Fred Allen With Guests Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone

Fred Allen’s guests on Town Hall Tonight on February 26, 1936 were Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone, a number of months before the accidental start of the Allen-Benny feud (at 2 p.m., the billing changes to the Benny-Allen feud).

I considered transcribing the script but thought “28 pages? Are you nuts?”

As I am not nuts, or at least have not been clinically diagnosed as such, I have uploaded a copy of the script for you to read. This is courtesy of Kathy Fuller-Seeley, the Benny chronicler who visited the Boston Public Library years ago and snapped pictures of the pages that were pasted in a scrapbook.

You will see that dialogue has been eliminated. My guess is it was for time, not due to network or sponsor censorship.

In case you’re not familiar with the cast listed marginally in the script, here you go:

HARRY is Harry Von Zell, the jovial announcer whom Allen turned into a comic actor.
JOHN is John Brown, one of too many actors caught in the blacklist in the 1950s. His most popular role was likely Digger O’Dell on The Life of Riley.
JACK until page 13 is Jack Smart, later J. Scott Smart, radio’s The Fat Man. He was typecast.
SMART starts on page 15. See above.
MIN is Minerva Pious, who was Mrs. Nussbaum in the Allen’s Alley segment, which wasn’t invented until 1942.
DOUG is Eileen Douglas, who died in 1938. She doesn’t do very much in this show and disappears after page two.

Charlie Cantor doesn’t appear at all in this week’s show.

Mary shows up on page 12 and Jack on the following page. They take up almost all of what would normally be Portland Hoffa’s spot on the show. They also appear in the sketch later in the broadcast.

The half-hour station break with the NBC chimes is on page 27. As there are only 28 pages, it means Allen pretty much ad-libbed the second half of the programme, which was taken up mainly by his weekly amateur show.

You can click on any of the pages to make them larger.