When comedians on radio got tired of jokes, they made jokes about jokes. Fred Allen, Henry Morgan, even Boston’s Bob and Ray, pointed out ...

Commentators have been with us since before electronic media. Back then, they were found in newspapers and called “editorial writers.” Radi...

There are vast numbers of Americans, it seems, who love sentiment mixed with patriotism. And there are people who are adept at dishing it ou...

Careers on television take detours, even for someone as venerable as Walter Cronkite. Uncle Walter wasn’t quite as venerable in 1954 as he ...

Game shows appeal to people for various reasons. One is viewers like to see ordinary people get something for nothing. It’s something they c...

For every successful radio sitcom like Burns and Allen or Blondie or Our Miss Brooks , there’s an equally unsuccessful one, perhaps no one...

In 1947, John Crosby famously wrote a column for the New York Herald Tribune syndicate gushing about a Jack Benny broadcast, asking for a c...

As the calendars changed during the 1950s, one by one, the big-time radio network programmes disappeared as the audience—and advertisers—mov...