What Was His Line? Funny

“California is a fine place to live--if you happen to be an orange.”

--Fred Allen

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The first three evenings to sell out at the Museum of Television & Radio’s 19th Annual William S. Paley Festival were no surprise--”Alias,” “Six Feet Under” and “Queer as Folk.” All three are hip, cutting-edge series that appeal to the 18-to-49 demographic that networks cater to and advertisers covet.

That certainly can’t be said of Fred Allen, the fourth sellout in the two-week festival.

Allen is best known for the radio work he did before 1950, most notably the popular sketch comedy show “The Fred Allen Show,” which ran on the NBC radio network from 1942-49. He never made a comfortable transition to television and died 46 years ago at the age of 61.

Still, Allen influenced such radio and television comics as Garrison Keillor, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and David Letterman.

“We are saluting Fred Allen because of his influence on American comedy both on radio and television and in general,” says Ron Simon, who is curating the event. A similar Allen retrospective in November at the New York City branch of the museum was equally popular.

“We got a wide range of people who in some way Fred Allen influenced, from historian Arthur Schlesinger to Kurt Vonnegut to comedian Alan King,” Simon says.

The Paley festival has an eclectic panel for the Wednesday night event at the Directors Guild of America Theater. Among those participating are Dick Cavett, radio writer-producer-director Norman Corwin, writer Larry Gelbart, writer-cartoonist Stuart Hample, writer Hal Kanter, producer-writer Normal Lear, comedian-director Dick Martin and novelist Herman Wouk of “The Winds of War” fame, who wrote for Allen in the late ‘30s.

“The one thing that Fred Allen did was give a topicality to American humor,” says Simon. “Allen was known for reading many, many papers a day. He really wanted to comment on current events. Most of the other comedians on radio were relying on old vaudeville sketches or sketches that worked well on the live stage.”

And there was Allen’s style. “Allen didn’t really play a character,” says Simon. “He was Fred Allen, the great wit commenting upon current events of the time. He didn’t develop an alter ego like Jack Benny did or Bob Hope did or obviously Edgar Bergen. So it was just Allen almost versus the world.”

Born John Florence Sullivan on May 31, 1894, in Cambridge, Mass., Allen spent most of his childhood living with an aunt. His mother died when he was 3, and his father was a hard-drinking bookbinder.

“Fred was at heart a humorist and a writer, but didn’t know it,” says Hample. “He didn’t go to college. He went to something called Commerce High School in Boston for children of blue-collar workers. He was left to his own devices.”

Hample tells the story of Allen’s caustic quick wit even in school, as he once told a teacher during math class: “Let X equal my father’s signature.”

Allen taught himself how to juggle and by 18 was appearing as a juggler and comedian in vaudeville. He played the Palace Theatre in New York City 1919 and then appeared in numerous Broadway shows, including “The Passing Show of 1922,” where he met his future wife, Portland Hoffa, who would be his version of Gracie Allen.

Allen started in radio in 1932 on “The Linit Bath Club Revue.” By the time he was doing “The Fred Allen Show” in the ‘40s, he’d developed a weekly sketch dubbed “Allen’s Alley,” in which Allen would knock on the doors of various comedic characters including Mrs. Nussbaum, a Jewish housewife, and the Southern Sen. Claghorn.

Allen also got a lot of mileage out of his “feud” with Jack Benny, which began in the late 1930s over Benny’s ability to play the violin.

Larry Gelbart (“MASH,” “Tootsie”), a longtime fan of Allen’s, came across his path twice when he was a young writer. “I met him in 1946 in New York,” he recalls. “I was one of the writers on ‘Duffy’s Tavern,’ and the show traveled to New York to do a couple of weeks there. Fred Allen was a guest on one of the shows. I wrote some material for him as one did for a guest artist.” Two years later, Gelbart encountered him at the William Morris office in Beverly Hills.

“To a young writer, it was like a rodeo clown meeting John Wayne,” says Gelbart. “He was a wit. Those were the days when you didn’t have to be sunny to be liked. You could be iconoclastic. You could be ironic. You could be sarcastic. He was all of the above and more.”

But Allen’s humor also got him in trouble with the censors.

“I remember when I met him in New York, we were in a room reading the script that we were going to do and the NBC censors came into the room,” says Gelbart. “He physically changed. He was very disturbed by their presence because he had running fights with them.”

“He had high blood pressure,” says Hample, author of the new book “all the sincerity in hollywood: Selections from the Writings of Radio’s Legendary Comedian Fred Allen. “He was a terribly hard worker. He wrote all the time, and while he did have writers in his career, he rewrote everything. He was a perfectionist. Everything had to bear his stamp.”

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By 1947, Allen was No. 1 on the radio and made the cover of Time magazine. But in 1949, he found his audience turning the dial to the game show “Stop the Music.”

He didn’t give up without a fight, even parodying the game show on his series. But the “Music” juggernaut was unstoppable. “He wore himself out,” says Hample. “His sponsors, Ford, pulled out and he pulled out of the whole thing.”

Allen, who resembled a saggy, baggy bloodhound, once admitted, “he had a face for radio.” And he didn’t take much stock in television: “Television is a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.”

He tried a TV quiz show. “It wasn’t very good,” says Hample. “That was beneath him,” adds Gelbart. “Fred Allen doing a game show would be like Winston Churchill judging a beauty contest.”

Allen ended up as a panelist on CBS’ “What’s My Line” for the last two years of his life.

The museum’s celebration of Allen will feature excerpts from his radio routines as well as clips from such TV appearances as an early “Colgate Comedy Hour” with Jackie Gleason. “We also have an ‘Omnibus’ [CBS’ cultural series] where he is reading an excerpt from his book, ‘Treadmill to Oblivion,’” says Simon. “The point of the seminar is that we are going to slow that treadmill down for Fred Allen.”

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A Salute to Fred Allen” takes place Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Directors Guild of America Theater, 7920 Sunset Blvd. The event is sold out.