Here's a one-line summary of last evening's Salute to Fred Allen at the Museum of Television and Radio. Nine very witty men got together to watch clips and to discuss another very witty man named Fred Allen. The nine gents were Stuart Canin, Dick Cavett, Norman Corwin, Larry Gelbart, Stuart Hample, Hal Kanter, Norman Lear, Dick Martin and Herman Wouk. A few knew Fred and had the honor of working with him. Others were just fans from afar. All had good stories and insights and historical information and (especially) quotes of clever Allen remarks. Wouk is, of course, best known as the author of serious, award-winning dramatic novels. Hard to believe — but true — that he was once a comedy writer for Fred Allen.
Stuart Hample is an author-cartoonist who compiled All the Sincerity in Hollywood: Selections From The Writing of Fred Allen, a fine book you can purchase by clicking on its name here. The other folks, you probably know of…though Canin's name may be unfamiliar. As you may be aware, Fred Allen enjoyed a very famous fake feud with Jack Benny that commenced one evening in 1936 when Allen had a 10-year-old violinist on his program. The young man played a stirring rendition of "The Bee," and then the host commented, "Jack Benny oughta be ashamed of himself." Well, Stuart Canin — now an important concertmaster — was that 10-year-old boy.
He told of his experiences, Lear, Kanter and Gelbart talked about their encounters with Allen, Cavett spoke of listening to the shows in Nebraska and then, when he first came to New York, exchanging but a few words with the man outside a What's My Line? broadcast. There were a lot of very funny Allen quotes, many of them almost poetic in their beauty, some so familiar to us from repetition that they seem like clichés until you realize that, when Fred first said them, they were fresh. Here are a couple of my faves…
You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.
A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 AM and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 PM to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.
Fred Allen was one of the cleverest men ever on radio but he never quite found a niche on television, which was a shame. When he died, Groucho was quoted as saying there were only two wits on TV — Fred Allen and Steve Allen and now, with Fred gone, television was half-witted. Steve's gone now, and the joke still applies.