Radio is nothing but a big medicine show. The announcer is the doctor: he tells you about the product. Then comes the actor, who entertains you and gets you all het up to buy.
Tom Howard, who reached this profound conclusion last week, should know. For 40 years he has been offering the very same brand of knockabout comedy that is now devoted to the flow of Piel's beer on Manhattan's station WOR. As ignoramus-in-chief of radio's least erudite quiz show, It Pays To Be Ignorant (Mon., 7:30-8 p.m., E.W.T.), he is one of the most faithful toilers in the old vaudeville garden.
Vinegar-voiced Howard's "Board of Experts" are a help. They include his oldtime stooge, George Shelton; Jeeves-voiced Harry McNaughton, the "Bottle" of the old Phil Baker shows; and bawdy Lulu McConnell — veteran vaudevillians all. Their exasperating inability to answer timely questions. (Sample: Coffee rationing has been brought about by the shortage of what bean?) has been, for the past 15 months, a sanctuary for refugees from radio quizzes.
You Too Can Be Ignorant. Howard is likely to go on the air bawling: "Do you suffer from ignorance? Are you embarrassed in the presence of intellectuals? Don't be uncomfortable every night. We bring you a program that will solace you —experts that know less than you do." There follow such transactions as
Howard: "Why hasn't Hitler got a suitcase?"
Shelton: "Because he lost his grip in Russia."
Howard: "Correct! Pay that man eight dollars!"
Howard and his daughter, Ruth, write the show, which he owns and sells as an $1,800-a-week package. There is no ad-libbing, nor any necessity for it. The four oldtimers can make any line sound like an ad-lib. Experienced listeners wait especially for Howard to crack down on Lulu McConnell with something like "Miss McConnell, if you ever get a chance to live your life over again . . . don't do it!"
Radio Bum. Skinny, wry Tom Howard swears he turned comedian because he hated to get up in the morning. Irish-born (County Tyrone) son of a bricklayer, he was clerking in a Philadelphia grocery store and his name was then George Black. Then he noticed that actors seemed to sleep late mornings. He began copying every gesture of a Keith headline act about a political boob, got a chance to give his imitation at Minersville, Pa.
After a quarter of a century in & out of medicine shows, burlesque, vaudeville, Howard made the big time in Joe Cook's Rain Or Shine in 1928, hit $1,100 a week in Ziegfeld's Smiles, and then went to Hollywood with Shelton to store some of their deadpan senselessness in celluloid. Howard claims that "radio made a bum out of me" and he is reconciled to it. The hours are wonderful; he has to work only a couple of days a week; and for his unsophisticated radio audience there is no need to think up new material.