John Florence Sullivan (May 31, 1894 – March 17, 1956), known professionally as Fred Allen, was an American comedian. His absurdist, topically pointed radio program The Fred Allen Show (1932–1949) made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the Golden Age of American radio.
His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but that was only part of his appeal. Radio historian John Dunning wrote that Allen was perhaps radio's most admired comedian and most frequently censored. A master ad libber, Allen often tangled with his network's executives and often barbed them on the air over the battles while developing routines whose style and substance influenced fellow comic talents, including Groucho Marx, Stan Freberg, Henry Morgan, and Johnny Carson; his avowed fans also included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, humorist James Thurber, and novelists William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Herman Wouk, who began his career writing for Allen.
Allen was honored with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for contributions to television and radio.
John Florence Sullivan was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Irish Catholic parents. Allen barely knew his mother, Cecilia (née Herlihy) Sullivan, who died of pneumonia when he was not quite three years old. Along with his father, James Henry Sullivan, and his infant brother Robert, Allen was taken in by one of his mother's sisters, "my aunt Lizzie", around whom he focused the first chapter of his second memoir, Much Ado About Me. His father was so shattered by his mother's death that according to Allen, he drank more heavily. His aunt suffered as well; her husband, Michael, was partially paralyzed by lead poisoning shortly after they married, which left him mostly unable to work; Allen remembered that as causing contention among Lizzie's sisters. Eventually, Allen's father remarried and offered his sons the choice between coming with him and his new wife or staying with Aunt Lizzie. Allen's younger brother chose to go with their father, but Allen decided to stay with his aunt. "I never regretted it," he wrote.
Allen was a Catholic and regularly attended Mass at St. Malachy's Church in Manhattan.
Allen took piano lessons as a boy, his father having brought an Emerson upright along when they moved in with his aunt. He learned exactly two songs, "Hiawatha" and "Pitter, Patter, Little Raindrops," and would be asked to play "half or all my repertoire" when visitors came to the house. He also worked at the Boston Public Library, where he discovered a book about the origin and the development of comedy. Enduring various upheavals at home (other aunts came and went, which prompted several moves), Allen also took up juggling while he learned as much as possible about comedy.
Some library co-workers planned to put on a show and asked him to do a bit of juggling and some of his comedy. When a girl in the crowd told him, "You're crazy to keep working here at the library; you ought to go on stage," Allen decided that his career path was set.
In 1914, at the age of 20, Allen took a job with a local piano company, in addition to his library work. He appeared at a number of amateur night competitions, soon took the stage name Fred St. James, and booked with the local vaudeville circuit at $30 a week (equal to $964 today), enough at the time to allow him to quit his jobs with the library and the piano company. Eventually, he became "Freddy James" and often billed himself as the world's worst juggler. Allen refined the mix of his deliberately clumsy juggling and the standard jokes and one-liners. He directed much of the humor at his own poor juggling abilities. During his time in vaudeville, his act evolved more toward monologic comedy and less juggling. In 1917, returning to the New York circuit, his stage name was changed to Fred Allen so that he would not be offered the same low salary that theater owners had been accustomed to paying him in his early career. His new surname came from Edgar Allen, a booker for the Fox theaters.
In 1922, Allen commissioned comic-strip artist Martin Branner to cover a theater curtain with an elaborate mural painting depicting a cemetery with a punchline on each gravestone. It was the "Old Joke Cemetery," where overworked gags go to die. In Allen's act, the audiences would see the curtain (and have several minutes to read its 46 punchlines) before Allen made his entrance. Audiences typically would be laughing at the curtain before Allen even appeared. Robert Taylor's biography of Allen includes an impressive full-length photo of Branner's curtain painting, and many of the punchlines are clearly legible in the photo.
Allen used a variety of gimmicks in his changing act from a ventriloquist dummy to juggling to singing, but the focus was always on his comedy, which was heavy on wordplay. One recurring bit was to read a purported "letter from home" with material such as the following:
"The man next door has bought pigs; we got wind of it this morning. Your father had a terrible fight with him about it, and the man hit your father with a rock in the left ear. It didn't bother your father; he is stone deaf in that ear. The policeman who took him away said that he would get his hearing in the morning. The other man, the one who owns the pigs, was arrested for fragrancy.... There is no other news except that our oil stove exploded yesterday and blew your father and me out into the backyard. It is the first time we have been out together for twenty years.
Allen's wit was at times intended not for the vaudeville audience but rather for other professionals in show business. After one of his appearances failed one day, Allen made the best of it by circulating an obituary of his act on black-bordered funeral stationery. He also mailed vials of his supposed "flop sweat" to newspapers as part of his comic self-promotion.
In 1921, Fred Allen and Nora Bayes toured with the company of Lew Fields. Their musical director was nineteen-year-old Richard Rodgers. Many years later, when he and Oscar Hammerstein II appeared as mystery guests on What's My Line?, Rodgers recalled Allen's act of sitting on the edge of the stage with his legs dangling down, playing a banjo, and telling jokes.
Allen temporarily left vaudeville, moving to work in such Shubert Brothers stage productions as The Passing Show in 1922. The show played well in its runup to Broadway but lasted only ten weeks at the Winter Garden Theatre. Portland Hoffa, who was in the chorus of the show, was eventually to marry Allen.
He received good notices for his comic work in several of the productions, particularly Vogues and Greenwich Village Follies, and continued to develop his comic writing. He even wrote a column for Variety called "Near Fun." A salary dispute ended the column; Allen wanted only $60 a week (equal
to $1,154 today) to give up his theater work to become a full-time columnist, but his editor tried a sleight of hand, based on the paper's ad rates, to deny him. He spent his summer in Boston, honed his comic and writing skills even further, worked in a "respectfully" received duo that billed themselves as Fink and Smith, and played a few of the dying vaudeville houses.
Allen returned to New York to the pleasant surprise that Portland Hoffa was taking instruction to convert to Roman Catholicism. After the couple married, Allen began writing material for them to use together ("With a vaudeville act, Portland and I could be together, even if we couldn't find any work"), and the couple divided their time between the show business circuit, Allen's New England family home and Old Orchard Beach, Maine, in the summers.
Allen's first taste of radio came while he and Hoffa waited for a promised slot in a new Arthur Hammerstein musical. In the interim, they appeared on a Chicago station's program, WLS Showboat, into which Allen recalled, "Portland and I were presented... to inject a little class into it." Their success in these appearances helped their theater reception. Live audiences in the Midwest liked to see their radio favorites in person even if Allen and Hoffa would be replaced by Bob Hope when the radio show moved to New York several months afterward.