The quotes for this author need curating
We’d love for you to do it. If you’re not yet registered as a curator, you’ll first need to do so.
Fred Allen (quotes)
- He’s so small, he’s a waste of skin.
- Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
- Hollywood is a great place if you’re an orange.
- The world is a grindstone and life is your nose
- Television is a triumph of equipment over people.
- Television is the triumph of machine over people.
- She used to be a teacher but she has no class now.
- In show business, more showgirls are kept than promises.
- A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.
- What’s on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.
- Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
- The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
- Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.
- I don’t want to own anything that won’t fit into my coffin.
- I’m going to Boston to see my doctor. He’s a very sick man.
- Everywhere outside New York City is Bridgeport, Connecticut.
- All I know about humor is that I don’t know anything about it.
- Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.
- My uncle is a Southern planter. He’s an undertaker in Alabama.
- I’d rather have two girls at seventeen than one at thirty-four.
- A gentleman is any man who wouldn’t hit a woman with his hat on.
- There are two kinds of jokes – funny jokes and Jack Benny jokes.
- The advertising world had space men in it before spacemen existed.
- California is a fine place to live – if you happen to be an orange.
- I play a musical instrument a little, but only for my own amazement.
- Hush, little bright line, don’t you cry You’ll be a cliché by and by.
- If criticism had any power to harm, the skunk would be extinct by now.
- If I could get my membership fee back, I’d resign from the human race.
- Radio is called a medium because it is rare that anything is well done.
- An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
- I don’t have to look up my family tree, because I know that I’m the sap.
- To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with skin wrapped around it.
- After quitting radio I was able to live on the money I saved on aspirins.
- Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.
- I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
- He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose.
- Hundreds Attend Parks Memorial in Ala. www.foxnews.com. October 30, 2005.
- An income tax form is like a laundry list – either way you lose your shirt.
- It is bad to suppress laughter. It goes back down and spreads to your hips.
- English coffee tastes like water that has been squeezed out of a wet sleeve.
- Fred Allen (2016). “Treadmill to Oblivion”, p.14, Pickle Partners Publishing
- Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
- My agent gets 10 percent of everything I get, except the blinding headaches.
- My hometown was so dull that one time the tide went out and never came back.
- The last time I saw him he was walking down lover’s lane holding his own hand.
- A comedian who starts talking to himself becomes his own audience. This is fatal.
- He was so narrow minded that if he fell on a pin it would blind him in both eyes.
- He dreamed he was eating shredded wheat and woke up to find the mattress half gone.
- If the grass is greener in the other fellow’s yard- let him worry about cutting it.
- My father never raised his hand to any one of his children, except in self-defense.
- He always had a chip on his shoulder that he was ready to use to kindle an argument.
- In America; Inside the Death House by Bob Herbert, www.nytimes.com. October 9, 2000.
- The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
- An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.
- Sunday Observer; Brass Hat In Hand by Russell Baker, www.nytimes.com. April 17, 1983.
- Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.
- When Jack Benny plays the violin, it sounds as though the strings are still in the cat.
- A psychiatrists is the next man you start talking to after you start talking to yourself.
- The guy who brought The Beatles to America by Bob Greene, www.cnn.com. February 9, 2014.
- A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.
- I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.
- A telescope will magnify a star a thousand times, but a good press agent can do even better.
- He has no idea what it was like to grow up in the South, where you had to hold your head down.
- Condensed milk is wonderful. I don’t see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans.
- Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.
- I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.
- Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making.
- Three million frogs’ legs are served in Paris – daily. Nobody knows what became of the rest of the frogs.
- All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter.
- Television is a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.
- I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and – I can’t remember what the third thing is.
- On ships they call them barnacles; in business they attach themselves to desks and are called vice presidents.
- During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.
- 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.
- Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They’re afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs.
- Father Time is the make-up man responsible for the physical changes that determine the parts the average actor is to play.
- Success is like dealing with your kid or teaching your wife to drive. Sooner or later you’ll end up in the police station.
- It was once rumored that fledgling executives walked around their offices backwards so they wouldn’t have to face an issue.
- 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.
- The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.
- A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done.
- 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.
- The average vice-president is a form of executive fungus that attaches itself to a desk. On a boat this growth would be called a barnacle.
- The S.S. Sierra was a ten-thousand-ton vessel. Today, lifeboats bigger than the Sierra are found on the Queen Mary and other luxury liners.
- 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.
- An actor’s popularity is fleeting. His success has the life expectancy of a small boy who is about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match.
- Cocktail party: A gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time. The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat’s navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent’s heart.
- The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows the average man can see much better than he can think- Ladies’ Home JournalI’d rather have two girls at seventeen than one at thirty-four
- 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.
- 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 PM 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’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.
- 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 was just working in the shop and all of a sudden something just triggered in me, and I started shaking. And then I walked back into the house and my wife asked, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I said, ‘I don’t feel good.’ And tears, uncontrollable tears, was coming out of my eyes and she says, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I told her. I said, ‘I just thought about that execution that I did two days ago, and everybody else’s that I was involved in.’ And what it was, something triggered within, and it just, everybody – all of these executions all sprung forward.
