Radio Digest (June 1932-Mar 1933)

RADIO'S a u g h PARADE 17 TJADIO awakes to a new dawn with America's J\. greatest showmen marshalling the parade. A laugh from the loudspeaker is priceless. Welcome, Ed. Wynn, we need you. A nation of listeners hears you and is laughing louder and longer than any audience you ever saw or heard over the footlights, Our hats are off to you for showing the others how to make an adblab INTERESTING. Editor. Grand Canon at midnight . . . Graham: And there are service stations everywhere in every state . . . Wynn: That's what I can't understand, Graham. I never could. Graham: Can't understand what? Wynn: How they know what corners to pick for filling stations. How can they tell they're going to find gasoline under those pumps? "This "Is a program that's different," as Wynn says. "No theme song, no crooner, no soprano and no contests. It's different." For instance, even McNamee laughs. If you merely listen in, you might not believe this, but if you sit in on the broadcast you'll see that he doubles up, and any radio announcer who doubles up (except to keep warm in a press box) must be hearing something. Which he does — take it from your own loud-speaker. Commercial plugging falls into McNamee's role, obviously, but it is one of the shortest allyoops for a product that has ever been heard on the -air. Announcements and things have been reduced to. a minimum to obtain a streamlined program, appropriately enough for any kind of an aerial job . . . be.it radio, or airplane, or girl trapeze act. The Fire-Chief program, sponsored by the retail dealers of The Texas Company, goes out from the old Frolic theatre which is now NBC's Crystal Studio atop the New Amsterdam roof in New York. On this feature of his radio work, Wynn has been able to capitalize. The fact that he has a visible audience, that footlights are before him and that he wears any of his million funny looking pieces of headgear, and his patched, oversized shoes and grotesque costume, makes for accentuation of the Wynn character — the bewildered, subdued, childlike zany, lisping and giggling and cracking his voice through his lines, fumbling with his hands and stumbling with his feet. The effect on the air is that Wynn flounders just as well verbally as he does behind the footlights bodily. When Ed Wynn launched his current show, "The Laugh Parade" he had no idea that he was heading for the larger laugh parade that frolics across the skies day and night from the great broadcasting stations of the country. But that is just what he did in a way that not even his most optimistic friends had hoped. One New York newspaper columnist commenting the next day said: "The sponsors are dancing on their desks today. There is a scramble on the part of agencies and sponsors for all the funny men and women they can find to join the big push that is catching the ear of millions of radio listeners." J. HE Wynn program has definitely set the trend. Tastyeast and Ivory Soap seem to be out to corner the market. Pepsodent grabbed Amos 'n' Andy when they suddenly flared up with amazing popular interest at WMAQ in Chicago. For a while there were imitators of Amos 'n' Andy but imitators never do so well. The fact that people who listen to these two black face comedians might respond to other forms of humor and philosophy was slowly recognized and then the parade of comic character entertainers began to grow. Clang! Clang! The Fire Chief dathet out to join Radio'i Laugh Parade. Probably the greatest difficulty of the radio humorist is the necessity for constantly producing a new story either each day or every other day during the week. Generally, they write and act their own scripts. The principal criticism seems to be that sometimes the jokes are not new. Ed Wynn has given the thought of broadcasting plenty of consideration, and measured the demands from transmitter to receiver for their full value. Eddie Cantor did likewise. No matter how successful a man is on the stage, he must follow this course if he hopes to win the radio audience. But he must cut his own pattern, as the Eddie Cantor successors have sadly learned. There can be only one act of a kind. Ed Wynn has a clean cut technique of his own. If he can keep up the pace of a new show each week he is bound to make more money on the air than he ever has behind the footlights.