Radio: Abe’s Hit Parade

Abe Burrows is a wit’s wit, a clown’s clown. The late Robert Benchley called him “the greatest satirist” in the U.S. The men who make the public laugh—Danny Kaye, Groucho Marx, Fred Allen, Jack Benny—split their sides laughing when Abe performs. Outside a little circle of Hollywood and Manhattan partygoers, few know the 35-year-old, balding, blinking radio writer whose hobby is poking fun at Tin Pan Alley. But last week, Abe agreed that his stuff was too good to keep. He began a $3,000-a-week job writing a new CBS comedy show (Holiday & Co.) on which he will air some of his songs. He has also teamed up with Publisher Bennett (Try and Stop Me) Cerf to put them in book form and he has accepted an offer from Decca to record his burlesques of the June-moon school of song composers.

Soon the U.S. will be able to hear most of Burrows’ own Hit Parade. Some of the titles: The Girl with the Three Blue Eyes, You Ate a Hunk of My Heart, I Looked under a Rock and Found You, Walking down Memory Lane without a Goddam Thing on My Mind, Green Christmas (“I’m going to spend a green Christmas on next St. Patrick’s Day.”)

Manhattan-born Abram S. Burrows, who looks like an accountant or a salesman (he has been both), worked as a Wall Street runner, a board boy, a coat label peddler until he was nearly 30. Then he sold gags to Eddie Garr, the mimic, for $125. That turned him into a radio writer. Until last summer, he wrote Duffy’s Tavern.

One evening at a Hollywood party, Songwriter Frank Loesser (Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition) saw Burrows at the piano, ad-libbing caustic caricatures of prominent guests and singing parodies of popular songs. After that evening, due to Loesser’s ballyhooing, Abe had little time for work. He was invited to more parties than he could attend. As soon as he arrived, he would be plied with drinks (“I think drinking is only good if done to excess,” he says) and virtually chained to the piano for the four hours or so it takes to go through his repertory. Sample burlesque (on radio’s staccato-phrased, sentimental Scriptster Norman Corwin):

“James Aberdijian, Armenian . . . and yesterday he fell at Concord. . . . We know what you long for, James. . . . We know what your dreams were like. . . . They were as American as apple pie . . . the crunch of a hot dog when you walk on it on a cold day . . . the smack of a wet cigar when it hits you across the face . . . the rattle of cement when you’re in the mixer … the cry ‘Play ball!’ ”

Such spoofing is one way of placating his pet peeves, says Abe. But the “good things, like Oscar Hammerstein, Gilbert & Sullivan and Christmas carols” he cannot kid. That still leaves him plenty of subjects.