Book Review : Tuning In to the Wit of a Radio Comic

Fred Allen: His Life and Wit by Robert Taylor (Little, Brown: $19.95, 340 pp., illustrated)

Call it the Pagliacci effect: the process by which a comedian’s life becomes anything but comic. Fred Allen, whose particular kind of verbal wit is an endangered species driven almost to extinction by television’s broader, coarser visual effects, was a phenomenon of the Golden Age of radio, a time when being funny was done with words.

To excel at that, a comedian didn’t need to look peculiar, use foul language or live flamboyantly. He could wear banker’s gray, actually use “Good Heavens” as a tag line, remain happily married, deeply religious and almost excessively modest in his personal habits. Television ended all that virtually overnight, and Fred Allen stopped being a household word and became an instant anachronism. His kind of humor didn’t cross over. There wasn’t enough to see.

Nothing Well-Done

“The reason why television is called a medium is because nothing on it is ever well-done,” Allen quipped, but his caustic comments didn’t help matters. The American public was infatuated with the tube, and couldn’t have cared less what a disillusioned radio comic thought of it. Those were the days, remember, when people watched test patterns through the magnifying glass over the 7-inch screen, when they traded in the piano for a TV.

A technological casualty, Allen wrote his memoir, called it “Treadmill to Oblivion,” and outlived his era by a scant six years, dying in his early ‘60s. According to his biographer, “ ‘Treadmill’ broke all records for a book on radio,” but Allen wasn’t comforted. “I’m appearing on TV and radio shows for nothing, speaking to motley groups of antique ladies, and going from door-to-door with my tome in my hand trying to stimulate the sale.” A comedown? It was an expulsion from Eden.

Taylor, a veteran Boston art and book critic, clearly has the warmest regard and admiration for his subject, consistently treating Allen with respect and affection. Unfortunately, Taylor’s rigid and often tortured prose style seems completely at odds with Allen’s easy colloquial wit. Taylor tends to favor strange, recherche forms of ordinary words-- fatidic for significant ; estivated for spent the summer. He leaves no noun or verb unmodified, as if a naked word could be guilty of indecent exposure. Often the syntax becomes so entangled that reading the book is like finding one’s way out of the Hampton Court maze.

Let Allen have the last word. “All the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter”--the original source of which Taylor lavishly quotes in this belabored but generous tribute.