"Good evening, anybody--here's Morgan . . . " (NBC.)
The Henry Morgan Show: The Quest Pests (NBC, 1949)
“Three radio comedians,” observes John Dunning in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio in due course, “became celebrities by heckling the establishment. Fred Allen and Arthur Godfrey needled their victims. Henry Morgan battered his with a club . . .
“Morgan clobbered his clients with such unprecedented candor that some of them fired him and one threatened to sue. This was delightful to listeners who scorned the radio commercial as an odious interruption of an otherwise enjoyable half-hour. It made Morgan the darling of his generation's rebels and thinkers, the grand guru of a hard core of intellectuals who considered the jousts of Godfrey and Allen too soft.”
The cheerfully cantankerous Morgan would recall his M.O. thus in his own memoir, Here’s Morgan: The Original Bad Boy of Broadcasting: “I couldn’t abide reading the junk the clients provided so I ad-libbed them in a kind of breezy, off-handed fashion that sometimes bordered on the insulting.”
Breezy and off-handed? “They’re educational. Try one—that’ll teach you,” he has barbed about Schick’s injector razor in the mid-to-late 1940s, which the Eversharp Corporation peddled on his show. There may have be those who believe that, what Casey Stengel actually did say once, to his barber, while managing a rather terrible baseball team (“Shave, haircut, and don’t cut my throat, I may want to do that myself later”), Henry Morgan feels in his heart of hearts.
“He was ahead of his time,” longtime radio announcer Ed Herlihy would tell radio historian Gerald Nachman (for Raised on Radio), “but he was also hurt by his own disposition. He was very difficult. He was so brilliant that he’d get exasperated and he’d sulk. He was a great mind who never achieved the success he should have.”
Apparently, not even radio's popular Quiz Kids are immune to the cheerful barbequer of sacred cows (well, calves), which is precisely what Morgan and company do to the brainy babes tonight. (Neither, for that matter, are new mothers and fathers, when Morgan opens the evening with a wisenheimer suggestion for the baby’s daily schedule.)
And if you come to believe the later-life recollections of some of the Quiz Kids themselves—Gerard Darrow, under the alias Bruce Fletcher, and plagued as an adult by menial jobs and long unemployment spells, will tell Studs Terkel (for Working), “I wish it had never happened; I just can’t forgive those who exploited me”; Joel Kupperman, maybe the most famous of the kids, will be thought to hold a similar opinion, refusing interview requests about his Quiz Kids years or just about anything else—you may come to believe that getting roasted so breezily by the man on the same corner in front of the cigar store was a kind of inside-out validator of what they sacrificed on behalf of their precocity.
Cast:
FURTHER CHANNEL SURFING . . .
The Goldbergs: The Parole Officer (CBS, 1941)—He’s in the Goldberg living room talking to troubled Mr. Way and Oriane, mere days after Mr. Way's appearance before the parole board . . . while Molly (Gertrude Berg) tries to keep them from marrying until she can convince Way's former wife to help repay his debts—a plan Jake (James R. Waters) doesn't exactly like. Thirteen years into its run and this show has lost none of its quietly dramatic wit. Rosalie: Roslyn Silber. Sammy: Alfred Ryder. Additional cast: Unknown. Announcer: Clayton (Bud) Collyer. Writer/director: Gertrude Berg.
The Fred Allen Show: Seeking a Radio Job (NBC; Armed Forces Radio Network rebroadcast, 1945)—That would be Fred (Allen) on behalf of opera star Lauritz Melchior, once the Alley demimonde finishes discussing what’s raised the family income, if anything did. Allen at the top of his form.
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