Word: allens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...three years Funnyman Fred Allen has cultivated a spurious feud with Jack Benny. This week he will begin to engage another comic in a more realistic fight. Having forsaken NBC because his former sponsor Bristol-Myers insisted that his hour show be reduced to 30 minutes, he starts on a CBS network for Texas Co. opposite Eddie Cantor on NBC. This season, as Bristol-Myers' substitute for Allen, Cantor will be spurred on by a contract that calls for a flat $10,000 a week, an extra $200 for every point over 20 he registers with...
Awesome to fellow zanies is Allen's ability to concoct his own jokes. Most of them depend on gagmen for their wit. Allen writes much of his show himself, decisively edits the contributions of his two assistant scripteurs. Practically unchanged this season will be the formula that carried his program along on NBC. In his dry, unhappy, singsong drawl, Allen will still handle 60% of the dialogue, manage, between musical pauses, to give his own news of the week, interview unexpected guests, preside over the dramatic doings of the Mighty Allen Art Players. For his famed ad libs...
...parched despair of Allen's voice is matched by his rueful features. In the classic comic tradition, he is persistently gloomy. In point of fact, his early lot was not too happy. A onetime stack-boy in the Boston Public Library, he got interested in juggling through reading a few books on the subject, soon became so proficient with balls and billiard cues that he was permitted to join a troupe of amateurs touring movie houses around Boston. Allen was subjected to all kinds of indignities. He was struck from behind with bladders, bothered by flying stuffed fish, interrupted...
Before Franklin Roosevelt makes a bold stroke, he likes to know how it will hit the U. S. Last week various unofficial feelers poked the U. S. in the ribs. Playing on its one theme, William Allen White's Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies crusaded up & down the land. In Chicago it held a mass meeting of 14,000 people, to whom Admiral William H. Standley (U. S. N. retired) declared: "We should throw more and more ships, air planes, munitions . . . into democracy's fight against Hitlerism." The White Com mittee, which pounded home...
Manager: Arthur B. Allen...