Aces Are High in Radio Comedy

Jane and Goodman Ace. WTMJ’s “EasyAces,” give their script a once over before the broadcast

The Milwaukee Journal – Apr 23, 1939

Aces Are High in Radio Comedy

WHAT makes a radio program click?

Goodman Ace is a good one to ask. His “Easy Aces” have been grand slamming across the networks for almost a decade, setting a high standard for comedy serials of family life.

If you want to go into the subject with a scholarly approach, to get the viewpoint of writer, producer and actor. Mr. Ace is still your man. He’s all three in his Easy Aces program, broadcast Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 6:30 p. m. over WTMJ.

But to get back to the question: What makes a radio program click? Well, let’s go behind those cleverly humorous situations on the Easy Aces show and see.

Mr. Ace is one of those conscientious comedians who keeps an ear close to listener taste and reaction. In this connection, he has arrived at some interesting conclusions.

Listeners, he believes, are more concerned with plot or situation than brilliant dialog or deft characterization.

“THE radio audience, as far as my show is concerned,” says Mr.  Ace, “wants stories dragged out to the bitter finish. You can’t be to sparing with details. I would just as soon make plot incidental to dialog, byt my public want story first.”

And that puts a burden on the bespectacled star. Thinking up plots is no cinch. Once in a while he can toss a plot off in less than two hours, but more often he labors over it for almost a whole day.

But there are compensations in creating and drawing out plots. Swell situations crop up that you might never have thought about.

It’s much easier to think up malapropos than plots. The twisted and misused phrases used by Jane Ace in her role of a dumb housewife are Mr. Ace’s particular pride. They are quoted often and many have become national catchphrases, as “Always play the first car on the right,” and “Don’t finesse, it makes me nervous.”

Some recent malapropos uttered by Jane are:

“Time wounds all heels.”

“I always say a wife should take the bitter with the better.”

“Go hire a kite.”

“You’re getting my ghost.”

“No use crying over spoiled milk.”

Goodman Ace keeps a record of his malapropos creations in a little black notebook for handy reference. He’s so mala-prop minded that when he was searching for the book for this interviewer, he mutered inadvertently that he ought to be a regular Shylock Holmes.

UNLIKE most comedians, Ace refuses to “punch” or call attention to a gag. There are no deliberate pauses for a funny line to register. These just like witty dialog, he considers incidental to the story.

Ace tries to have his story lap over from Monday to Wednesday and from Wednesday to Friday. He’s not so much concerned with a “hangover” from Friday to the following Monday because he figures that listeners might be inclined to forget the sequence.

Those “hangover” situations, incidentally, often give him a headache. He will carry over a situation from one script to the next and then have a terrible time going on from where he left off.

It’s hard enough to think up a plot, but it’s tougher still to work up a plot that might be developed over a period of weeks and then drop it because it doesn’t quite get off. The decision to drop a story idea comes after getting the reaction of various people.

In producing a show, Mr. Ace doesn’t like to “clutter it up” with sound effects. Using a stage analogy, he would prefer to have a single tree denote a forest. One typewriter is all that is necessary to give the illusion of a newspaper city room on the Easy Aces program.

There is just one rehearsal for the “Easy Aces.” To read the script over more than once kills the spark of spontaneity, he believes.

The “Easy Aces” point out no morals in their broadcasts. Their aim is to be amusing and entertaining and homey “but not too homey.”

Jane and Goodman Ace are unique among radio entertainers in so far as their relation with their sponsors are concerned. In all the years the couple have been broadcasting, they have never met the folks who pay the checks.