Funt's Stunts

There’s always been a subset of television programming, dating back to the network radio days, of shows that deliberately embarrass and laugh at innocent people. Most make me cringe.
Ralph Edwards was particularly smirky and smarmy as he ridiculed people in ridiculous situations on Truth or Consequences (his image was counterbalanced by some excellent charity work and a half-hour of sentiment called This is Your Life). Art Linkletter was a little more tolerable on People Are Funny (his image was counterbalanced by eliciting amusing answers by naïve children on House Party).

One of these programmes I did like was Candid Camera. It may have trod the line, but when I watched it in the 1960s any embarrassment about a situation didn’t last long and we always saw the victim was let in on the joke at the end. (Bob and Ray came up with a parody called “Secret Camera” where the host was beaten up by angry victims). The show was so popular, CBS aired reruns Monday through Friday, which is when I watched.

It helped, too, the host was a chap named Allen Funt. He was no chortling, “aren’t we devils” type. He came across as an ordinary, unaffected guy, not an over-the-top television host.

Funt created Candid Camera, which was actually born as Candid Microphone on ABC radio, the network that allowed recorded voices. The show worked on radio and Funt was able to move it to television, where it blossomed. But it took a little bit of time.

If nothing else, Funt was a self-promotor. Not surprising perhaps because, in 1940, he was the head of a copy department at ad agency. In 1942, he became the writer and director of the Blue Network’s Army-Navy Game, where a soldier and sailor took part in gag demonstrations. The Army itself beckoned for Funt a year later, and we find him at Camp Gruber in Oklahoma, where he was behind a local radio show called Behind the Dog Tag, that made GI wishes come true—after a stunt, of course.

The Gruber Guidon reminisced in late 1944: “Remember the night the soldier had to had to fill the colonel’s hat with catsup and mashed potatoes, then answer to the colonel himself? And the night a blind-folded Pfc made love to a donkey? And the night a soldier was dunked in a tank of water and came up with a watch and a real live pinup girl in a bathing suit?”

After the war, he produced Johnny Olsen’s Ladies Be Seated before selling ABC on Candid Microphone, which debuted on the same network June 28, 1947. (Alan Courtney and Art Green had hosted a series with the same name on WMCA in 1938, but it involved interviews from night clubs). Pretty soon, the papers were talking about it.

Well, in some cases, they were talking about Funt. And Funt was a great story-teller. Here’s one of a number of feature stories about his adventures in stunt-land. It’s from July 30, 1947.

My New York
By MEL HEIMER
NEW YORK—Since the publication of the Wakeman book of the same name, the hucksters have been very much in the spotlight. They are, of course, advertising agency men who go around peddling radio shows.
There is a surface hilarity to their asinine activities which Wakeman exploited neatly, but underneath, most of them are colossal bores. It was thus a pleasure, the other day, to talk to a reformed huckster.
This is a 32-year-old, slightly bald, calm-looking gentleman named Allen Funt, who has progressed from huckstering to the point where he now is a "gimmick" man in radio.
Webster defines "gimmick" as "anything tricky"—which means that the fabulous Funt goes around thinking up trick ideas for radio shows. And here is a man, friends, in words of Broadwayite Al Slep, he makes the average zany character "sound like a bookkeeper with the diamond pin for 50 years' service in sawdust mill.”
Back in the days when Allen was a promising young huckster, he gave more than one indication of his genius. At one time he was trying to peddle P. K. Wrigley, the gum magnate, an idea for a radio show—but Wrigley, he says, just wouldn't pay no never mind to his letters, wires and calls.
Finally, one day he took an old plank of wood, stuck four pieces of well-chewed gum on its bottom side and mailed it express to Wrigley. "I have had these analysed," Allen's accompanying letter informed Wrigley darkly, "and NONE is Wrigley's. Let our radio show correct this situation." He got his audience with P. K. "Of course," Allen adds now, "the show never materialized, anyway. But it was a moral triumph."
Another stunt that Allen pulled more than once was to write a sales letter to a prospective client, then tear it into a hundred pieces, drop it Into a wastebasket—and mail the wastebasket to the customer. “They ALWAYS pasted the pieces together," he recalls, dreamily.
However, huckstering palled on this New York native, who is a Cornell graduate and an artist and sculptor in his spare time. He became a radio idea man—his Groucho Marx mind ran rampant. He has a show now in which an attempt is made to really bring candor to the airwaves.
Thus, recently, Funt broadcast the actual awakening of a man by his wife in the morning (the wife was in cahoots with Funt and his aides), complete to the sleepy guy's muttering of "Get lost, will ya?" He also broadcast the transaction when a harrassed soul hocked his watch in a pawn shop. It turned out the hocker needed some quick money for a set of false teeth.
As an Army corporal in Tulsa, Okla., during the war, young Funt staged a radio show whereby 10 GI's, who had written letters, had their greatest wishes come true. One soldier meditated long and then decided he wanted to dive into a swimming pool full of iced tea.
Eyes a-gleam, Allen got a whole battalion to dig a swimming pool—and filled it with cooling oolong. Another soldier wanted to see some of the animals he had left on the farm. Funt badgered a general to commandeer a fleet of amphibious trucks that ferried in enough livestock to fill Noah's old LST.
One of Funt's best stunts helped win the war. Called on for a gimmick to sell war bonds, he created a dilly. With several thousand people jammed into an auditorium he seated on the stage a little old woman who hadn't seen her GI son for five years. With a roll of drums, the hall was darkened at the entrance to the hall, in a spotlight, stood the son.
The gimmick? For every $1,000 war bond purchased by the audience, the son could take one step closer to his old mother. At $50,000, with half the audience in hysterics, crying men and women finally rushed into the aisles and carried the GI up to his ma.
On his current candid show, Allen's immediate goal is to broadcast one of President Truman's sneezes. He already is lining up a mechanical crew to go to Washington for the purpose.
However, Funt's most grandoise gimmick seems due to die unborn. He wants to get some manufacturer to turn out a Christmas stocking as large as the Empire State building, hang it and have it filled by radio listeners with gifts to be sent to the needy the world over.
There are two main obstacles: 1—You would have to build a bigger structure than the Empire State on which to hang the stocking. 2—It would have to be knitted by Bethlehem Steel.
These are the kind of people we have in New York. I ask you—how can you get bored here?

Funt parlayed the radio show into a number of books, including dialogue from the broadcasts, several volumes of “secret recordings” on Columbia records, 40 short films released by Columbia (and re-released even into the 1960s) and sales training films for liquor, mattress and appliance companies. When ABC’s TV flagship station WJZ-TV finally went on the air on August 10, 1948, Candid Microphone was dropped in the 8 to 8:30 p.m. time slot opposite Texaco Star Theatre on NBC starring Henny Youngman, with Paul Winchell and Bert Lahr. Then, it was back to radio.

Candid Microphone became Candid Camera on NBC-TV at the start of the 1949-50 season before appearing on CBS from July to October 1950. Philip Morris dropped the show in favour of bandleader/starmaker Horace Heidt, despite placing 15th in the ratings in metropolitan New York. But Funt wasn’t hurting. Associated Artists Productions bought his TV films (recut from 89 half hours) for $200,000 in 1954 and put them in syndication. Funt bought them back in April 1959 for $40,000.

Through most of the ‘50s, while Truth or Consequences and House Party were attracting audiences, no network wanted Funt’s show. Finally, it surfaced on a semi-regular basis starting in April 1958 on, of all places, the Jack Paar version of the Tonight show (columnist Hy Gardner proclaimed they “provide the week’s high in hilarity,” opining Paar was getting stale). Then it surfaced as a regular five-minute segment of The Garry Moore Show in the 1959-60 season. Moore, his announcer Durward Kirby and cast members Marion Lorne and Carol Burnett (chained to a blacksmith’s table) would take part in Funt’s stunts shot behind a two-way mirror or a hole in a folding screen. Amazingly, few people recognised Moore, whose face had been seen day and night on television through the 1950s.

One critic who cried “humiliation!” “sadism!” and “bully!” at Funt was Scripps-Howard writer Harriet Van Horne who, if she were reviewing Santa Claus, would ignore the free gifts to good children, and instead sharply censure him because she might possibly have to vacuum chimney soot from her carpet.

In April 1960, it was reported Candid Camera would become a regular series. It debuted on Sunday, Oct. 2nd, at 10 p.m., sandwiched between Jack Benny and What’s My Line? Funt was there and so was singer Dorothy Collins. But there was a behind-the-scenes war. Eddie Albert had been hired to host and shot some shows with Arthur Godfrey set to be a guest star. But producer Bob Banner, at least according to the Hollywood Reporter, decided he wanted Godfrey to host. Albert found greener pastures. Or green something.

“Warmhearted, prankish,” declared Ben Gross of the Daily News about the premiere, pointing to a Collins segment where she “drove” into a gas station without an engine. Cynthia Lowry of the Associated Press opined “I suspect the gag will wear thin pretty quickly.”

Well, the series carried on until 1967, was revived several times and, even today, reruns are seen on cable TV. The only thing that wore thin was Godfrey, who lasted a season and then griped to Donald Freeman of the Copley News Service that CBS thought he was through, that Funt aired their differences in public and that Candid Camera wasn’t his kind of show anyway. Then he went on to call Julius LaRosa a liar (almost seven years after Godfrey fired him), and rip singer Frank Parker (“he ruined himself”) and singing group the Mariners (“What they used to have, they don’t have any more.”). Sounds like your Lipton tea isn’t what’s bitter, Arthur.

Funt responded by going back to his Garry Moore days, hiring Durwood Kirby to co-host, and carrying on. And on. And on.

Funt died in 1999 just before his 85th birthday.

One other thing about Funt—he was a cartoonist. He had attended the Pratt Institute in New York. His strip appeared in papers in the 1940s. (If he didn’t draw it, I will stand corrected).