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Ten minutes before broadcast time, the famous comedian pushed his way through the stage curtain and raked the studio audience with a cold, poached eye.
They howled and they screamed. The comedian gave them a look of deep distaste and tongued his three-stick gum wad to the other side of his mouth. In the well-known nutmeg-grater tones, he announced: "For those of you who got caught in the crowd and swept in here—I would like to say that this is the Fred Allen show, and you still have eight minutes before we go on the air to get the heck out of here." They flailed helplessly in their seats.
"Geez," sighed the admiring sound-effects man, "whatta warmup!" The comedian had long since expressed his contempt for his own skill in that field: "Warming up a studio audience is like warming up dry ice. When you've done it, what have you got?"
By broadcast time the audience ("those hyenas") were weak with laughter. They were with him. They had been with him, all over the U.S., for 14 years. But never before this season has he had a greater volume of enthusiastic listeners. Twice this season, for the first time in Fred Allen's radio career, his show has ranked first in the Hooper telephone poll of listeners.
"If I Had the Brains." Fred's durability as a comedian has not depended solely on the obvious externals of slapstick. His 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 comics, dogmatically says that Fred is "the greatest living comedian . . . a wise materialist who exposes and ridicules the pretensions of his times."
To 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.