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I especially enjoy the old time radio comedy writing. The writers did not have the luxury of falling back on sight gags or being augmented by visual slapstick, yet it was frequently very witty.

Depending on the show in question, they had a slightly deeper challenge---timing and placing the aural gags and audio slapstick, which is often a lot more difficult to bring off successfully. With the right sound people, attuned to the nuance of the characters and the rhythm of the dialogue (the sound people working such shows as Fibber McGee & Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, The Fred Allen Show, for example), the aural gags enhance and amplify the verbal humour, and the best comedy writers knew how to work with those as characters in their own right.

They had a challenge even deeper than that, if you take seriously the observation of one of the genre's absolute masters, Goodman Ace (Easy Aces): "A lot of times, on the air, I noticed comics in a sketch do a joke that destroys the character because it gets a big laugh." You could say that that knowledge was a key in making the quieter comedies---Easy Aces, Amos 'n' Andy, Vic & Sade, The Goldbergs (though it was always an open question whether this show was as much if not more a drama), Lum & Abner---endure as they did; to a one, almost, any of them that were converted to the half-hour sitcom format (as all but The Goldbergs were in their final radio years) lost too much in the conversion.

Ace himself conveyed the frustration when describing what CBS did to a show he'd worked up for Robert Q. Lewis (an occasional Easy Aces/mr. ace and JANE guest performer): "I give them a good, tight fifteen-minute comedy show and what do they do? Bring in an orchestra and an audience. Who the hell said a comedy show had to be half an hour? Marconi? Ida Cantor?"

An irony: Fibber McGee & Molly went the other way beginning in 1953: from a half-hour show with audience and orchestra to a fifteen-minute offering without the audience and orchestra. Having everything that survives of their show (and a boatload of it has survived), I can tell you the fifteen-minute, semi-serial version of the show is just as funny as the original half-hour. And the absence of audience probably allows the joke to grip a little more firmly, if a little more gently.

I am of the opinion that the radio comedy writing itself was often very good in how the writers might set up a comical moment, and often using clever turns of phrase.

To this day I wonder just how much oxygen Jim Jordan (Fibber McGee) must have required after schpritzing out one of those alliterative paragraphics Don Quinn fashioned for him all those years. Quinn was one of the top of the line radio comedy writers, in league with Gosden and Correll (Amos 'n' Andy), Goodman Ace (Easy Aces, The Big Show), Fred Allen (who wrote most of his own stuff even when he had good writers working for him including [drumroll please] Herman Wouk, before the latter went to World War II), Paul Henning (George Burns and Gracie Allen), Abe Burrows (Duffy's Tavern, Leave It to Joan), Phil Leslie (Fibber McGee & Molly---he was Don Quinn's protege), Paul Rhymer (Vic & Sade), Lauck & Goff (they wrote as well as played Lum, Abner, and everyone else in Pine Ridge so long as the show was a fifteen-minute serial), Gertrude Berg (The Goldbergs), John Whedon and Sam Moore (The Great Gildersleeve's best years), Ray Singer & Dick Chevillat (The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show for most of its life), Al Lewis (Our Miss Brooks), Henry Morgan (with and without his fine team of Aaron Ruben and Joe Stein), and Parke Levy (numerous shows, including but not limited to My Friend Irma). Not to mention Jack Benny's two best teams, Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow in the late 1930s (in hand with Al Boasberg, whom they joined as Benny's writers in 1936 and with whom they worked until Boasberg's sudden death in 1937); and, George Balzer, Sam Perrin, Milt Josefsberg, and John Tackaberry beginning in about 1942 and staying for the rest of Benny's radio career.

Again, I am of the opinion that this caliber of writing carried through into early television sitcoms, and is largely absent today. I'm not sure I can remember a TV comedy show that I have cared to watch since the early 1970s.

It did with a very few of the early television sitcoms, particularly those (think Our Miss Brooks, The Halls of Ivy) that made the transition from radio. (If you think of it in terms of honing both the writing team and the character that became Lucy in due course, you could say likewise for My Favourite Husband, even if Lucille Ball was a little bit wasted on radio---she was as gifted a visual comedian as a verbal one, equal parts, and the radio show gave her only half her spread. And there are reasons I'm not including The Life of Riley, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best in the bunch---now that I've gotten to hear them, those shows were light years better on radio. There's really no comparison between their radio and television versions, and in the case of Father Knows Best it's actually arguable whether, on television, it wasn't more light drama than real comedy.)

Over the years since The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered, I can think of a very few television comedies in which the writing was that clever, never mind a very few television comedies that would have made great radio. I've thought such television fare as All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (whose first two television seasons were impeccable), Welcome Back, Kotter (think of it as a kind of inner-city Our Miss Brooks), Night Court, Cheers (which was, really, the grandson of Duffy's Tavern in more ways than one---the son of Duffy's Tavern co-mastermind, Abe Burrows, was one of the co-masterminds of Cheers), The Cosby Show, Seinfeld, and Frasier, would have made great radio. (And, considering the profession of its title character, Frasier might have made, concurrently, a clever send-up of radio if it were on radio.)

And, if you could get the right sound people working it, you could imagine House making great radio.

If you want to get an insight into how some of the radio writers themselves approached their art, hunt down a copy of Jordan R. Young's The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and Television's Golden Age.

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