Word: allene
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...three in one. One subtitle might read "Up from Penury," the Dickensian tale of a poor Boston Irish boy who made good; another, "Vaudeville's Final Hour," a nostalgic total recall of the show-business tribe that was "half gypsy and half suitcase"; and the third, "The Fred Allen Joke Book," for gags are sprinkled all over-mostly outrageous gags, gags that used to be known as "forty-men jokes," i.e., it takes 40 men to keep the audience from bolting. The jokes were Allen's way of laughing at himself and his trade, and they serve...
...Fred Allen's father bound books for a living, but there is no evidence that he ever opened one. Born in Cambridge, Mass, in 1894, Fred was christened John Florence Sullivan; within three years his mother was dead, and the elder Sullivan had taken to drink. One of Allen's boyhood memories is of himself and his younger brother piloting the old man home after an all-day binge: "We looked like two sardines guiding an unsteady Moby Dick into port." He took an after-school job as runner and stack boy at the Boston Public Library...
Lines like that numbed the funnybones of Allen's pre-World War I audiences. When he wasn't twanging out patter, he pyramided cigar boxes on his chin and twirled hats through the air as "Freddy James, the World's Worst Juggler." At times he also did a ventriloquist's bit with a dummy named Jake. He had outdistanced the drag-off hooks with which managers yanked booed performers into the wings, but he was still patronizingly tagged as a "coast defender," i.e., a smalltime vaudevillian who played only Boston and such outlying provinces as Maine...
That one refers to Mrs. Montfort's Boardinghouse, a fleabag theatrical hotel, which was Allen's first miserable beach head on Broadway's Great White Way. It was 1914, World War I had top billing, and Allen's arrival in New York had "created as much commotion as the advent of another flounder at the Fulton Fish Market." But the day would come (The Little Show and Three's a Crowd) when Broadway would be Allen's alley...
...ALLEN : What character do you portray...