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.
To purchase a
copy of
The Great American Broadcast
by Leonard Maltin please
click here.
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