Quotes from Fred Allen

The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.

In the theater the actor had uncertainty, broken promises, constant travel and a gypsy existence. In radio, if you were successful, there was an assured season of work. The show could not close if there was nobody in the balcony. There was no travel and the actor could enjoy a permanent home. There may have been other advantages but I didn't need to know them.

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.

Jack Benny's so cheap he wouldn't give you the parsley off his fish.

Television is the triumph of machine over people.

A comedian who starts talking to himself becomes his own audience. This is fatal.

A telescope will magnify a star a thousand times, but a good press agent can do even better.

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.

With the advance of refrigeration, I hope that along with the frozen foods someday we will have frozen conversation. A person will be able to keep a frozen promise indefinitely.

I'm a little hoarse tonight. I've been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night. Things are so tough in Chicago that at Easter time, for bunnies the little kids use porcupines.

A good comedian can say things funny and other guys just say funny things.

The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.

Vaudeville could not vouch for the honesty, the integrity, or the mentality of the individuals who collectively made up the horde the medium embraced. All the human race demands of its members is that they be born. That is all vaudeville demanded. You just had to be born. You could be ignorant and be a star. You could be a moron and be wealthy. The elements that went to make up vaudeville were combed from the jungles, the four corners of the world, the intelligentsia and the subnormal.

I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.

Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.

Won't say I hate you–but my admiration for you is under control.

A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 A.M. 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 even before lunch.

Advertising is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.

I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.

A celebrity is someone who works hard all his life to become known and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

That's a joke, son!

Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.

The triumph of machine over people.