Extract from The Great American Broadcast

Another daily dose of "recognition humor" was provided by a talented writer-performer named Peg Lynch, the creator and star of Ethel and Albert. She started out in radio at KATE, a small station in Albert Lea, Minnesota, where she was an advertising and continuity copywriter. Bored with her routine, and inspired by Easy Aces, she decided to try writing a husband-and-wife comedy script-a decade before she got married in real life. The station, happy to have material to fill its airwaves, not only put her show on the air, but pressed her into service as an actress.

"One day I wrote about something that happened at home," she recalls, "the kind of thing that isn't funny when it happens but makes good dinner table conversation if you want to be amusing. And I got several fan letters; it all went to my head, but also went to my common sense. I realized that I didn't have to sit down and knock myself out every minute to try to think of something funny. All I had to do was look around me.

"You're going to give a party, for example, and you got a script out of who you're going to have, who doesn't get along with who, and what you're going to wear. Then you've also got the party. Something happens at the last minute something goes wrong with the food - I mean, you can get a week's script out of that."

But Lynch makes light of her considerable comic know-how. It takes a certain gift to recognize the potential humor in a situation, and understand how to build on reality with just enough exaggeration to make it funny. This was her great gift. It was only when she auditioned writers to help shoulder her workload (and read submissions that came in "over the transom") that she realized not everyone could do what she did.

"People seemed to assume because I had little throwaway lines and would write about 'nothing' that the script was about nothing, and they would write four pages of nothing, not realizing that even among those little throwaway lines there was some clue to something else that was going on. It was usually about three things that dovetailed; sort of like doing embroidery." One would-be contributor who submitted an Ethel and Albert script treatment was a young John Cheever.

Peg's success in New York came quickly. NBC considered her show, but ultimately turned it down; fortunately, an executive who had just moved to the fledgling ABC decided to pursue her. A recent arrival in wartime Manhattan, Lynch had to use a pay telephone at the corner drugstore to respond to his telegram. ABC liked the show, she was told, because the network's new owner, Life Savers magnate Edward Noble, thought soap operas were trashy, and relished the idea of having a daily series in which each show was complete in itself

For a long time, Lynch didn't regard her routine as anything out of the ordinary. "I can remember when I got to the network, in 1944, I couldn't believe that all I had to do was write a fifteen-minute show every day," she says today. Accustomed to rising early, she would approach her typewriter as early as 4:00 and set to work, usually completing her task in two hours-and almost never rewriting or editing. Lynch worked with a two-week lead time, so there were never any deadline anxieties. Her stomach tightened not during the writing process, but when it was time to go on the air: she suffered terribly from mike fright.

When she got married in 1948, in order to take time off for her honeymoon she stockpiled a bunch of shows. "They wouldn't allow me to do repeats. I was writing two a day and recording at night. We went on the Queen Mary on our honeymoon, and I slept the whole time."

After five years of daily broadcasts, and a less successful half-hour format program, Ethel and Albert was canceled in 1950, but made an immediate transition to television, first in a series of skits on the Kate Smith show, and then as a series of its own. It later made a brief reappearance on radio, and then got one final reprieve in 1958 when CBS expressed interest in a daily fifteen-minute broadcast. Because the name of the show belonged to NBC, this final series with Lynch and Alan Bunce was renamed The Couple Next Door, but it was Ethel and Albert reincarnate.

Lynch's best scripts ring out with the hilarity born of total audience identification. She knew how to take a simple, believable premise and escalate it to the level of high comedy. It's an art that has since been taken up by such columnists as Art Buchwald, Russell Baker, Erma Bombeck, and Dave Barry.

This extract has been reproduced with
kind permission of Penguin Books.

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