Word: allen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...voice, to be sure, sounds as if it might be filing his teeth down as it issues from his spigot mouth. And his face ("the sharpest knife," says Ludwig Bemelmans, "I have ever seen") is rather like a very large red pear that the ants have been at. Fred Allen has other gifts as well. John Steinbeck considers him "unquestionably the best humorist of our time ... a brilliant critic of manners and morals." Jack Benny, his private friend and public enemy, calls him "the best wit, the best extemporaneous comedian I know." Edgar Bergen, a very thoughtful fellow among professional...
...Fred, these eulogies sound like a good definition of what he is not-and wishes most ardently that he could be. Once, when asked his supreme ambition, he replied simply: "Write, if I had the brains." Allen's output of writing during the last 14 years has been bulky, at least. "I am probably the only man," he says, "who has written more than he can lift...
Black Hole. As a writer of fiercely topical satire for a windblown medium, Allen has acquired, in spite of his protests, considerable stature. His work has an angry, big-city clank, a splashy neon idiom and a sort of 16-cylinder poetry. Like a well-barbered, satiric Buddha, he squats in his forest of steel-&-concrete trees, grinning them such a grin as they have seldom had to bear. It is certainly a grin as wide as Shaw's, if less thoughtful-and quite as bitter as Swift's, if less profound...
...Allen persistently regards himself as "just a man who can write good comedy lines." This certainty about his limitations descends, like a black hole, to the bottom of his brain. It allows the very basis of his thinking a cold, immediate access to the facts of living. Certainly few entertainers are so comfortlessly close to reality as Allen; still fewer are crowded so hard by sanity. Often his wit appears to be a cushion against hard fact. More often it seems an act of reprisal. He hurls it, rich with cyanic rancors, in the face of sham wherever he sees...
Reluctantly Amiable. Only in the fastnesses of his pleasant, unpretentious Manhattan apartment, where he lives with his wife Portland (the Portland Hoffa of his radio show), does Allen lower his always-loaded guns. Even then, he does not often relax. Five days a week, 14 hours a day, he squints through nine newspapers and bends over his typewriter like a jeweler, chipping and polishing at the hard little brilliants for his program. Most nights he sleeps only six hours (with ear plugs...