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By Root 811 0

at once a comedian, a humorist, a wit, and a satirist,” the Boston-bred Allen mixed verbal gymnastics and gentle put-downs with parodies of topical events and the mass diversions of the day, most notably his own medium, radio. “He took generous and regular swipes at mawkish soap operas, treacly kid-die shows, noisy quiz programs, talentless amateur hours, insipid husband-and-wife chatfests, banal interviewers, and mindless commercials,” wrote Gerald Nachman in Raised on Radio. Not coincidentally, the host of the hour-long Town Hall Tonight was forever grappling with censors, who objected to many of the three-dollar words Allen so loved, such as titillate and rabelaisian. The watchdogs routinely required him to change references to potentially offended parties, including cockneys, hucksters, rodeo fans, and other targets of the announcer’s exasperated wit. “Fifty percent of what I write ends up in the toilet,” Allen complained.

Allen was one of the earliest radio celebrities to mine the daily news for satirical commentary, featuring segments called “Town Hall News,” “Passe News” (a takeoff on the Pathe newsreels of the day), and “The March of Trivia” (which alluded to The March of Time, Time’s long-running newsreel series). For much of his career—from childhood, actually—Carlin created his own mock newscasts: “In labor news, longshoremen walked off the pier today. Rescue operations are continuing.” Those routines, delivered in the clipped nasal tone of an off-the-rack newscaster, typically featured the additional talents of the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman and a rat-a-tat sportscaster the comedian called Biff Burns. Carlin borrowed that character, subconsciously or otherwise, from a character of the same name in the repertoire of Bob and Ray.

Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding—like Fred Allen, Boston natives drawn to New York, around 1950—brought the understated, off-the-cuff humor they’d developed as announcers on WHDH to the NBC network, where they became nationally beloved figures. The pair’s comedy took the wind out of radio’s insufferable windbags, from the exhausting sportscaster Burns to the self-important critic Webley Webster, to Elliott’s standby, the hapless newscaster Wally Ballou. “Our original premise was that radio was too pompous,” Elliott explained.

For Carlin, the nuanced send-up comedy of such vintage radio programs was complemented by the more lawless humor of other period entertainers to whom he was drawn. “I was a hip kid,” he joked. “When I saw Bambi it was the midnight show.” There were the Marx Brothers, of course, with their constant peppering of rectitude. Like many of his classmates, Carlin also got caught up in the national craze for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, whose convulsive physicality and audacious pranks seemed like a reaction to the insanity of the Atomic Age. Such wild men “represented anarchy,” Carlin recalled. “They took things that were nice and decent and proper, and they tore them to shreds. That attracted me.”

At the dawn of network television, Carlin often went downstairs to a neighbor’s apartment to watch “Uncle Miltie,” Milton Berle, on The Texaco Star Theater. Fascinated with the new medium, he sometimes traveled to the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center to walk in front of the closed-circuit cameras in the showroom, where visitors could watch themselves in real time on television screens overhead. Mary soon purchased a TV console for the Carlins’ apartment.

The kid made time for Jackie Gleason’s parade of characters on Cavalcade of Stars and on Sundays for Toast of the Town, the original name of The Ed Sullivan Show. Even better, however, was the short-lived Broadway Open House, the prototypical late-night variety show starring veteran comedian Jerry Lester, “The Heckler of Hecklers,” whose trademark was twisting his glasses into uncomfortable angles on the bridge of his nose. The show also featured accordionist Milton DeLugg and a vapid bombshell known to viewers as Dagmar. With its antic mix of vaudeville routines and slapstick gags, “That one really got my attention,” said Carlin.