Fred Allen Quotes

I like long walks, especially when they're taken by people who annoy me.

To Fred, those years seemed to pass like quickly skimming a book and then finding the ending wasn't what he expected. He wished he'd paid more attention to the story.

I checked to see if Fred was not in the room. What i was about to do to his mother, no child should see.

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to be well-known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

California is a fine place to live, if you happen to be an orange.

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.

Televisio is a vehicle that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

It is bad to suppress laughter. It goes back down and spreads to your hips.

Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission.

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

Radio is called a medium because it is rare that anything is well done.

I'm going to Boston to see my doctor. He's a very sick man.

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

Most of us spend the first six days of the week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.” -Fred Allen

Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.

All I know about humour is that I don't know anything about it.

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.

I can’t understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

You don’t make money by trading, you make it by sitting.” It takes patience to wait for the trade to develop, for the opportunity to present itself. Let the market come to you, instead of chasing the market. Chart patterns are very accurate. They have proven their accuracy and predictability time and time again, but you have to wait for them to develop.

a group of people who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done

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.

You only live once. But if you work it right, once is enough.

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.

The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.

Fred came running right up to me, his tail held high and mouth wide open as he sang me the song of his people.

An actor, to spend his entire life as an actor, has to have the mind of a child. A writer at sixty can be a Steinbeck, a Faulkner, or a Hemingway. An actor at sixty can make a funny face or do a creaky dance. The actor lives a reasonable-facsimile existence while cavorting in an unreal world. The value of an actor’s services are determined by the needs of another person.

The fight spilled out into the press. Allen blasted the censors. “They are a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference. Their conferences are meetings of men who can do nothing but collectively agree that nothing can be done.” The thin-skinned network reacted again, cutting Allen off in the middle of a barb. Now other comics joined the fray. That week Red Skelton said on his show that he’d have to be careful not to ad-lib something that might wound the dignity of some NBC vice president. “Did you hear they cut Fred Allen off on Sunday?” That’s as far as he got—the network cut him off. But Skelton went right on talking, for the studio audience. “You know what NBC means, don’t you? Nothing but cuts. Nothing but confusion. Nobody certain.” When the network put him back on the air, Skelton said, “Well, we have now joined the parade of stars.” Bob Hope, on his program, was cut off the air for this joke: “Vegas is the only town in the world where you can get tanned and faded at the same time. Of course, Fred Allen can be faded anytime.” Allen told the press that NBC had a vice president who was in charge of “program ends.” When a show ran overtime, this individual wrote down the time he had saved by cutting it off: eventually he amassed enough time for a two-week vacation. Dennis Day took the last shot. “I’m listening to the radio,” he said to his girlfriend Mildred on his Wednesday night NBC sitcom. “I don’t hear anything,” said Mildred. “I know,” said Dennis: “Fred Allen’s on.” On that note, the network gave up the fight, announcing that its comedians were free to say whatever they wanted. It didn’t matter, said Radio Life: “They all were anyway.” Allen took a major ratings dive in 1948. Some

His reputation rests on his standing as the wit of his day, though his shows are seldom cited as the funniest in radio. His humor has paled, and today he plays to a tougher audience than he ever faced in life. This is a crowd reared on comedy that censors nothing. It has no hook, but it is harsh, impatient, and unforgiving. In some quarters he is found lacking, but others see him as a humorist in the truest sense. “Fred will last,” predicted comic Steve Allen, no relation. Listening to an old Town Hall Tonight, a modern listener might wonder, where is the humor? Some of these sound as dusty as the museum pieces that he himself found them to be in later life: as dead as yesterday’s newspaper. Perhaps this is the answer. When Allen went into topical humor, at the beginning of his career, he may have forfeited his only opportunity to be the Mark Twain of his century. He had flashes of undeniable brilliance. But the main body of his work deals with the day-to-day fodder of another time, and sons have seldom been amused by the embarrassments or tragedies of their fathers.

My favourite part of my new book so far: Chapter 48: Creatures of The Night A figure stood in the stairwell beneath the Smoke's Poutinerie close to Simcoe Street and Adelaide Street West. He munched his pulled pork poutine and watched the strange object glide through the fog that engulfed the tall blue R.B.C. building. “Nice night for a stroll,” smiled The Rooster. Upon heading North, Fred had decided to take a detour and glide the exact opposite way: South. It was why he was now flying through the fog that suspended over the R.B.C. building. Through the billowing cloud he sailed and higher up into the air as he was heading towards the business district of Toronto where all the skyscrapers were. As Fred got closer, he understood why they were labeled as skyscrapers: they basically scraped the sky. But the view from up here was fantastic. It was a rainy and cold night, but Fred felt very warm in his upgraded suit. Soon, he was zooming past the green windowed T.D. building and back towards the North side of Yonge Street. However, as he sailed home, he began to worry about Allen. The Rooster had already cut up his ex-girlfriend so what would he do to Allen? Allen had been a friend to Fred when no one else had been there. Of course, he used to have many friends in preschool, elementary school, and high school but no one he clicked with. Allen McDougal was really the only family he had left and he didn't want The Rooster to kill his old friend in any way. I must radio him, thought Fred as he shot past Dundas Square. But when he pressed the button on the helmet that alerted his Butler's phone, there was no answer. Damn it. They've already got him.

As the stock trades lower each day, what is the volume doing? Right! It is increasing. The volume is confirming the trend. We always check the volume. If a stock is advancing and the volume is declining, then it is not confirming the trend.

This is also a good lesson in patience. A new investor or trader usually lacks patience and has the tendency to want to jump in, fearful of missing out on an advance. Don’t make that mistake. Wait for the confirmation. Buy at the bottom, not at the top. And, always use a Stop Loss to protect your capital. “Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain cool and unruffled under all circumstances” ~Thomas Jefferson

Entry and exit points are vital parts of trading and investing. That is worth repeating.  Entry and Exit points are vital parts of Trading and Investing. Whether you are Day Trading, Swing Trading, or are a Long Term Investor. Why would you ever buy a stock at the wrong time? Unfortunately, there are many market participants with no training that do it every day.

Entry and exit points are vital parts of trading and investing. That is worth repeating.  Entry and Exit points are vital parts of Trading and Investing. Whether you are Day Trading, Swing Trading, or are a Long Term Investor. Why would you ever buy a stock at the wrong time? Unfortunately, there are many market participants with no training that do it every day. The Pros love the uninformed, the novices, and the Pigs. Who else are they going to sell to when a stock has reached a resistance point, or reached an all time high? You guessed it. They are going to sell to the novices and the pigs who are hoping for more advance. Then when the stock drops, falls to support, or finds support somewhere, the Pros will buy it back from the novice who has just taken a loss and a beating. “The time to buy is when blood is running in the streets” ~Baron Rothschild

In the following chart we see a trend line drawn connecting the support levels where the stock has found support on 3 separate occasions. See Figure 9-1 below. It only takes two points, or lows, to draw a trend line. Meaning, the trend line drawn in the above chart could have effectively been drawn after the stock had found support at point 1 and at point 2. However, while it only takes two points to draw a trend line, a third point is necessary to identify the line as a valid trend line. How does this help us? By drawing a trend line connecting points 1 and 2, we can then extend the trend line to the ‘infinite.’ Understand?

He was the first of the top stars of vaudeville and burlesque to also reach the top in radio. Almost a full year ahead of Al Jolson, Ed Wynn, Fred Allen, and Jack Benny, three years ahead of Bing Crosby, seven years before Bob Hope: Eddie Cantor trailed only Rudy Vallee, but Vallee was cut from a different log.

He was still too well known as Freddy James, second-rater, to command more than a second-rate salary, so yet another name change was in order. It came about by mistake: through a mixup with an old agent named Edgar Allen, he arrived for a booking to learn that he had been inserted in the program as Fred Allen.

Fred Allen was perhaps the most admired of radio comics. His fans included the president of the United States, critically acclaimed writers, and the intelligentsia of his peers. William Faulkner was said to have liked Allen’s work; John Steinbeck, who became his friend and later wrote the foreword for Allen’s autobiography, called him “unquestionably the best humorist of our time.” As early as 1933, when he had been on the air less than six months, he got a heartening letter of support from Groucho Marx. To Jack Benny he was “the best wit, the best extemporaneous comedian I know.” Edgar Bergen, who normally shied away from gushy superlatives, told a Time reporter that Allen was the “greatest living comedian, a wise materialist who exposes and ridicules the pretensions of his times.

On Sunday evenings, there was a comparatively vast array of radio shows from which to choose. Frequently I would lie in my bed with my father, who would pull the covers over our heads and pretend that we were in a cave. This is how we would listen to shows such as Jack Benny, The Great Gildersleeve with Harold Peary, The Fred Allen Show, and The Edgar Bergen Show. As a ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen had Charlie McCarthy and the slow-witted Mortimer Snerd as puppets. For us the last show of the evening was always Your Hit Parade sponsored by Lucky Strike Cigarettes, starring Snooky Lanson, Gisele MacKenzie and a host of other well-known singers of that period. Although my father was a strict disciplinarian, on Sunday evenings he usually relaxed things and we would enjoy our time listening to the radio together.

Holding losses and hoping to break even is not an investing or trading plan. That is dumb money on suicide watch!

Moe Berg, Boston Red Sox catcher, had a quick mind and a vast store of general knowledge (and later became a spy, searching out atomic secrets for the OSS in Europe). Harpo Marx appeared without speaking, whistling his way riotously through the program. Fred Allen took over the show, relegating Fadiman to a panelist’s chair. Wendell Willkie did the same. Deems Taylor was a regular fill-in, appearing no less than 30 times.

The market internals tell us how many stocks are making new highs and new lows as the major market indexes are advancing. They also tell us the number of stocks advancing versus those that are declining. We are looking for divergences. For example, it is not a good sign to see more stocks hitting new lows than new highs while the major indices are hitting all-time highs. Similarly, it’s not a good sign to see total volume contracting while prices are breaking to new highs.

The very first advance is too steep. A healthy advance should never create a trend line that is more than a 45 degree angle. Thus, a sustainable advance should always be less than a 45 degree angle.

It is a curious commentary on people’s fear of time that if much time passes without their being aware of it, they assume they had a “good time.” A “good time” is thus defined as escaping boredom. It is as though the goal were to be as little alive as possible—as though life, as Fred Allen so pungently put it, “is an unprofitable episode that disturbs an otherwise blessed state of non-existence.

She showed him to the guest bedroom down the hall. There were a few boxes of first-aid kits and three kerosene heaters in the room, but she’d been keeping this room mostly clear and the bed made with fresh sheets every week for over thirty years. There was a void—which still existed, just better concealed these days—left in her home after Evanelle’s husband died. During those sad days following his death, Lorelei would spend the night with Evanelle, but she stopped as she got older and wilder. Then Claire would stay the night sometimes when she was young, but she liked to stay at home mostly. Evanelle never imagined Fred would be staying here one day. But surprises were nothing new to her. Like opening a can of mushroom soup and finding tomato instead; be grateful and eat it anyway.

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

An actor’s success has the life expectancy of a small boy about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match.

(Faces are all important. Without faces it would be impossible to identify our friends. If we had to recognize people by their bodies, we could only tell men from women. With career women, in many cases this would be impossible.

You don’t make money by trading, you make it by sitting.

Three years after he came to town, he was elected one of the members of the common council of the town of Northampton, from Ward Two. It was in that year that the Northampton City Council was faced with the first serious traffic problem that had come up in a hundred years. Fred Jager brought an automobile to town. It was called a Locomobile. It went chugging up and down the streets and scared the horses. The Council resolved that something ought to be done.

Fred Allen cast his net wide, and the results look like a meeting of the board of directors in Candy Land. CoreFire floats at the back, obviously impatient with the selection process.

The moment Fred Allen learned of television, he hated it. He called it “a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.

If you ignore the primary trend, you are most likely going to lose money. The only time you should be buying stocks, index funds, or mutual funds is when the primary trend is advancing. But even then, you want to get in on the early stages of the advance. You don’t want to be the last one to the party.

Charts really are the ‘footprint of money.

Jim has never received adequate recognition for his skills as a comic actor. Fred Allen’s status as a witty ad-libber is well-documented, yet Jim could fire off an spontaneous line with the best of them. It is this talent of the quick quip that is noted in the comments of numerous episodes in this book.

Raising Junior, a domestic comedy, has as its chief claim to fame discovery of Walter Tetley as a major radio character actor. According to the legend, collaborator Ray Knight snatched Tetley, then 9, off an elevator and thrust him before the microphone when the child scheduled to play Bobby failed to arrive. Tetley, of course, went on to thousands of radio broadcasts (an estimated 2,300 appearances on 150 separate series by the late 1930s, with the bulk of his work still ahead), specializing in wiseguy kid roles on The Fred Allen Show, Easy Aces, The Great Gildersleeve, and The Phil Harris/Alice Faye Show.

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

John’s Other Wife was such a perfect title for a soap opera that it was lampooned by Fred Allen (as Duncan’s Other Fife, etc.) and other comics for years. The main point of contention was the romantic triangle—store owner John Perry, his wife Elizabeth, and John’s secretary, Annette, who became fixed in Elizabeth’s mind as “John’s other wife.” While Elizabeth wrung her hands and fretted, John was trying to survive the furious competition from Sullivan’s luxurious department store across the street. At one point in the serial, John’s assistant, Martha, came in for the brunt of Elizabeth’s “other wife” jealousies.

Millions for Defense was one of the first big Treasury Department shows of the war. It predated Pearl Harbor by six months and sounded a warning call for hard times ahead. Fred Allen was opening-night master of ceremonies. Typical of these war shows, it had all of Hollywood and New York at its beck and call, all free talent. Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour headlined the July 9 show. Bette Davis, Lily Pons, Abbott and Costello, Tyrone Power, and Claudette Colbert were on subsequent broadcasts. The show was quite popular in the waning months of summer, and when Fred Allen reclaimed his slot in the fall, Millions simply shifted networks and became The Treasury Hour.

My stateroom was a form-fitting gullhole (on a ship, a pigeonhole is a gullhole).

I scooped Fred up and buried my face in him. “I should have named you Benedict, you little turncoat.” He purred and started making biscuits in my hair.

No, Fred. Mommy and Daddy need to have alone time right now.” I almost laughed, my relief was so strong. Mommy and Daddy. It had to be him. No one else was so presumptuous.

I scooped Fred up and buried my face in him. “I should have named you Benedict, you little turncoat.