SOURCE: 'Fred Allen's Comedy of Language," in Fred Allen's Radio Comedy, Temple University Press, 1990, pp. 127-52.

In the following essay, which was originally published in the Journal of Popular Culture in 1978, Havig discusses Allen's censorship troubles with broadcast executives, sponsors, and advertising agencies.

Unlike other arts—dance, theatre, the movies, fiction and non-fiction writing—radio broadcasting from the 1920s through the 1940s did not give rise to an influential corps of critics and anon-going body of critical evaluation. Although a few reviewers like John Crosby of the New York Herald Tribune wrote intelligently about what appeared on radio, for the most part Charles Siepmann's assessment, written after two decades of network programming, was accurate:

While plays performed in the 'legitimate' theater (having comparatively small audiences) and books, even on abstruse subjects, are regularly reviewed in the press, similar reviews of radio's best productions, performed before an unseen audience...