Radio: Satirist

Ever since Fred Allen joined Benny, Bergen, McGee & Hope, no rival network has been able to break NBC’s hammer lock on humor. Last week, little ABC weighed in a promising challenger: droll, deadpan Henry Morgan. His first coast-to-coast half hour (Tues., 8:30-9 p.m., E.D.S.T.) was the freshest and funniest new show in years. Morgan’s secret weapon: a needle that tickles.

Jabbing Radio Row has been Henry Morgan’s favorite pastime for 14 years. He has lost good jobs and good sponsors by ridiculing commercials, mocking soap operas, burlesquing bigwigs and romping through childish pranks. Philadelphia’s WCAU once sacked him when he listed station executives (whom he seldom met) in the missing persons’ bureau broadcast. (Says Morgan, gleefully: “It was days before they discovered it.”)

Last week’s victims of his satire: the “Men of Distinction” liquor ads, tedious radio news features, tobacco auctioneers and cigaret advertising (“. . . Try the taste test. Simply take a package of Morgan cigarets, remove the paper from each cigaret [and] pour the tobacco into a bowl. Now, taste it. . .”).

Savage and Sophomoric. No one knows exactly how Henry Morgan got that way. “I was born at an early age,” says he, “of mixed parents—male & female.” That was 31 years ago. Some time after becoming a radio page boy, he changed his name from Henry Lerner von Ost to Morgan (“I borrowed it from a dance-hall bouncer”). Before he joined the Army Air Forces in 1943, his nightly jabberwocky, sometimes savage, sometimes sophomoric, had drawn millions of New York fans, including Fred Allen and Norman Corwin. (Says Corwin: “He is a great, great artist—better than he knows.”)

Morgan writes his own scripts (aided by one gag writer) and speaks most of the lines on his show. The ideas, he says, come from reading “about eight magazines. I begin with the New Masses, work up through the Nation to FORTUNE.” But he gets his biggest laughs by tossing pitchforks at radio’s holy heifers. Last week, he suddenly stopped his broadcast, announced soberly: “Friends, in the public interest, I figure this is the time when you people at home are getting restless. Now during the following two or three minutes you can get up, walk around, twist the dial, see if there’s a better program on CBS, go in and look at the baby. Nothing will happen while you’re gone.”

Morgan still thinks of himself as unemployed. “Radio is my hobby. I don’t have a vocation.” Only his worst humor is broadcast, he says. “There aren’t more than 3,500 people who can understand the good stuff. Most people don’t understand anything. There are too few people as intelligent as I am.” He adds: “I’m intelligent, but misguided. If I had any real talent, I’d go straight.”