From Old Time Radio Club's "The Illustrated Press", January 2000 Edition
CAN YOU TOP THIS?
For a dozen years a trio of old vaudevillians appearing on this squeaky-clean joke-telling marathon sought bigger laughs than those guffaws produced by the puns submitted by listeners.
The panel included comedians 'Senator' Ed Ford ("Good evening"), Harry Hershfield ("Howdy!") and Joe Laurie Jr. ("Hel-low"), Yarns from listeners were delivered by a contemporary comic, Peter Donald. He was renowned as a master dialectician who often chose ethnic-sounding vernacularism to gain wider acceptance of ordinary quips. Donald routinely employed an Irish brogue, a throwback to his enormously popular alter ego figure Ajax Cassidy, a permanent 1946-49 resident of "Allen's Alley" on weekly broadcasts of The Fred Allen Show.
Ward Wilson moderated Can You Top This? for most of the run. He would offer a topic on which the next round of jests hinged. He shared the hosting with Roger Bower who also produced and directed the show at varying intervals. Charles Stark was the announcer.
One of the panelists, 'Senator' Ford-who wasn't an elected official representing anybody at all but who called himself by that prefix merely to announce his status as an orator on the banquet circuit-was creator, owner, producer and executive director of the show. Like the others he maintained a large repository of wisecracks (believed to exceed 15,000 gags among the panel threesome) that could yield explosive laughter at a moment's notice.
Each of these jests reached 1000 on a 'laugh meter,' an electronic apparatus connected to a studio microphone that recorded the level of audience response. An indicator was onstage in full view of those witnesses. Once in a while a joke gained only a snickering retort, registering 200 or less on the scale. The majority of puns exceeded 500, however, most of them hitting 1000. A listener's submission that was read over the air earned $10 for the sender ($5 in the earliest days). The contributor gained another $5 every time a panelist told a subsequent joke on the same topic but failed to reach 1000 on the laugh meter. Consequently a collapse of the panel would bring the listener $25, a tidy sum in those days of simple radio giveaways.
The Can You Top This? staff typically received about 6000 jokes every week from the folks at home. Screener Betty North pored over the mail before forwarding her picks to the producer, director, host and chief storyteller. Ostensibly only those gags pertaining to arson, politics and religion were considered off-limits although North got away with omitting some categories of her own: death, deformities, race and stuttering. Jokes about nationalities were fair game, however, and Peter Donald's dialects could readily convert from Italian to Irish to Jewish to whatever else seemed appropriate. North claimed she liked "fast jokes, talking stories that don't require anything visual to put them across." A quip's age was of little consequence: audiences laughed at Today's Chuckle from current newspapers just as they did a humorous tale that had been circulated for decades.
Across the show's dozen-year run Ed Ford claimed he had previously heard every joke sent in by a listener in one form or another. This triad of wits-labeled the Knights of the Clown Table-altered their stories often to fit a myriad of environments. In addition they adroitly interchanged ethnic characters, locales and other circumstances with direct bearing on a quip's environment. Sometimes enough elements were masked that listeners hardly recognized a retelling of "the same old story."
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CAN YOU TOP THIS?
For a dozen years a trio of old vaudevillians appearing on this squeaky-clean joke-telling marathon sought bigger laughs than those guffaws produced by the puns submitted by listeners.
The panel included comedians 'Senator' Ed Ford ("Good evening"), Harry Hershfield ("Howdy!") and Joe Laurie Jr. ("Hel-low"), Yarns from listeners were delivered by a contemporary comic, Peter Donald. He was renowned as a master dialectician who often chose ethnic-sounding vernacularism to gain wider acceptance of ordinary quips. Donald routinely employed an Irish brogue, a throwback to his enormously popular alter ego figure Ajax Cassidy, a permanent 1946-49 resident of "Allen's Alley" on weekly broadcasts of The Fred Allen Show.
Ward Wilson moderated Can You Top This? for most of the run. He would offer a topic on which the next round of jests hinged. He shared the hosting with Roger Bower who also produced and directed the show at varying intervals. Charles Stark was the announcer.
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