Awards & Winners

Fred Allen

Date of Birth 31-May-1894
Place of Birth Cambridge
(United States of America, Massachusetts, Middlesex County, Area code 617, Area code 857)
Nationality United States of America
Also know as John Florence Sullivan
Profession Comedian, Writer
Quotes
  • Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
  • Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.
  • A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 am and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 p.m. to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.
  • We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.
  • I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.
  • A celebrity is a person who works hard all of their life to become well known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
  • A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.
  • 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.
  • It is probably not love that makes the world go around, but rather those mutually supportive alliances through which partners recognize their dependence on each other for the achievement of shared and private goals.
  • Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.
  • He dreamed he was eating shredded wheat and woke up to find the mattress half gone.
  • Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.
  • The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
  • Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.
  • I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.
  • An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.
  • I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
  • Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They're afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs.
  • A conference is a gathering of people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.
  • 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 last time I saw him he was walking down lover's lane holding his own hand.
  • The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
  • Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
  • An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
  • I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and -- I can't remember what the third thing is.
Fred Allen was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the Golden Age of American radio. His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but it was only part of his appeal; radio historian John Dunning wrote that Allen was radio's most admired comedian and most frequently censored. A master ad libber, Allen often tangled with his network's executives, while developing routines whose style and substance influenced fellow comic talents, including Groucho Marx, Stan Freberg, Henry Morgan and Johnny Carson; his avowed fans also included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and novelists William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Herman Wouk. Fred Allen was honored with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for contributions to television and radio.

Awards by Fred Allen

Check all the awards nominated and won by Fred Allen.

1944


Peabody Award
(a Personal Award.)