about her family which she instigated. Then, a brief music interlude would symbolize the two making their way to the fictitious alley, always launched by a quick exchange that began with Hoffa asking Allen what he would ask the Alley denizens that week. After she implored him "Shall we go?", Allen would reply with cracks like "As the two drumsticks said when they spotted the tympani, 'let's beat it!'"; or, "As one strapless gown said to the other strapless gown, 'What's holding us up?'"

A small host of stereotypical characters greeted Allen and Hoffa down the Alley, discussing Allen's question of the week, usually drawing on news items or popular happenings around town, whether gas rationing, traffic congestion, the Pulitzer Prizes, postwar holiday travel, or the annual Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus visit.

The Alley went through a few changes in the first installments. Early denizens included sarcastic John Doe (John Brown), self-possessed Senator Bloat (Jack Smart), dimwit Socrates Mulligan (Charlie Cantor), and pompous poet Falstaff Openshaw (Alan Reed). But soon the Alley's four best-remembered regulars moved in and rarely disappeared: announcer Kenny Delmar as bellowing ("Some— Ah say, somebody's knockin' at mah doah!") Senator Beauregard Claghorn (the model for cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn), Parker Fennelly as stoic New England farmer, Titus Moody, Minerva Pious as the Jewish housewife, Pansy Nussbaum, and Peter Donald as fast-talking Irishman, Ajax Cassidy.

His best-remembered gag may be his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny. Allen has been considered one of the more accomplished, daring and relevant humorists of his time. A master ad libber, he constantly battled censorship and developed routines the style and substance of which influenced future comic talents, notably Stan Freberg. Perhaps more than any of his generation, Fred Allen wielded influence that outlived both his contemporaries and the medium that made him famous. We have more on The Feud in the tidbits section we all love to read about.

Then, in 1948, Fred Allen's radio fortunes changed almost overnight. In 1946-47, he had the top-ranked radio show. Thanks in large part to NBC's anxiety to keep more of its stars from joining Jack Benny in a wholesale defection to CBS (the CBS talent raids broke up NBC's hit Sunday night, and Benny also convinced George Burns and Gracie Allen and Bing Crosby to join his move), Allen also had a lucrative new contract, as did singing husband-and-wife situation comedy team Phil Harris and Alice Faye.

Allen was knocked off his NBC perch a year later, not by a CBS talent raid but by a show on a third rival network, ABC (the former NBC Blue network). The quiz show, Stop the Music, hosted by Bert Parks, required listeners to participate live, by telephone. The show became a big enough hit to break into Allen's grip on that Sunday night time slot. At first, Allen fought fire with his own kind of fire: he offered $5,000 to any listener getting a call from Stop the Music or any similar game show while listening to The Fred Allen Show. He never had to pay up, nor was he shy about lampooning the game show phenomenon (especially a riotous parody of another quiz Parks hosted, lancing Break the Bank in a routine called "Break the Contestant", in which players didn't receive a thing but were compelled to give up possessions when they blew a question.)

Unfortunately, Allen fell to number 38 in the ratings, as television began its rise as well. By this time, he had changed the show again somewhat, changing the famed "Allen's Alley" skits to take place on "Main Street," and rotating a new character or two in and out of the lineup. He stepped down from radio again in 1949, at the end of his show's regular season. When NBC declined his contract renewal, his doctor again advised him to take a break for his health, and he decided to take a year off. But this time the year layoff did everything for his health and almost nothing for his radio career. After the 26 June 1949 show, Fred Allen never hosted another radio show full-time again.

Some of those great tidbits we all love and cherish. Fred Allen got his name and got started when some library co-workers planned to put on a show and asked him to do a bit of juggling and some of his comedy. When a girl in the crowd told him, "You're crazy to keep working here at the library. You ought to go on stage," Allen decided his career path was set.

Allen took a later job with a local piano company, added to his library work, and appeared at a number of amateur night competitions, soon taking the stage name Fred St. James and booking with the local vaudeville circuit at $30 a week, enough at that time to allow him to quit his jobs with the library and the piano company. Often billing himself as the world's worst juggler, Allen refined and advanced the mix of his clumsy juggling and the comic routines. He toured the world in a decade worth of vaudeville work during which a billing mix-up provided the stage name change that stayed with him the rest of his life. Booked with a performer named Edgar Allen, he found the venue's front office scrambled the names, advertising Edgar James and Fred Allen.

While performing in vaudeville, Allen commissioned comic-strip artist Martin Branner to cover a theatre curtain with an elaborate mural painting, depicting a cemetery with a punch line on each gravestone. This was the cemetery where old jokes go to die. In Allen's act, the audiences would see the curtain (and have at least a minute to read its punch lines) before Allen made his entrance. Often, audiences would be laughing at the curtain before Allen even appeared. Robert Taylor's biography of Allen includes an impressive full-length photo of Branner's curtain painting, and many of the punch lines are clearly legible in the photo.
Allen's wit was sometimes never intended for the vaudeville audience, but for other professionals in show business. After one of his appearances failed one day, Allen made the best of it by circulating an obituary of his act on black-bordered funeral stationery.
Fred’s stint on Broadway is where he met his wife, Portland Hoffa, who was one of the show's chorus girls.

And now for the famous Feud. Good friends in real life, Fred Allen and Jack Benny hatched a running gag in 1937, after child violinist Stewart Canin's very credible performance on the Allen show inspired Allen to deliver a wisecrack about "a certain alleged violinist" should hide in shame over his poor playing. Benny responded in kind, and they were off and running. The back-and-forth got good enough notice that the two went with it for over a decade, doing it so well that many fans of both shows believed the two really were blood enemies.

The Allen-Benny feud was the longest-playing, best-remembered dialogue running gag in classic radio history. (By far the longest-running running sound gag in radio had to be Fibber McGee's clattering cluttered closet.) The gag even pushed toward a boxing match between the two comedians and the promised event was a sellout. It also never happened, really. The pair even appeared together in films, including 1940's Love Thy Neighbor and 1945's It's In The Bag, Allen's only starring vehicle, also featuring William Bendix, Robert Benchley, and Jerry Colonna.

Some of the feud's highlights involved Al Boasberg. who is credited with helping Benny refine his character into (arguably) America's first stand-up comedian. Boasberg was well known behind the scenes as a top comedy writer, but seldom received recognition in public. He worked, uncredited, on many films (including the Marx Brother's hit A Night at the Opera). Steaming mad because of his long battles for recognition, Boasberg was said to have delivered a tirade that ended up (in slightly altered form) in an Allen-Benny feud routine:

Allen: Why you fugitive from a Ripley cartoon ... I'll knock you flatter than the first eight minutes of this program.
Benny: You ought to do well in pictures, Mr. Allen, now that Boris Karloff is back in England.
Allen: Why, if I was a horse, a pony even, and found out that any part of my tail was used in your violin bow, I'd hang my head in my oat bag from then on.
Benny's side of the feud included a tart interpretation of Allen's Town Hall Tonight show, which Benny and company called "Clown Hall Tonight." What those enraptured by the feud often missed: whenever they guested on each other's shows, the host was liable to hand the feuding guest the best lines of the night.

They toned the gag down after 1941, though they kept it going often enough as the years continued. The biggest climactic event of the feud was broadcast on Allen's show May 26, 1946. In a sketch called "King for a Day," satirizing big-money game shows, Benny pretended to be a contestant named Myron Proudfoot on Allen's new quiz show.

Allen: Tomorrow night, in your ermine robe, you will be whisked by bicycle to Orange, New Jersey, where you will be the judge in a chicken-cleaning contest.
Benny (rapturously): I'm KING for a Day!
[Allen proceeds to have Benny's clothes pressed:]
Allen: Upon our stage we have a Hoffman pressing machine.
Benny: Now wait a minute! Wait a minute!
Allen: An expert, operating the Hoffman pressing machine, will press your trousers.
Benny: NOW WAIT A MINUTE!!! (total audience hysteria laughter, as Benny's pants are literally removed).
Allen: Quiet, king!
Benny: Allen, this is a frame--- (starts laughing himself) Where are my pants?
Allen: Keep your shirt on, king.
Benny: You BET I'll keep my shirt on!
Allen: We're a little late, folks! Tune in next week---
Benny: Come on, Allen, where are my pants!
Allen: Benny, for 15 years I've been waiting to see you here like this!
Benny: Allen, you haven't seen the END of me!
Allen: It won't be long NOW!
Benny: I WANT MY PANTS!

Allen and Benny couldn't resist one more play on the feud on Allen's final show. Benny appeared as a skinflint bank manager and mortgage company owner bedeviling Henry Morgan. Typically, Allen handed Benny the show's best crack: "Listen, I was never this cheap on my own program!"
Benny even used the feud on his TV show, which depicted Benny and Allen as rivals for the sponsor's favors. When the sponsor pointed out that Benny was also a musician, Allen countered with a passage on his clarinet.

In Benny's eventual co-memoir (his daughter added her own recollections and published it after his death), he revealed that the feud may have begun spontaneously, following the Stewart Canin incident, but that it went over big enough with listeners "that we decided to hold a summit meeting with my two writers and Allen's five writers and plan the strategy of our feud. It was all cold and calculated and the sky was the limit. Or rather, the mud was the limit."

Allen may have battled censors more than most of his radio contemporaries. "Fred Allen's fourteen-year battle with radio censorship," wrote the New York Herald-Tribune critic John Crosby, "was made particularly difficult for him by the fact that the man assigned to reviewing his scripts had little sense of humor and frankly admitted he didn't understand Allen's peculiar brand of humor at all." Among the blue pencils, according to Crosby, were: Allen was barred from saying "Brenda never looked lovelier", at the time of socialite Brenda Frazier's wedding, unless he could get direct permission from the Frazier family itself.

Allen was ordered to change the Cockney accent he assigned the character of a first mate aboard the Queen Mary — on the grounds that the ship's first mate could only be a cultured man who might not like a Cockney accent.

Allen actually had to fight to keep Mrs. Nussbaum in the Allen's Alley routines — because NBC feared Jewish-dialect humour "might offend all Jews", never mind that Jewish dialect humour had been a vaudeville and burlesque staple for years.

Allen was ordered not to even mention the fictitious town of North Wrinkle until or unless it could be proven that no such town actually did exist. (It didn't.)

"Allen not only couldn't poke fun at individuals", Crosby wrote, "he also had to be careful not to step on their professions, their beliefs, and sometimes even their hobbies and amusements. Portland Hoffa was once given a line about wasting an afternoon at the rodeo. NBC objected to the implication that an afternoon at the rodeo was wasted and the line had to be changed.

Another time, Allen gagged that a girl could have found a better husband in a cemetery. (The censor) thought this might hurt the feelings of people who own and operate cemeteries. Allen got the line cleared only after pointing out that cemeteries have been topics for comedy since the time of Aristophanes."

The final years. After his own show ended, Allen became a regular attraction on NBC's The Big Show (1950–1952), hosted by Tallulah Bankhead. He appeared on 24 of the show's 57 installments, including the landmark premiere, and showed he had not lost his trademark ad-lib skill or his rapier wit. In some ways, The Big Show was an offspring of the old Allen show: his one-time Texaco Star Theater announcer, Jimmy Wallington, was one of The Big Show's announcers, and Portland Hoffa made several appearances with him as well. On the show's premiere, in fact, Allen — with a little prodding from head writer Goodman Ace — could not resist one more play on the old Allen-Benny "feud," a riotous parody of Benny's show called "The Pinch Penny Program."

It was also on The Big Show's premiere that Allen delivered perhaps his best-remembered crack about television: "You know, television is called a new medium, and I have discovered why they call it a medium — because nothing is well done." This jaundiced TV eye proved a bigger influence on the medium than his cynicism would have suggested. The Museum of Broadcast Communications considers Allen "the intellectual conscience of television." Aside from his famous crack about not liking furniture that talked, Allen observed that television allowed "people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything."

Allen tried three short-lived television projects of his own, including a bid to bring "Allen's Alley" to television in a visual setting similar to Our Town. NBC apparently rejected the idea out of hand. "Television is a triumph of equipment over people," Allen observed after that, "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 the heart of a network vice president."

His other two TV tries were quiz shows. Judge For Yourself (subtitled "The Fred Allen Show") was a game show incorporating musical acts. The idea was to allow Allen to ad-lib with guests a la Groucho Marx, but the involved format had to be revamped in the middle of the run. (The star was "lost in the confusion of a half hour filled with too many people and too much activity," wrote Alan Havig.) A comedy series, Fred Allen's Sketchbook, didn't catch on. Allen finally held down a two-year stint as a panelist on the CBS quiz show What's My Line? from 1954 until his death in 1956 (March 17, 1956).

Allen also spent his final years as a newspaper columnist/humorist and as a memoirist, renting a small New York office to work six hours a day without distractions. He wrote Treadmill to Oblivion (1954, reviewing his radio and television years) and Much Ado About Me (1956, covering his childhood and his vaudeville and Broadway years, and detailing especially vaudeville at its height with surprising objectivity); the former — which included many of his vintage radio scripts — was the best-selling book on radio's classic period for many years.

But before he finished the final chapter completely (the book was published as the author had left it), Allen took one of his regular midnight walks on West 57th Street in New York on the night of St. Patrick's Day, 1956 — and suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 61. A myth for many years was that he died walking his dog, but his biographer Robert Taylor revealed Allen had never owned a dog. A tireless (and funny) letter writer, Allen's letters were edited by his wife into the publication of Fred Allen's Letters in 1965.

Allen is buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York and has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: a radio star on 6709½ Hollywood Blvd. and a TV star on 7021 Hollywood Blvd. His widow, Portland Hoffa, re-married in 1959, to bandleader Joe Rimes, and celebrated a second silver wedding anniversary well before her own death of natural causes in Los Angeles on Christmas Day, 1990. Hoffa also has a star on the Walk of Fame as well. Fred Allen was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1988.

Enjoy the talents of the man who would go on to influence radio and, much later, television. With over 160 episodes and better then 100 hours of Fred Allen comedic wit contained on 2 CDs, you will be laughing till your sides hurt.

The following are the episodes contained on the two CD set.

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