Easy Aces
Encyclopedia
Easy Aces, a long-running American
serial radio
comedy
(1930-1945), was trademarked by the low-keyed drollery of creator and writer Goodman Ace
and his wife, Jane
, as an urbane, put-upon realtor and his malaprop-prone wife. A 15-minute program, airing as often as five times a week, Easy Aces wasn't quite the ratings smash that such concurrent 15-minute serial comedies as Amos 'n' Andy
, The Goldbergs
or Vic and Sade
were. But its unobtrusive, conversational, and clever style, and the cheerful absurdism of its storylines, built a loyal enough audience of listeners and critics alike to keep it on the air for 15 years.
. On radio station KMBC, he read comic strip
s to children on Sunday mornings and reviewed films on Friday evenings. One night in 1930, the cast of the 15-minute show that followed his slot failed to show up, and Ace found himself having to fill in the time. His wife, Jane (b. Jane Epstein, 1897-1974), had accompanied him to the studio that night, and the two engaged in an impromptu chat about their weekend bridge game. This brought such a favorable response that the station invited Ace to create a domestic comedy---even though neither of the couple had ever really acted before.
At first, according to radio historian John Dunning (in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio), the show oriented entirely around the couple's bridge playing, and nearly died the same way, when Jane Ace was said to have lost her temper over her husband's constant needling of her style of play, and threatened to quit the show entirely. Ace revamped the show into "a more universally based domestic comedy revolving around Jane's improbable situations and impossible turns of phrase." The result was one of radio's most respected comedies, going on to a fifteen-year air life despite its never being a ratings blockbuster. It was the first KMBC program to go on to become a network radio show.
Easy Aces moved to WBBM
Chicago
in 1930 on a trial basis; the Aces themselves launched a write-in appeal to test the size of their audience and thousands of letters convinced original sponsor Lavoris to renew the deal for 1932-33. (A typical Ace maneuver, according to Dunning, was to buy trade publication ad space poking fun at the show's modest rating: after all, a typical Ace ad would say, the ratings were polled by telephone and the Easy Aces audience never answered the phone while the show was on.) The program began airing on the CBS
network in March of 1932. That summer, the Aces sought New York
backing and found it in the Blackett, Sample and Hummert agency headed by Frank Hummert, soon to become radio's top soap opera
producer with his wife Anne
but then producing various other programs.
Hummert liked the Aces' style and the show's low overhead and put them on CBS as often as four times weekly, as an afternoon offering, before Anacin
(marketed at that time by American Home Products' Whitehall Pharmaceutical division) moved them to 7 p.m. in 1935---right up against Amos 'n' Andy. They couldn't possibly out-rate that hit, but they could and did build a loyal audience of their own. The show moved to the NBC Blue Network and a 7:30 p.m. time slot Mondays and Wednesdays, beginning in 1935, before returning to CBS in 1942, holding the same time slot on Wednesdays and Fridays. The show became a half-hour entry one night a week from 1943 through January 1945. It ended only when Goodman Ace and Anacin had a disagreement over a musical bridge in one of the episodes; he, in turn, criticized their use of cardboard packaging instead of tin for their headache tablets, calling it a "gyp").
In 1934 the couple was signed by Educational Pictures
to do Easy Aces two reel comedies. Dumb Luck was released January 18, 1935, with the Aces reprising their radio roles.
Easy Aces storylines often ran several episodes, though there were many single-episode stories, and the show was performed live on the air but in an isolated studio, without an audience, which made perfect sense considering its conversational style. Goodman Ace wrote the show's scripts and played the exasperated but loving husband of Jane Ace as his deceptively scatterbrained, language-molesting, more than periodically meddlesome wife. (Like many radio couples of the day, the Aces used their real names on the air, though no one ever addressed Ace by his first name---it was always Ace---and Jane chose the maiden name of Sherwood for her on-air character.)
There were no sound effects beyond the almost ambient-like playing of normal life sounds, and the Aces' inexperience as actors probably worked in their favour: they simply played as though they were allowing listeners to eavesdrop on their own real-life conversations, allowing Easy Aces listeners more than those of many shows to believe the Aces really could have been their own unusual neighbours. The couple worked from a card table with a microphone sunk in its center, feeling it was easier to talk to each other in this manner rather than standing at a microphone. In addition, as Arthur Frank Wertheim noted in his book Radio Comedy, Ace shunned belly laughs in favour of consistent character humour. "A lot of times, on the air," Wertheim quoted Ace as saying, "I noticed comics in a sketch do a joke that destroys the character because it gets a big laugh."
The cast included Mary Hunter as best friend and boarder Marge; Paul Stewart as ne'er-do-well brother-in-law Johnny; Martin Gabel
as Neil Williams, a newspaper reporter and Marge's love interest; Helene Dumas as Southern maid Laura; Ken Roberts
as Cokie, an orphaned young adult "adopted" by the Aces; Ann Thomas as Ace's secretary; Ethel Blume as the Aces' niece, Betty; Alfred Ryder
(remembered best as Sammy on another old-time radio mainstay, The Goldbergs
) as Betty's husband, Carl Neff; Peggy Allenby
as Mrs. Benton, a nosy, gossipy neighbour who turned up now and then to leave openings for Jane to fret and gnash over imagined slights or indiscretions; and, Truman Bradley
and Ford Bond
as their announcers. When Easy Aces relocated from Chicago to New York, the actor who played Marge's husband did not move along with the rest of the cast; Ace wrote him out of the script with a divorce for the couple and a new boyfriend for Marge. He then received a letter from an extremely loyal fan who said that since he did not believe in divorce, he would stop listening to the show unless Marge's ex-husband was written out of the story as dead.
They made it seem as natural as tying their shoes: Ace himself prodded his network to build set tables with microphones embedded beneath them, not in front of or above them, the better to ease the prospect of mike fright among their co-performers and allow them to sound like themselves and not actors. Further along that line, Ace refused to rehearse an episode more than once, the better to avoid destroying the spontaneity that made the show work as it did.
's equally celebrated illogical logic, anticipating such later word and context manglers as Jimmy Durante
, Lou Costello
, Phil Harris
, and, especially, All in the Family
s Archie Bunker. The famed Jane-isms included:
You could have knocked me down with a fender.
Up at the crank of dawn.
Time wounds all heels.
Now, there's no use crying over spoiled milk.
I'm completely uninhabited.
Seems like only a year ago they were married nine years!
I am his awfully-wedded wife.
He blew up higher than a hall.
I look like the wrath of grapes!
I wasn't under the impersonation you meant me!
He shot out of here like a bat out of a belfry.
I'm sitting on pins and cushions.
The coffee will be ready in a jitney.
This hangnail expression...
I don't drink, I'm a totalitarian.
We'll be together like Simonized twins.
Well, you've got to take the bitter with the better.
Jane Ace's malaprops were less limited in their word play than the Mrs. Malaprop of Richard Brinsley Sheridan
's The Rivals
. She was scripted as having a knack for making right the muddled situations she made muddled in the first place, by stumbling into the solutions right before her original muddling might have blown everything to smithereens. Some critics such as the New York Herald-Tribunes John Crosby noted her language molestation betrayed a "crazy like a fox" intelligence with its own logical illogic, but as Crosby himself said, "There are a lot of Malaprops in radio but none of them scrambles a cliché quite so skillfully as Jane."
Even this gently droll show couldn't avoid controversy. At one point, Easy Aces lost its longtime sponsor, Anacin
, after a company representative objected to a musical interlude. (The Aces at one point used small music themes, usually spun off a line of dialogue toward the end of the previous scene.) Ace rejoined by suggesting he didn't like Anacin switching from small tins to small cardboard boxes to package its aspirin. "They sent me a two-word answer: 'you're fired'," Ace remembered in a radio interview many years later.
-based distribution firm (and later producers of television shows like Bat Masterson
), in 1945.
These episodes became a bigger ratings hit in syndicated play than when the Aces and cast performed them originally. They are the Easy Aces episodes long since available to old-time radio collectors, in above-average sound condition, but minus their commercial spots, edited away the better to foster future, differently-sponsored airings. (The Library of Congress
is believed to have perhaps one or two hundred more Easy Aces episodes in its collection as well.)
In 1948, the Aces revived the show on CBS
as mr. ace and JANE (the unusual spelling was Ace's idea) on Saturday nights at 7pm. (Time
had reported a year earlier that the Aces were pondering whether to create a new fifteen-minute serial for Jane almost exclusively, but she couldn't decide whether to do that or a new half-hour show with a live audience.) Recorded live before a studio audience, the new version also revived and expanded a few of the vintage Easy Aces plots and presented a few new ones. The new show was sponsored first by the U.S. Army Recruiting Service
and, later, by Jell-O
.
"The new program," wrote Crosby, in a 31 March 1948 column, "differs from the old Easy Aces in about the same manner as the new and old Amos 'n' Andy programs. It's once a week, half-hour, streamlined up-to-date and very, very funny... Goodman Ace, the brains of this team, tags along behind his wife, acting as narrator for her mishaps in a dry, resigned voice (one of the few intelligent voices on the air) and interjecting witty comment. The couple's conversations are usually masterpieces of cross-purpose."
And, chock full of new or modified Jane-isms, such as this jewel, when told she was assigned to a jury panel: I'll say he's not guilty, whoever he is. If he's nice enough to pay me three dollars a day to be his jury, the least I can do is recuperate, doesn't it to you? "In most other respects," Crosby wrote, "Jane is a rather difficult conversationalist because she is either three jumps ahead or three long strides behind the person she is conversing with."
Of Goodman Ace, Crosby wrote that with the revival show he "uses his program to take a few pokes at radio, the newspapers, and the world in general. He's particularly sharp on the subject of radio, a field he knows intimately. Once, playing the role of an advertising man, he asked a prospective sponsor what sort of radio program he had in mind. 'How about music?' asked Ace. 'Music? That's been done, hasn't it?' said the sponsor."
The Aces' co-stars now included Leon Janney
, John Griggs, Evelyn Varden
, Eric Dressler, Cliff Hall, and Pert Kelton
. (Kelton would soon become the first Alice Kramden, in the earliest "Honeymooners" sketches on Jackie Gleason
's original Cavalcade of Stars variety hour on the old, experimental DuMont
network.) The new announcer was Ken Roberts, from their old cast, and he also joined the new cast as a next-door neighbour who just so happened to be . . . a radio announcer. (Jane's asking for an autograph each time they met became a small running gag on the new show.) Ace sketched Roberts in character as full of jibes about radio commercial announcements, a typical such jibe going thus: "Fifty years ago, Blycose began selling the public its high-quality products. And, today, just as it was fifty years ago, it is March 20."
But however favorably mr. ace and JANE was reviewed, however high the quality the Aces injected into it, it wasn't enough to extend its new life for more than one year. CBS kept the show on the air as a sustaining (non-sponsored) program for some months after Jell-O no longer was the sponsor. Nor was it enough to gain the Aces a steady television audience, when they tried reviving the original Easy Aces format and style and adapting it to a 15-minute TV show on the DuMont Television Network
in 1949.
In 1956, it seemed that the television version of the show would be revived. There was news that NBC and Goodman Ace had selected Ernie Kovacs
and his wife, Edie Adams
, to play the roles of the couple in a pilot, but there is no information as to whether the pilot actually took place.
Radio Monitor
"Communicators" in 1955; they were given a spot just after Dave Garroway
. The couple was also signed to an NBC Radio show for women called Weekday that went on the air not long after Monitor's debut. Weekday was aired Monday through Friday. They also went into commercial work..
Goodman Ace enjoyed a second career as a writer. He wrote for radio (most notably, as head writer for Tallulah Bankhead
's weekly variety show, The Big Show
, but also for Ed Wynn
, Jack Benny
, Abbott & Costello, Danny Kaye
, and others), for television (most notably, for Milton Berle
, Sid Caesar
, Perry Como
, Robert Q. Lewis
, and Bob Newhart
), and as a weekly columnist for Saturday Review (formerly The Saturday Review of Literature). Those columns eventually yielded three anthologies: The Book of Little Knowledge: More Than You Want to Know About Television, The Fine Art of Hypochondria, or How Are You and The Better of Goodman Ace.
In 1970, Ace surprised and delighted old Easy Aces fans when he published a book with eight complete Easy Aces scripts and essays about living with, working with and loving the malaprop queen, plus a small soft vinyl seven-inch record that extracted from the original radio performance of one of those scripts, "Jane Sees a Psychiatrist." The book was named for the show's standard introduction: Ladies and Gentlemen--Easy Aces. He also held a regular slot for humorous commentaries on New York station WPAT for a few years before spending the rest of his life as a writer and lecturer. But it was Easy Aces that made its co-stars and writer's name forever. Appropriately, the show and the Aces were inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1990.
A Canadian
television sitcom, The Trouble with Tracy
, was adapted from the Easy Aces scripts in the early 1970s. Through a variety of factors, that show has been labelled by some television critics as one of the worst TV comedies ever produced.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
serial radio
Old-time radio
Old-Time Radio and the Golden Age of Radio refer to a period of radio programming in the United States lasting from the proliferation of radio broadcasting in the early 1920s until television's replacement of radio as the primary home entertainment medium in the 1950s...
comedy
Comedy
Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...
(1930-1945), was trademarked by the low-keyed drollery of creator and writer Goodman Ace
Goodman Ace
Goodman Ace , born Goodman Aiskowitz, was an American humourist, working as a radio writer and comedian, a television writer, and a magazine columnist....
and his wife, Jane
Jane Ace
Jane Ace was the high-voiced, malaprop-mastering wife on legendary, low-keyed American radio comedy Easy Aces...
, as an urbane, put-upon realtor and his malaprop-prone wife. A 15-minute program, airing as often as five times a week, Easy Aces wasn't quite the ratings smash that such concurrent 15-minute serial comedies as Amos 'n' Andy
Amos 'n' Andy
Amos 'n' Andy is a situation comedy set in the African-American community. It was very popular in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s on both radio and television....
, The Goldbergs
The Goldbergs
The Goldbergs is a comedy-drama broadcast from 1929 to 1946 on American radio, and from 1949 to 1956 on American television. It was adapted into a 1948 play, Me and Molly, and a 1973 Broadway musical, Molly.-Radio:...
or Vic and Sade
Vic and Sade
Vic and Sade was an American radio program created and written by Paul Rhymer. It was regularly broadcast on radio from 1932 to 1944, then intermittently until 1946, and was briefly adapted to television in 1949 and again in 1957....
were. But its unobtrusive, conversational, and clever style, and the cheerful absurdism of its storylines, built a loyal enough audience of listeners and critics alike to keep it on the air for 15 years.
Accident of circumstance
Goodman Ace (b. Goodman Aiskowitz, 1899-1982) was a film critic for the Journal Post in his native Kansas CityKansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...
. On radio station KMBC, he read comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
s to children on Sunday mornings and reviewed films on Friday evenings. One night in 1930, the cast of the 15-minute show that followed his slot failed to show up, and Ace found himself having to fill in the time. His wife, Jane (b. Jane Epstein, 1897-1974), had accompanied him to the studio that night, and the two engaged in an impromptu chat about their weekend bridge game. This brought such a favorable response that the station invited Ace to create a domestic comedy---even though neither of the couple had ever really acted before.
At first, according to radio historian John Dunning (in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio), the show oriented entirely around the couple's bridge playing, and nearly died the same way, when Jane Ace was said to have lost her temper over her husband's constant needling of her style of play, and threatened to quit the show entirely. Ace revamped the show into "a more universally based domestic comedy revolving around Jane's improbable situations and impossible turns of phrase." The result was one of radio's most respected comedies, going on to a fifteen-year air life despite its never being a ratings blockbuster. It was the first KMBC program to go on to become a network radio show.
Easy Aces moved to WBBM
WBBM (AM)
WBBM is an all-news CBS radio station in Chicago, Illinois broadcasting on the AM dial at 780 kHz. It is owned by CBS along with WBBM-TV....
Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
in 1930 on a trial basis; the Aces themselves launched a write-in appeal to test the size of their audience and thousands of letters convinced original sponsor Lavoris to renew the deal for 1932-33. (A typical Ace maneuver, according to Dunning, was to buy trade publication ad space poking fun at the show's modest rating: after all, a typical Ace ad would say, the ratings were polled by telephone and the Easy Aces audience never answered the phone while the show was on.) The program began airing on the CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
network in March of 1932. That summer, the Aces sought New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
backing and found it in the Blackett, Sample and Hummert agency headed by Frank Hummert, soon to become radio's top soap opera
Soap opera
A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...
producer with his wife Anne
Anne Hummert
Anne Hummert was the leading creator of daytime radio serials during the 1930s and 1940s, responsible for more than three dozen drama series....
but then producing various other programs.
Hummert liked the Aces' style and the show's low overhead and put them on CBS as often as four times weekly, as an afternoon offering, before Anacin
Anacin
Anacin is a pain reliever intended for the temporary relief of minor aches and pains. Anacin is a product of Insight Pharmaceuticals. Anacin's active ingredients are aspirin and caffeine.-History:...
(marketed at that time by American Home Products' Whitehall Pharmaceutical division) moved them to 7 p.m. in 1935---right up against Amos 'n' Andy. They couldn't possibly out-rate that hit, but they could and did build a loyal audience of their own. The show moved to the NBC Blue Network and a 7:30 p.m. time slot Mondays and Wednesdays, beginning in 1935, before returning to CBS in 1942, holding the same time slot on Wednesdays and Fridays. The show became a half-hour entry one night a week from 1943 through January 1945. It ended only when Goodman Ace and Anacin had a disagreement over a musical bridge in one of the episodes; he, in turn, criticized their use of cardboard packaging instead of tin for their headache tablets, calling it a "gyp").
In 1934 the couple was signed by Educational Pictures
Educational Pictures
Educational Pictures was a film distribution company founded in 1919 by Earle Hammons . Educational primarily distributed short subjects, and today is probably best known for its series of 1930s comedies starring Buster Keaton, as well as for a series of one-reel comedies featuring Shirley...
to do Easy Aces two reel comedies. Dumb Luck was released January 18, 1935, with the Aces reprising their radio roles.
Easy Aces storylines often ran several episodes, though there were many single-episode stories, and the show was performed live on the air but in an isolated studio, without an audience, which made perfect sense considering its conversational style. Goodman Ace wrote the show's scripts and played the exasperated but loving husband of Jane Ace as his deceptively scatterbrained, language-molesting, more than periodically meddlesome wife. (Like many radio couples of the day, the Aces used their real names on the air, though no one ever addressed Ace by his first name---it was always Ace---and Jane chose the maiden name of Sherwood for her on-air character.)
There were no sound effects beyond the almost ambient-like playing of normal life sounds, and the Aces' inexperience as actors probably worked in their favour: they simply played as though they were allowing listeners to eavesdrop on their own real-life conversations, allowing Easy Aces listeners more than those of many shows to believe the Aces really could have been their own unusual neighbours. The couple worked from a card table with a microphone sunk in its center, feeling it was easier to talk to each other in this manner rather than standing at a microphone. In addition, as Arthur Frank Wertheim noted in his book Radio Comedy, Ace shunned belly laughs in favour of consistent character humour. "A lot of times, on the air," Wertheim quoted Ace as saying, "I noticed comics in a sketch do a joke that destroys the character because it gets a big laugh."
The cast included Mary Hunter as best friend and boarder Marge; Paul Stewart as ne'er-do-well brother-in-law Johnny; Martin Gabel
Martin Gabel
Martin Gabel was an American actor, film director and film producer.-Life and career:Gabel was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth and Israel Gabel, who was a jeweler...
as Neil Williams, a newspaper reporter and Marge's love interest; Helene Dumas as Southern maid Laura; Ken Roberts
Ken Roberts (announcer)
Ken Roberts was an American radio and television announcer known for his work during the Golden Age of Radio and for his work announcing the daytime television soap operas The Secret Storm, Texas and Love of Life, each for a two-decade span.-Early life and education:Roberts was born on February...
as Cokie, an orphaned young adult "adopted" by the Aces; Ann Thomas as Ace's secretary; Ethel Blume as the Aces' niece, Betty; Alfred Ryder
Alfred Ryder
Alfred Ryder was an American film, radio and television actor. Ryder may best be remembered for appearing in over one hundred television shows, including the 1959 starring role as a British criminal who could not be killed in Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond episode 'The Devil's Laughter'...
(remembered best as Sammy on another old-time radio mainstay, The Goldbergs
The Goldbergs
The Goldbergs is a comedy-drama broadcast from 1929 to 1946 on American radio, and from 1949 to 1956 on American television. It was adapted into a 1948 play, Me and Molly, and a 1973 Broadway musical, Molly.-Radio:...
) as Betty's husband, Carl Neff; Peggy Allenby
Peggy Allenby
Peggy Allenby was an American silent film actress who continued as performer in television. She appeared in silent films, including The Man Who Came Back .-Career:...
as Mrs. Benton, a nosy, gossipy neighbour who turned up now and then to leave openings for Jane to fret and gnash over imagined slights or indiscretions; and, Truman Bradley
Truman Bradley (actor)
Truman Bradley was an actor and narrator in radio, television and film.Bradley began his career in the 1930s as a radio broadcaster. With a voice well-suited for that medium, his career evolved into voice acting and narration. He was the host of the 1950s TV series Science Fiction Theater...
and Ford Bond
Ford Bond
Ford Bond was an American radio personality.He was the announcer for several popular radio shows in the 1930s and 1940s, earning him a spot on the This is Your Life television show....
as their announcers. When Easy Aces relocated from Chicago to New York, the actor who played Marge's husband did not move along with the rest of the cast; Ace wrote him out of the script with a divorce for the couple and a new boyfriend for Marge. He then received a letter from an extremely loyal fan who said that since he did not believe in divorce, he would stop listening to the show unless Marge's ex-husband was written out of the story as dead.
They made it seem as natural as tying their shoes: Ace himself prodded his network to build set tables with microphones embedded beneath them, not in front of or above them, the better to ease the prospect of mike fright among their co-performers and allow them to sound like themselves and not actors. Further along that line, Ace refused to rehearse an episode more than once, the better to avoid destroying the spontaneity that made the show work as it did.
"I am his awfully-wedded wife"
That and almost everything else could be forgotten amidst Jane Ace's linguistic mayhem, much of it provided by her wry husband's scripts and enough improvised by her.(Mary Hunter's real laughter, at Jane's malaprops or Ace's arch barbs, was practically the show's laugh track, years before anyone ever thought of using canned laughter.) Known as often as not as "Jane-isms," the better remembered of her twisted turns of phrase were more than a match for Gracie AllenGracie Allen
Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen , known as Gracie Allen, was an American comedian who became internationally famous as the zany partner and comic foil of husband George Burns...
's equally celebrated illogical logic, anticipating such later word and context manglers as Jimmy Durante
Jimmy Durante
James Francis "Jimmy" Durante was an American singer, pianist, comedian and actor. His distinctive clipped gravelly speech, comic language butchery, jazz-influenced songs, and large nose helped make him one of America's most familiar and popular personalities of the 1920s through the 1970s...
, Lou Costello
Lou Costello
Louis Francis "Lou" Costello was an American actor and comedian best known as half of the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, with Bud Abbott...
, Phil Harris
Phil Harris
Harris and Faye married in 1941; it was a second marriage for both and lasted 54 years, until Harris's death. Harris engaged in a fistfight at the Trocadero nightclub in 1938 with RKO studio mogul Bob Stevens; the cause was reported to be over Faye after Stevens and Faye had ended a romantic...
, and, especially, All in the Family
All in the Family
All in the Family is an American sitcom that was originally broadcast on the CBS television network from January 12, 1971, to April 8, 1979. In September 1979, a new show, Archie Bunker's Place, picked up where All in the Family had ended...
s Archie Bunker. The famed Jane-isms included:
Congress is back in season.
Jane Ace's malaprops were less limited in their word play than the Mrs. Malaprop of Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan was an Irish-born playwright and poet and long-term owner of the London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. For thirty-two years he was also a Whig Member of the British House of Commons for Stafford , Westminster and Ilchester...
's The Rivals
The Rivals
The Rivals, a play by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, is a comedy of manners in five acts. It was first performed on 17 January 1775.- Production :...
. She was scripted as having a knack for making right the muddled situations she made muddled in the first place, by stumbling into the solutions right before her original muddling might have blown everything to smithereens. Some critics such as the New York Herald-Tribunes John Crosby noted her language molestation betrayed a "crazy like a fox" intelligence with its own logical illogic, but as Crosby himself said, "There are a lot of Malaprops in radio but none of them scrambles a cliché quite so skillfully as Jane."
Cheerful absurdity
The show's storylines, crafted to allow for steady unfurling of absurdities, included dealing with deadbeat brother-in-law Johnny falling into work as a private investigator; accidentally discovering a potential boxing champion when first thinking about adopting an orphan; losing (in a crooked politician's crooked deal) and then regaining Ace's real estate business; Jane becoming a professional bridge player (as the instructor's living example of how not to play bridge!); Jane's misguided attempts to help her husband's business affairs (mostly under the influence of a domineering woman who had manipulated her husband's business success); and, and various Jane-instigated romantic mishaps. (Jane: "Well, you could have knocked me over with a fender"; Ace, deadpan: "There's an idea"). There were frequent allusions to playing bridge, as well, even when the game wasn't a storyline centerpiece; this may have been the Aces' own nod of thanks to the subject that provoked the show's creation in the first place.Even this gently droll show couldn't avoid controversy. At one point, Easy Aces lost its longtime sponsor, Anacin
Anacin
Anacin is a pain reliever intended for the temporary relief of minor aches and pains. Anacin is a product of Insight Pharmaceuticals. Anacin's active ingredients are aspirin and caffeine.-History:...
, after a company representative objected to a musical interlude. (The Aces at one point used small music themes, usually spun off a line of dialogue toward the end of the previous scene.) Ace rejoined by suggesting he didn't like Anacin switching from small tins to small cardboard boxes to package its aspirin. "They sent me a two-word answer: 'you're fired'," Ace remembered in a radio interview many years later.
Survival
Easy Aces survives with many of its best episodes intact thanks to a bit of foresight on the Aces' part. They owned the rights from the beginning, recorded ("transcribed," in the day's vernacular) just about all its episodes, and sold the syndication rights to over three hundred episodes from 1937-1941 to the Frederick Ziv Company, a CincinnatiCincinnati, Ohio
Cincinnati is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio. Cincinnati is the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located to north of the Ohio River at the Ohio-Kentucky border, near Indiana. The population within city limits is 296,943 according to the 2010 census, making it Ohio's...
-based distribution firm (and later producers of television shows like Bat Masterson
Bat Masterson (TV series)
Bat Masterson is an American Western television series which showed a fictionalized account of the life of real-life marshal/gambler/dandy Bat Masterson. The title character was played by Gene Barry and the half-hour black and white shows ran on NBC from 1958 to 1961...
), in 1945.
These episodes became a bigger ratings hit in syndicated play than when the Aces and cast performed them originally. They are the Easy Aces episodes long since available to old-time radio collectors, in above-average sound condition, but minus their commercial spots, edited away the better to foster future, differently-sponsored airings. (The Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
is believed to have perhaps one or two hundred more Easy Aces episodes in its collection as well.)
Resurrected Aces
In 1948, the Aces revived the show on CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
as mr. ace and JANE (the unusual spelling was Ace's idea) on Saturday nights at 7pm. (Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
had reported a year earlier that the Aces were pondering whether to create a new fifteen-minute serial for Jane almost exclusively, but she couldn't decide whether to do that or a new half-hour show with a live audience.) Recorded live before a studio audience, the new version also revived and expanded a few of the vintage Easy Aces plots and presented a few new ones. The new show was sponsored first by the U.S. Army Recruiting Service
United States Army
The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...
and, later, by Jell-O
Jell-O
Jell-O is a brand name belonging to U.S.-based Kraft Foods for a number of gelatin desserts, including fruit gels, puddings and no-bake cream pies. The brand's popularity has led to it being used as a generic term for gelatin dessert across the U.S. and Canada....
.
"The new program," wrote Crosby, in a 31 March 1948 column, "differs from the old Easy Aces in about the same manner as the new and old Amos 'n' Andy programs. It's once a week, half-hour, streamlined up-to-date and very, very funny... Goodman Ace, the brains of this team, tags along behind his wife, acting as narrator for her mishaps in a dry, resigned voice (one of the few intelligent voices on the air) and interjecting witty comment. The couple's conversations are usually masterpieces of cross-purpose."
And, chock full of new or modified Jane-isms, such as this jewel, when told she was assigned to a jury panel: I'll say he's not guilty, whoever he is. If he's nice enough to pay me three dollars a day to be his jury, the least I can do is recuperate, doesn't it to you? "In most other respects," Crosby wrote, "Jane is a rather difficult conversationalist because she is either three jumps ahead or three long strides behind the person she is conversing with."
Of Goodman Ace, Crosby wrote that with the revival show he "uses his program to take a few pokes at radio, the newspapers, and the world in general. He's particularly sharp on the subject of radio, a field he knows intimately. Once, playing the role of an advertising man, he asked a prospective sponsor what sort of radio program he had in mind. 'How about music?' asked Ace. 'Music? That's been done, hasn't it?' said the sponsor."
The Aces' co-stars now included Leon Janney
Leon Janney
Leon Janney was an American actor and radio personality between 1920 to 1980.-Career:Born Leon Ramon in Ogden, Utah, Janney made his first theatrical appearance at age two before an audience at the Pantages Theatre in his hometown...
, John Griggs, Evelyn Varden
Evelyn Varden
Evelyn Varden was an American actress.Evelyn Varden had a long and distinguished career on Broadway despite starring in the ill-fated Return Engagement by Lawrence Riley...
, Eric Dressler, Cliff Hall, and Pert Kelton
Pert Kelton
Pert Kelton was an American vaudeville, movie, radio and television actress. She was the first actress who played Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners with Jackie Gleason and was a prominent comedic supporting film actress in the 1930s...
. (Kelton would soon become the first Alice Kramden, in the earliest "Honeymooners" sketches on Jackie Gleason
Jackie Gleason
Jackie Gleason was an American comedian, actor and musician. He was known for his brash visual and verbal comedy style, especially by his character Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners, a situation-comedy television series. His most noted film roles were as Minnesota Fats in the drama film The...
's original Cavalcade of Stars variety hour on the old, experimental DuMont
DuMont Television Network
The DuMont Television Network, also known as the DuMont Network, DuMont, Du Mont, or Dumont was one of the world's pioneer commercial television networks, rivalling NBC for the distinction of being first overall. It began operation in the United States in 1946. It was owned by DuMont...
network.) The new announcer was Ken Roberts, from their old cast, and he also joined the new cast as a next-door neighbour who just so happened to be . . . a radio announcer. (Jane's asking for an autograph each time they met became a small running gag on the new show.) Ace sketched Roberts in character as full of jibes about radio commercial announcements, a typical such jibe going thus: "Fifty years ago, Blycose began selling the public its high-quality products. And, today, just as it was fifty years ago, it is March 20."
But however favorably mr. ace and JANE was reviewed, however high the quality the Aces injected into it, it wasn't enough to extend its new life for more than one year. CBS kept the show on the air as a sustaining (non-sponsored) program for some months after Jell-O no longer was the sponsor. Nor was it enough to gain the Aces a steady television audience, when they tried reviving the original Easy Aces format and style and adapting it to a 15-minute TV show on the DuMont Television Network
DuMont Television Network
The DuMont Television Network, also known as the DuMont Network, DuMont, Du Mont, or Dumont was one of the world's pioneer commercial television networks, rivalling NBC for the distinction of being first overall. It began operation in the United States in 1946. It was owned by DuMont...
in 1949.
In 1956, it seemed that the television version of the show would be revived. There was news that NBC and Goodman Ace had selected Ernie Kovacs
Ernie Kovacs
Ernie Kovacs was a Hungarian American comedian and actor.Kovacs' uninhibited, often ad-libbed, and visually experimental comedic style came to influence numerous television comedy programs for years after his death in an automobile accident...
and his wife, Edie Adams
Edie Adams
Edie Adams was an American singer, Broadway, television and film actress and comedienne. Adams, a Tony Award winner, "both embodied and winked at the stereotypes of fetching chanteuse and sexpot blonde." She was well-known for her impersonations of female stars on stage and television, most...
, to play the roles of the couple in a pilot, but there is no information as to whether the pilot actually took place.
Afterlife
Jane Ace all but retired from public life (taking a very brief turn as what her husband called "a comedienne now making her come-down as a disc jockey" in the early 1950s) after Easy Aces was laid to rest at long last. The Aces were hired as NBCNBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
Radio Monitor
Monitor (NBC Radio)
NBC Monitor was an American weekend radio program broadcast from June 12, 1955, until January 26, 1975. Airing live and nationwide on the NBC Radio Network, it originally aired beginning Saturday morning at 8am and continuing through the weekend until 12 midnight on Sunday...
"Communicators" in 1955; they were given a spot just after Dave Garroway
Dave Garroway
David Cunningham "Dave" Garroway was the founding host of NBC's Today from 1952 to 1961. His easygoing, relaxed, and relaxing style belied a battle with depression that may have contributed to the end of his days as a leading television personality—and, eventually, his life...
. The couple was also signed to an NBC Radio show for women called Weekday that went on the air not long after Monitor's debut. Weekday was aired Monday through Friday. They also went into commercial work..
Goodman Ace enjoyed a second career as a writer. He wrote for radio (most notably, as head writer for Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was an award-winning American actress of the stage and screen, talk-show host, and bonne vivante...
's weekly variety show, The Big Show
The Big Show (NBC Radio)
The Big Show, an American radio variety program featuring 90 minutes of top-name comic, stage, screen and music talent, was aimed at keeping American radio in its classic era alive and well against the rapidly-growing television tide...
, but also for Ed Wynn
Ed Wynn
Ed Wynn was a popular American comedian and actor noted for his Perfect Fool comedy character, his pioneering radio show of the 1930s, and his later career as a dramatic actor....
, Jack Benny
Jack Benny
Jack Benny was an American comedian, vaudevillian, and actor for radio, television, and film...
, Abbott & Costello, Danny Kaye
Danny Kaye
Danny Kaye was a celebrated American actor, singer, dancer, and comedian...
, and others), for television (most notably, for Milton Berle
Milton Berle
Milton Berlinger , better known as Milton Berle, was an American comedian and actor. As the manic host of NBC's Texaco Star Theater , in 1948 he was the first major star of U.S. television and as such became known as Uncle Miltie and Mr...
, Sid Caesar
Sid Caesar
Isaac Sidney "Sid" Caesar is an Emmy award winning American comic actor and writer known as the leading man on the 1950s television series Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour, and to younger generations as Coach Calhoun in Grease and Grease 2.- Early life :Caesar was born in Yonkers, New York,...
, Perry Como
Perry Como
Pierino Ronald "Perry" Como was an American singer and television personality. During a career spanning more than half a century he recorded exclusively for the RCA Victor label after signing with them in 1943. "Mr...
, Robert Q. Lewis
Robert Q. Lewis
Robert Q. Lewis was an American radio and television personality, game show host, and actor. Lewis added the middle initial "Q." to his name accidentally on the air in 1942, when he responded to a reference to radio comedian F. Chase Taylor's character, Colonel Lemuel Q...
, and Bob Newhart
Bob Newhart
George Robert Newhart , known professionally as Bob Newhart, is an American stand-up comedian and actor. Noted for his deadpan and slightly stammering delivery, Newhart came to prominence in the 1960s when his album of comedic monologues The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart was a worldwide...
), and as a weekly columnist for Saturday Review (formerly The Saturday Review of Literature). Those columns eventually yielded three anthologies: The Book of Little Knowledge: More Than You Want to Know About Television, The Fine Art of Hypochondria, or How Are You and The Better of Goodman Ace.
In 1970, Ace surprised and delighted old Easy Aces fans when he published a book with eight complete Easy Aces scripts and essays about living with, working with and loving the malaprop queen, plus a small soft vinyl seven-inch record that extracted from the original radio performance of one of those scripts, "Jane Sees a Psychiatrist." The book was named for the show's standard introduction: Ladies and Gentlemen--Easy Aces. He also held a regular slot for humorous commentaries on New York station WPAT for a few years before spending the rest of his life as a writer and lecturer. But it was Easy Aces that made its co-stars and writer's name forever. Appropriately, the show and the Aces were inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1990.
A Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
television sitcom, The Trouble with Tracy
The Trouble with Tracy
The Trouble with Tracy was a Canadian television series produced by CTV for the 1970–1971 television season, with intended distribution by the U.S.-based National General Pictures. It is considered by some to be one of the worst situation comedies ever produced.The show was produced as a daily...
, was adapted from the Easy Aces scripts in the early 1970s. Through a variety of factors, that show has been labelled by some television critics as one of the worst TV comedies ever produced.
Listen to
- Download 239 Easy Aces episodes from archive.org
- Boxcars711: Easy Aces (two episodes)
- Easy Aces and mr. ace and JANE episodes Old Time Radio-OTR