Word: allen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mississippi's and a brain the size of a hominy grit. The Senator's development has been arrested in an artistic sense, too. After only six minutes on the air (four programs), his "That's a joke, son!" and "That is" were national bywords. Allen, who intended the Senator to have a far larger comic vocabulary, has been forced to give the public what it wants: plenty of nothing...
...farm is "somethin' like Communism. Nobody's got nothin', but everybody's workin'." Does he like the radio? "I don't hold with furniture that talks." Titus is anemic. If cut, he will not bleed; the wound will only "hiss and pucker." Says Allen: "Titus will be getting better when the other characters have dried up and blown away...
...Pansy Nussbaum (Minerva Pious) is a triumph of comic virtuosity. To avoid offense to Pansy's prototype (the big-city Yiddish tenement dweller), Allen confines himself to kidding Yiddish-English. He seems endlessly aware of new and whimsical wrinkles in the dialect. "When I am a young goil, footloose and fancy," Pansy once related, "I am woiking, a waitress, in Doberman's delicatessen. Is coming every day for lunch a liverwurst salesman. He is a goodtime Irving, a fancy dandy, also floiting a bissel. The liverwurst salesman is to the other waitress, Supreme Feitelbaum, engaged. With ogling, also...
...mention of Allen's name, most network executives get a drawn look about the eyes; but over conferential desks, they gleefully repeat this one: "Allen doesn't dislike radio. He just resents having to work all week long for only $20,000." He does indeed, as he once ruefully admitted in seven words that catalogue his complete attitude toward his work: "This drudgery, this sham, this gold mine." Actually, after the tax collectors and the 60 members of his cast are paid off, Allen's gold mine yields him closer to $2,000 a week...
...Shrinkage of Values. Allen does not spare his fellow comics. "Midgets," he calls them, "living on borrowed minds." This attitude has precluded for Allen hundreds of friendships. His only real intimates are two rusty old iron men of vaudeville, "Uncle Jim" Harkins and "Doc" Rockwell. Uncle Jim acts as his social secretary and general Man Friday; Doc has retired to Southport, Maine, where he tends lobster pots...