The front page of Creston, Iowa’s May 18, 1940, News Advertiser bore the banner headline “Belgium’s Cities Are Falling.” Its equally depressing sub-headline read: “Nazis Push to 60 Miles from Paris.” Just below these massive words, a small news item was squeezed in among the columns of devastating reports from Europe. “The nation has a new presidential candidate today,” it noted, “Gracie Allen, nominated by the Surprise Party at a convention as goofy as Gracie’s patter.” Comic relief doesn’t get much clearer than that. But Allen’s campaign ended up entailing much more than comic relief.
Gracie Allen was one of America’s most popular comedians. She and her husband, George Burns, had been headliners in vaudeville, then became radio stars, and would go on to become television stars. For those unfamiliar with what this newspaper meant by Allen’s goofy patter, here’s a sample from a broadcast in which she is telling Burns about waiting in line at a department store exchange counter for the clerk to return from lunch:
Allen: There was a lady and her husband in front of me. And I said to her, “I hope that girl comes back from lunch soon.” And she said, “So do I. I have to make an exchange for my husband; this hat’s too small.”
Burns: And you said . . .
Allen: “Why change your husband? Why not get him a larger hat?”1
In her mock campaign for president, Allen brought that same verbal chaos to a nation fearfully watching the world turn into actual and frightening chaos. Declaring that she was seeking the nomination of the Surprise Party, she delighted reporters and their readers with her views on foreign relations (“They’re all right with me, only when they come they’ve got to bring their own bedding”) and the Neutrality Bill (“If we owe it, let’s pay it”).2
The idea of running for president in a mock campaign did not originate with Allen or Burns. It began with the writers of their radio show as a running gag they could use for a few episodes in February 1940. The public loved it, so much that one syndicated columnist expressed his own qualms about comedians as clown candidates when he wrote, “Now comes Gracie Allen with a real screwball stunt which calls for her running for the presidency of the United States.” But, he had to admit, “if anybody can do the trick in good taste it will be Gracie.”3
The gag expanded as other radio stars had Allen “unexpectedly” appear during their shows to solicit their support for her presidential bid, parrying their questions and doubts, such those of Fibber McGee and Molly, who told her they’d heard rumors about Allen and the White House. “They’re not true,” she snapped, “I don’t intend to take in any roomers.”4
What began as a radio gag turned into a road-show campaign when the Union Pacific Railroad spotted an opportunity for publicity. The previous year, the railroad had partnered with Omaha, Nebraska, and Paramount Pictures to promote the film Union Pacific (dramatizing its struggles when becoming part of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad) by sponsoring a Golden Spike Days festival. Setting aside the fact that the “golden spike” that joined the eastern and western branches to create the transcontinental railroad is in Utah (specifically Middleofnowhere, Utah), the event was so successful the railroad wanted to sponsor a sequel. Representatives of the Union Pacific approached Allen about doing a whistle-stop tour with thirty-four stops for stump speeches as it traveled from Los Angles to Omaha, where a grand celebration would again take place, this one culminating with a mock convention of her Surprise Party to nominate her as its candidate.
Tempting as the offer was, Allen had qualms. “She didn’t think she could do it,” Burns recalled. “Gracie disliked making speeches, even to small groups.”5 While she may well have disliked making speeches, these would not have been speeches per se but rather comic monologues in the form of speeches. Even though she was the one who got the laughs in their act, those laughs were connected to Burns as the straight man, for his feeding her the set-ups and for the couple’s impeccable sense of mutual timing. Going solo would be risking an entirely different act from the one with which the public was familiar. To a comedian, flopping is every bit as devastating as losing an election is to a politician.
Moreover their act had never been political. Nor had either of them ever personally been much interested in politics. The closest they’d come was their patriotism. When, during the worst years of the Depression, the federal government asked them to do some routines promoting the National Recovery Act, they promptly did. One such broadcast had Burns trying to explain to Allen the benefits of this new program’s minimum-wage provision:
Burns: Look here, Gracie. This means that women will be getting men’s wages.
Allen: Don’t be silly, George. My sister Bessie has been married to three men and never got their wages.
Clearly their writers knew how to pull off political gags for Allen and, simply as a matter of craft, could turn those gags into monologues posing as mock speeches. As to her uncertainty regarding their reception, if publicity could generate large enough crowds at the stops along the way and the monologues did work, it could be a boffo bonanza.
And was it ever.
Even before the whistle-stop tour commenced, the National Women’s Press Club invited Allen to attend an annual dinner in Washington as a guest of honor along with the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt. “Mrs. Roosevelt has nothing to worry about if Gracie is elected President,” one columnist wrote regarding the invitation. “Miss Allen has already sent out a statement saying she wanted Mrs. Roosevelt to remain in the White House because George cannot write ‘My Day’” (Eleanor Roosevelt’s own syndicated column that she wrote as first lady).6 At the event Allen charmed Mrs. Roosevelt—and, as important, the women’s press corps—with remarks such as her promise that, if elected, she would change DC to AC so her clock would work.7
Meanwhile Burns and Allen’s publicity people were obtaining eight hundred signatures in Los Angeles supporting her presidential bid. While those signing undoubtedly did so to play along, not everyone was amused. Yet another syndicated columnist declared that those who signed “were really writing a sad comment on the irresponsibility of the American voter.”8 Similarly, albeit conversely, what made Allen’s campaign sad for one of the most famous of that era’s columnists, Walter Winchell, was not what it said about voters but what it said about politicians. “Gracie Allen must be heartsick,” he told his readers, “listening to some of the White House candidates—realizing that her clown candidacy will never get as many laughs as theirs.”9 Viewed either way, right off the bat there was more to her candidacy than comic relief; there was commentary. And there was commentary because her fringe candidacy resonated with, and amplified, (dis)chords barely heard in a political landscape trembling amid so many nations at war.
By the time Allen’s campaign train rolled up to its first stop in Riverside, California, on May 9, Burns estimated some three thousand people were waiting for her. Even if exaggerated it was quite a throng. Her speech there and at all the stops along the way left them laughing since, as the publicity mill kept grinding, large crowds greeted her even at the smallest towns in their scheduled stops. By the time the train reached Salt Lake City, the mayor was there to greet her for a parade in which thousands lined the streets.10 In Omaha some seventy-five thousand people had assembled for the grand parade of its second Golden Spike Days festival, with Allen in the reviewing stand alongside Mayor Dan Butler and, in front of her, network radio microphones. When the mayor told her to call him Dan, she recoiled, telling him, “Everyone knows you can’t say Dan on the radio.” She did, however, offer him the job of secretary of the interior “so we can have x-ray pictures taken together.”11
The Surprise Party nominating convention took place in Omaha’s mammoth Ak-Sar-Ben Arena, its exotic name being more corny than mystical: Nebraska spelled backward. Some ten thousand “delegates” gathered to hear Allen declare, “You are probably just as anxious as I am to find out what I stand for.” She then pounded away at her campaign platform. “I propose to extend the Civil Service to all branches of the government, because I think a little politeness goes a long way, don’t you? . . . To take care of Emergency Relief, I plan to build thousands of new gas stations. . . . But Social Progress, no. Social Progress is not one of my goals. This country is not a social-climber.”12
Allen was nominated by acclimation.
Along the way to Omaha, something more had become part of her candidacy. Increasingly she was campaigning, in her way, on behalf of women. By the time she reached Omaha she told those gathered at her convention that she was “a better man for the job than many who aren’t even a woman. . . . The reason we need a woman in the presidential chair is to pave the way for other political jobs for women, such as lady senators and lady congressmen. Anybody knows that a woman is much better than a man when it comes to introducing bills into the house.”13
Growing more comfortable in the role of mock candidate, Allen tooted women’s rights more clearly (and less comically) in her book, How to Become President, which appeared in stores right after her nomination. In the book she did not need vocal and instantaneous laughs in the way a comedian does in performance. This format enabled her to assert, “Let me tell you that women are getting very tired of running a poor second to the Forgotten Man. And with all the practice we’ve had around the house, the time is ripe for a woman to sweep the country.”14
More notable was a remark she made without a punchline: “The Constitution doesn’t say anything about ‘he’ or ‘him’; it refers only to the ‘the person to be voted for.’ And if women aren’t persons, what goes on here?” Most notable, however, was what she wrote after mentioning Eleanor Roosevelt: “Now that I think of it, have you ever considered what a great President Mrs. Roosevelt would make? It’s not just her charm and personality. She has intellect, tact, humor, a keen sense of her responsibilities to—but wait a minute! Who am I campaigning for, Mrs. Roosevelt or me?”15 While there was a punchline in this instance, it was a punch in her own nose aimed to leave them not only laughing but also thinking.
For the most part, however, How to Become President was apolitical and aimed at giving her readers a hoot. As its title suggests, she urged all Americans to consider that they too could be president, and accordingly she provided advice: “Of course, it goes without saying that every candidate must be . . . awake to the needs of the people whether they know what they need or not. You should also come from a good family, because while breeding isn’t everything, it is said to be lots of fun.”16
After making her big splash in Omaha on May 18, followed closely by her book, Burns and Allen soon returned to their apolitical radio hijinks. In mid-June one columnist asked, “Whatever did become of the Gracie Allen for President movement, anyhow?”17
The answer came two weeks later, when she announced she was withdrawing from the race and that she’d instructed her publisher to send the proceeds from her book to the Red Cross. “Fun is fun,” she told the press, “but the sacred right of franchise under the American Constitution is nothing to be trifled with. I’ve carried the joke far enough. . . . We are on the eve of selecting a president in the gravest period in our history.” She would, she said in closing, throw her party’s support to “whoever is elected.”18 A classic Gracie Allen laugh line. And simultaneously a patriotic statement.
It was also a rare moment in which Allen spoke in the voice of the highly intelligent woman who created her daffy stage character. Why, then, did she build her career in comedy on self-ridicule with lines such as “You are probably just as anxious as I am to find out what I stand for.” Here is where Allen’s “campaign” reveals its most profound significance. Successful women comics at the time of her campaign, and right on through to TV’s I Love Lucy in the 1950s, nearly all relied on self-deprecating humor (Mae West being an exception that proved the rule).19 The comic mayhem of Allen’s and Lucille Ball’s humor remained under the onstage control of their husbands. In the signature closing to Burns and Allen’s act, Burns said, “Say goodnight, Gracie.” And she immediately complied.
Scholars have engaged in a lively discussion about self-deprecating humor, particularly in regard to female comedians. Take a gander at a few of the titles from academic journals: “Self-Deprecatory Humor and the Female Comic: Self-Destruction or Comedic Construction?”; “Comedy and Femininity in Early Twentieth Century Film”; “Situation Comedy, Feminism and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy.”20 Although they have disagreed regarding self-deprecating humor, all have recognized that it contains a powerful paradox. On the one hand, one presents oneself as ridiculous; on the other hand, making a successful career by presenting oneself as ridiculous is not ridiculous.
In this regard, consider Burns’s role during Allen’s comic campaign. “In Las Vegas we rode in a long torchlight parade—they made me drive an oxcart,” he recalled. “In the parade held in Salt Lake City they made me drive a midget racing car. During the torchlight parade in Cheyenne I had to drive a stagecoach.”21 Let’s lift his modesty; no local yokel made Burns do anything. Rather, with Allen performing solo and empowered, he helped sell the act by clowning as the disempowered husband.
Most significant, however, Allen occasionally delivered lines such as this: “A platform is something a candidate stands for and the voters fall for.”22 That laugh was not a self-ridiculing punchline; that was a punch at the public. In getting that laugh, Allen took a step into the empowered realm of hurling humor at others.
Just as quickly, however, she stepped back from that realm by announcing the end of her comic campaign. As we will see, however, for another famous female comic, Roseanne Barr, it will be her starting point in 2012. For Gracie Allen in 1940, it was a goal.