Fred Allen (John Florence Sullivan) was born and raised in nearby Cambridge and worked, for a time, at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. He got his start in show business at one of the many vaudeville theaters on Dover Street (now East Berkeley St.) in the South End.
Fre Allen`s Jokes:
A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done.
California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange.
Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne-sounds like a trunk falling down a flight of stairs.
I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.
I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
I`d rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal labotomy.
Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.
I`m a little hoarse tonight. I`ve been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night. Things are so tough in Chicago that at Easter time, for bunnies the little kids use porcupines.
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for a star.
Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.
Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
Television is a device that permits people who haven`t anything to do to watch people who can`t do anything.
A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
The advertising world had space men in it before spacemen existed.
The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.
The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.
I can`t understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
To me, an advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission. A vice-president in an advertising agency is a `molehill man.` A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 A.M. and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 P.M. to make this molehill into a mountain.
What`s on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement?
Everywhere outside New York City is Bridgeport, Connecticut.
When a radio comedian`s program is finally finished it slinks down Memory Lane into the limbo of yesteryear`s happy hours. All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter.
You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer`s heart.
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