Fred Allen
Birth Name: John Florence Sullivan
Birthdate: May 31, 1894
Birthplace: Cambridge, Massachussetts, U.S.A.
Date of Death: March 17, 1956
Occupation: Comedian and Radio Personality
Profile: Self-educated, extraordinarily well read and perhaps the
best comic writer in the history of radio. Best known for
Treadmill to Oblivion.
Website: http://fredallen.org/
Number of Quotes: 54
A celebrity is one who works hard all his life to become well-known and then goes through back streets wearing dark glasses so he won't be recognized.
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 committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.
A conference is a gathering of important people who, singly, can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done.
A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.
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 before lunch.
A telescope will magnify a star a thousand times, but a good press agent can do even better.
All I know about humor is that I don't know anything about it.
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.
An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.
An income tax form is like a laundry list - either way you lose your shirt.
California is a great place to live if you're an orange.
Condensed milk is wonderful. I don't see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans.
During the Samuel Johnson days
they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.
Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.
I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and - I can't remember what the third thing is.
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.
I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.
I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.
I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.
I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.
I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
I play a musical instrument a little, but only for my own amazement.
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.
I'm not funny. What I am is brave.
If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn't have to advertise them.
If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
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.
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.
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.
My father never raised his hand to any one of his children, except in self-defense.
My uncle is a Southern planter. He's an undertaker in Alabama.
Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making.
Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They're
afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs.
Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.
Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
Television is a new medium, and I have discovered why it's called a new medium - because nothing is well done.
Television is the triumph of machine over people.
The advertising world had space men in it before spacemen existed.
The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
The last time I saw him he was walking down lover's lane holding his own hand.
The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.
Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.
Was she old? When they lit all the candles on her birthday cake, six people were overcome with the heat.
Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.
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.
What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.
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.
Last on Earth
