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Podcast: Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting
Episode: BW - EP137—001: St. Patricks Day On The Air—Fred Allen, The End And The Beginning
Description: In 1922 a twenty-eight-year-old Fred Allen, already a vaudeville veteran, was hired by J.J. Shubert for his broadway production of The Passing Show of 1922. Allen was gaining fame as a monologist.
He was in charge of writing his own material. One popular gag was the "Old Joke Cemetery." Allen had a curtain painted as a graveyard, on the tombstones were the punch lines to forty-six old jokes.
When Allen moved with the show to Chicago, he met a dancer named Portland Hoffa. There the producers told Allen to drop the cemetery gag. The show was moving to Hollywood. Allen quit...