TV Guide (January 22, 1954)

commentator. When TV gives him the heave-hd, he figures to become a writer. Such an event would further deplete: the ranks of a vanishing type of humorist sorely needed by the industry—the satirist. Allen’s Ally Though Henry worships Fred Allen as the funniest man on earth, he holds Fred partly responsible for the decline of satire. When Fred was riding high on radio, Stop the Music, a quiz show, was thrown up against him on a rival network and, by giving away gobs of money, drained the Allen audience. Henry’s complaint is that Fred didn’t fight back hard enough and since he was the satirists’ spiritual leader, the rest tumbled with him. Henry’s own special flair, of course, is his needling of commercials, usually his own. When he was sponsored by Schick razors, his show featured a Shavathon that supposedly established Schick as the world’s fastest shaver. He once introduced the commercial by saying, “Here’s Ted Husing, the world’s greatest announcer with the world’s lousiest commercial.” After he was dropped by Schick, he said it was because “I pushed and I pulled, but I didn’t click-click.” Life Savers dropped Henry after one broadcast when he joked that the company was bilking the public by drilling holes in its products. Elevators: First Up, Then Down Perhaps the most tolerant sponsor of all was Mr. Jesse Adler of Adler Elevator Shoes. Henry had a glorious time scrambling the commercials: “An Adler Elevator Shoe is a meal in itself” or “Wake up your lazy liver bile with a pair of Adler Elevators.” Mr. Adler, a sweet-tempered, guileless man, found that the Morgan bits WERE selling shoes, so he rarely complained, but this nettled him: “Old Man Adler claims that Adler os Elevators make you two inches taller the minute you put them on. The claim is correct— you can be two inches taller IF you can stand up in them. But what about the trousers, Adler? Do they stretch, too?” Radio and TV have been Henry’s favorite targets. Examples: “The Answer Man:” Q. Should olives be eaten with the fingers? A. No, the fingers should be eaten separately. “Movie Gossips:” Mickey Rooney will or will not:make a movie next year. Remember, you heard it here first. “Giveaways:” Among the prizes for the winner will be—a long-playing record of the Minute Waltz AND six dozen tennis shoes, size twelve. Henry’s bizarre humor has disillusioned more than sponsors. Once when his wife was taking a bath a man burst into the apartment screaming, “Mrs. Morgan, come quickly, your husband has just been killed in an auto accident.” Mrs. Morgan reacted like a sponsor when she found the man doing the shouting was Henry. She divorced him. No More Gnus Was Bad News Henry’s biggest TV venture was a short-lived spoofer called The Great Talent Hunt, with such acts as a man who played “The Stars and Stripes Forever” with two wet dishrags on fresh cheesecake, a man who could play the scherzo from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony by beating his cranium with soup spoons, and a little boy whose whistle could be heard only by gnus. Out of acts, the show expired. Morgan is now relatively happy with his I’ve Got a Secret panel job, which he finds easy and a lot of fun. And one of these days, it just may turn out that the U. S. public will again be ripe for good, old-fashioned biting satire. And, we trust, ready to give it to us will be that kinkyhaired iconoclast whose hopeful introduction always is “Hello anybody, here’s Morgan.”—Bob Cunniff