From Those Were the Days:

1922 - A U.S. President was heard on the radio for the first time. President Warren G. Harding dedicated the Francis Scott Key Memorial and was heard on radio station WEAR in Baltimore.

1950 - After 13 years on the radio, Harold Peary played the leading role of The Great Gildersleeve one final time. Willard Waterman took Peary’s place in the role for the next seven years on radio and for several years on TV as well.
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“Good night, and good nonsense…”

With the proliferation of popular intellectual quiz shows like Information, Please and The Quiz Kids dotting the airwaves, a program director for WELI, New Haven, Connecticut—Bob Howell—began to toy with an idea of creating a quiz show spoof built around the concept of “a board of experts who are dumber than you are and can prove it.” Howell was working at the time alongside aspiring writer Ruth Howard, who turned his idea into an outline for a series originally titled Crazy Quiz—and cast her father, famed vaudevillian Tom Howard, as the show’s quizmaster. Ruth sold the outline to a promoter, and the result was It Pays to Be Ignorant, which debuted over Mutual Radio on June 25, 1942.

Since Ignorant was essentially a lampoon of Information, Please, it would probably have been more fitting to call the show Disinformation, Please—but instead of featuring a panel of sophisticated, erudite experts like John Kieran, Franklin P. Adams and Oscar Levant, Ignorant showcased a collection of mental midgets in George Shelton, Harry McNaughton and Lulu McConnell. Shelton had been Tom Howard’s partner in vaudeville (the duo even made several comedy two-reelers for Educational Studios in the 1930s) and McNaughton was a British comic best known for playing a butler named Bottle on comedian Phil Baker’s comedy program. Originally, the third member of the Ignorant panel was to be Ann Thomas, but McConnell—with her “sawblade voice” and abrasive personality—proved to be the better fit.

“I deliberately picked old-timers for my experts,” Howard once explained. “I figured their experience would make the show sound ad-libbed.” To me, that’s one of the interesting things about It Pays to Be Ignorant—that a half-hour of insults, bad puns, zany non sequitors and just plain insanity could sound so spontaneous when in fact it was scripted by Bob and Ruth Howell (Ruth married the program director and co-wrote the show with him until his death in 1944, whereupon she continued by herself thereafter). Critics mercilessly panned the show shortly after its Mutual debut, but the public’s nose was thumbed in their direction when the series lasted on radio for nine years. Ignorant switched to CBS in February 1944 and ended its regular run September 13, 1949 (during most of that time it was sponsored by Philip Morris), and the show had two brief summer runs in 1950 (on CBS for Chrysler) and 1951 (on NBC, as DeSoto’s summer replacement for You Bet Your Life).

The listening audience took to It Pays to Be Ignorant almost immediately, enjoying its breezy vaudeville fun and reveling in the program’s familiar catchphrases. McNaughton, when introduced by Howard, would invariably intone “I have a poem, Mr. Howard” and then would go on to recite doggerel like There was a young fellow named Paul/Who went to a fancy dress ball/But sad to relate/He dressed up as a steak/And was eaten with relish by all. Whenever anyone would mention their hometown (Sheboygan was always good for a laugh), Shelton would excitedly cry out: “I usta…I usta…I usta woik in dat town!” Any male “contestant” would find himself interrogated by McConnell, in her whisky tenor: “What’s your first name, honey? Are you married, honey?” (McConnell also figured in another running gag—when Howard described something unpleasant or repulsive, McNaughton would crack “Now we’re back to Miss McConnell again…”)

Last night at work, I listened to an AFRS (Armed Forces Radio Service) rebroadcast of an episode originally heard over CBS August 22, 1944—which has the usual gang of zanies tackling weighty questions like “What’s the habitat of the Bengal tiger?” “How many instruments are there in a string quartet?” and “In which season of the year do people take their summer vacations?” Though the show’s wheezy, hoary gags—some of which I think even Abbott & Costello wouldn’t touch—to paraphrase Fred Allen, “mulch the maize to monumental heights,” I have to admit that I get a kick out of the show. I marvel at the sheer audacity of the performers, knowing that the material is corny but being ballsy enough to do it anyway—plus you have to admire a guy like Tom Howard who, when McConnell asks rhetorically as to whether she could be a pin-up girl, fires back with Groucho-like ferocity: “Only in a bowling alley, Miss McConnell.”

“I hit ‘em in the eyes with the satire, while I kick ‘em in the pants with the gags,” Howard once said in examining the show’s appeal—and I think that’s as good a description as any. There are about seventy programs of Ignorant extant today, but be forewarned—many of them are the AFRS versions. The one I listened to last night didn’t even feature the program’s beloved theme song (“It paaaays to be ignorant…to be dumb, to be dense, to be ignorant…”)
9:56:10 AM    comment []  trackback []