SOURCE: "Forgotten Laughter: The Fred Allen Story," in American Heritage, Vol. 39, No. 1, February, 1988, pp. 98-107.

In the following excerpt, Grauer claims Allen's humor as the progenitor of such modern humorists as David Letterman and Garrison Keillor.

Satire, according to the playwright George S. Kaufman, "is what closes Saturday night," but for seventeen years Fred Allen used his satiric brand of humor to create some of the nation's most popular radio comedy.

"The other comedians . . . swoon at Allen," said a one-time editor of Variety, the show business newspaper. In part the admiration of his colleagues was due to their knowledge that Allen, unlike many of his competitors, did not rely on a steady supply of gags from a stable of writers. Allen was his own chief writer, laboring twelve to fourteen hours a day in longhand, six days a week, to produce his scripts. He had only a few...