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The Alley is a fairly serious attempt to take four large U.S. social groups, personify them—and play them for laughs. In other hands this idea has produced, at best, good caricatures. Allen has built it into at least two larger-than-life characters and a wealth of thoughtful jests. Each Sunday (8:30 p.m., E.S.T., NBC), as he wanders through the Alley, Allen visits:
¶Senator Beauregard Claghorn (Kenny Delmar), a julep-slupping burlesque of a Southern politico, a latter-day Civil Warrior with a mouth as big as the Mississippi's and a brain the size of a hominy grit. The Senator's development has been arrested in an artistic sense, too. After only six minutes on the air (four programs), his "That's a joke, son!" and "That is" were national bywords. Allen, who intended the Senator to have a far larger comic vocabulary, has been forced to give the public what it wants: plenty of nothing.
¶Titus Moody (Parker Fennelly) is a whey-voiced, ding-this-and-dang-that farmer with a wit hot off the general-store stove. Is his wife happy? "I don't pry into her business none." Titus' farm is "somethin' like Communism. Nobody's got nothin', but everybody's workin'." Does he like the radio? "I don't hold with furniture that talks." Titus is anemic. If cut, he will not bleed; the wound will only "hiss and pucker." Says Allen: "Titus will be getting better when the other characters have dried up and blown away."
¶Mrs. Pansy Nussbaum (Minerva Pious) is a triumph of comic virtuosity. To avoid offense to Pansy's prototype (the big-city Yiddish tenement dweller), Allen confines himself to kidding Yiddish-English. He seems endlessly aware of new and whimsical wrinkles in the dialect. "When I am a young goil, footloose and fancy," Pansy once related, "I am woiking, a waitress, in Doberman's delicatessen. Is coming every day for lunch a liverwurst salesman. He is a goodtime Irving, a fancy dandy, also floiting a bissel. The liverwurst salesman is to the other waitress, Supreme Feitelbaum, engaged. With ogling, also babytalk, I am stealing him away. For 20 years already he is mine husband Pierre. Crime does not pay!" Pierre, who now is never seen (or heard) in the Alley, is a luckless "schmo" who plays the ponies at "Epstein Downs" and "Hia-Levy." He is so unlucky that "if it is raining borsch outside, Pierre will be standing with a fork. He will also missing the potato."
¶Ajax Cassidy (Peter Donald) is a tuberculous, growler-rushing, clay-pipe Irishman who thinks he is "not long for this worrld." He is also the newest and least-developed of Fred's characters, but as Donald reads the role, it contains some winning bits of brannigan. A favorite Cassidy wheeze: having resolved to give up the stuff, he puts himself to the test by trying to pass Kerrigan's Kosy Korner without dropping in. After a desperate struggle he makes it—and promptly returns to Kerrigan's to celebrate his moral victory with a snootful.