Fred Allen 

(1894 - 1956) - American humorist.


A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
 
A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.
 
California is a fine place to live--if you happen to be an orange.
 
Committee--a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.
 
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
 
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.
 
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.
 
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
 
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 firefly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.
 
An actor's success has the life expectancy of a small boy about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match

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

The president of the new agency had been a famous quarterback in college football an old wives tale told around the water cooler in the office related that, after he had left college when ever he met other players who had been on the team with him he could never recognize the fellow until he asked him to bend over.

The college quarterback started sending turtle-necked memos which intimated that, as the mink sayed as it backed into the electric fan, "the fur is going to fly".

A new headache tablet would be distributed to the staff and probably be very welcome. In the advertising game (it isn't buisness) a headache is an occupational side effect.

This man used to talk to himself incessantly. We called him the one-man conference.

This gentleman nursed two secret ambitions. The first was to put a day bed in his office so that he wouldn't have to sleep sitting up during conferences. His second and greater ambition was to keep changing elements we had in the program.

An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.

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.

Where were you fellows when the paper was blank? [asking editors]

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.

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

Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.

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.

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

Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in the navel of a flea and still have enough room for a network president's heart.

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.. [It is] radio fluoroscoped; the triumph of machinery over people; a "medium" because anything good on it is "rare."

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

The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.

I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy.

A kind of radio which lets people at home see what the studio audience is not laughing at.

[Television] The triumph of machinery over people.

He's done everybody's act. He's a parrot with skin on. (about Milton Berle)

He's so small, he's a waste of skin.

He was so narrow minded that if he fell on a pin it would blind him in both eyes.

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

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.

If the grass is greener in the other fellow's yard - let him worry about cutting it.

Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.

Radio in the 30's was a calm and tranquil medium. Oleaginous-voiced announcers smoothly purred their commercial copy into the microphones enunciating each lubricated syllable.


back

Hit Counter