Fred Allen Quotes

#1. I don't mind personal insults, but when you insult the jokes that I tell you're insulting Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Burns and Allen, Trevor McGee and Molly Picon.

Milton Berle

#2. I like to think of myself as the middleman between Fred Allen and Henny Youngman.

Milton Berle

#3. An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.

Fred Allen

#4. Television is the triumph of machine over people.

Fred Allen

#5. I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.

Fred Allen

#6. He always had a chip on his shoulder that he was ready to use to kindle an argument.

Fred Allen

#7. Father Time is the make-up man responsible for the physical changes that determine the parts the average actor is to play.

Fred Allen

#8. What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.

Fred Allen

#9. If criticism had any power to harm, the skunk would be extinct by now.

Fred Allen

#10. Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.

Fred Allen

#11. I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

Fred Allen

#12. I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.

Fred Allen

#13. Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.

Fred Allen

#14. My father never raised his hand to any one of his children, except in self-defense.

Fred Allen

#15. She used to be a teacher but she has no class now.

Fred Allen

#16. A telescope will magnify a star a thousand times, but a good press agent can do even better.

Fred Allen

#17. California is a fine place to live, if you happen to be an orange.

Fred Allen

#18. Three million frogs' legs are served in Paris - daily. Nobody knows what became of the rest of the frogs.

Fred Allen

#19. The advertising world had space men in it before spacemen existed.

Fred Allen

#20. I like long walks, especially when they're taken by people who annoy me.

Fred Allen

#21. During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.

Fred Allen

#22. I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and - I can't remember what the third thing is.

Fred Allen

#23. Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.

Fred Allen

#24. The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.

Fred Allen

#25. He's so small, he's a waste of skin.

Fred Allen

#26. A psychiatrists is the next man you start talking to after you start talking to yourself.

Fred Allen

#27. A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 AM and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 PM to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.

Fred Allen

#28. The world is a grindstone and life is your nose

Fred Allen

#29. All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter.

Fred Allen

#30. The S.S. Sierra was a ten-thousand-ton vessel. Today, lifeboats bigger than the Sierra are found on the Queen Mary and other luxury liners.

Fred Allen

#31. California is a great place to live if you're an orange.

Fred Allen

#32. Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart.

Fred Allen

#33. Success is like dealing with your kid or teaching your wife to drive. Sooner or later you'll end up in the police station.

Fred Allen

#34. Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.

Fred Allen

#35. Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making.

Fred Allen

#36. With the advance of refrigeration, I hope that along with the frozen foods someday we will have frozen conversation. A person will be able to keep a frozen promise indefinitely.

Fred Allen

#37. A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done.

Fred Allen

#38. A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

Fred Allen

#39. It was once rumored that fledgling executives walked around their offices backwards so they wouldn't have to face an issue.

Fred Allen

#40. An actor's success has the life expectancy of a small boy about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match.

Fred Allen

#41. English coffee tastes like water that has been squeezed out of a wet sleeve.

Fred Allen

#42. The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.

Fred Allen

#43. Condensed milk is wonderful. I don't see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans.

Fred Allen

#44. I'm going to Boston to see my doctor. He's a very sick man.

Fred Allen

#45. A group of people who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done

Fred Allen

#46. When Jack Benny plays the violin, it sounds as though the strings are still in the cat.

Fred Allen

#47. You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.

Fred Allen

#48. He was so narrow minded that if he fell on a pin it would blind him in both eyes.

Fred Allen

#49. A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.

Fred Allen

#50. After quitting radio I was able to live on the money I saved on aspirins.

Fred Allen

#51. He has no idea what it was like to grow up in the South, where you had to hold your head down.

Fred Allen

#52. The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows the average man can see much better than he can think- Ladies' Home JournalI'd rather have two girls at seventeen than one at thirty-four

Fred Allen

#53. It is probably not love that makes the world go around, but rather those mutually supportive alliances through which partners recognize their dependence on each other for the achievement of shared and private goals.

Fred Allen

#54. I'm a little hoarse tonight. I've been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night. Things are so tough in Chicago that at Easter time, for bunnies the little kids use porcupines.

Fred Allen

#55. The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Fred Allen

#56. Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.

Fred Allen

#57. The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.

Fred Allen

#58. A comedian who starts talking to himself becomes his own audience. This is fatal.

Fred Allen

#59. I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.

Fred Allen

#60. A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.

Fred Allen

#61. An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.

Fred Allen

#62. The average vice-president is a form of executive fungus that attaches itself to a desk. On a boat this growth would be called a barnacle.

Fred Allen

#63. In show business, more showgirls are kept than promises.

Fred Allen

#64. My agent gets 10 percent of everything I get, except the blinding headaches.

Fred Allen

#65. On ships they call them barnacles; in business they attach themselves to desks and are called vice presidents.

Fred Allen

#66. Cocktail party: A gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time. The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host.

Fred Allen

#67. To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with skin wrapped around it.

Fred Allen

#68. Televisio is a vehicle that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

Fred Allen

#69. I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.

Fred Allen

#70. A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to be well-known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

Fred Allen

#71. I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

Fred Allen

#72. Radio is called a medium because it is rare that anything is well done.

Fred Allen

#73. The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.

Fred Allen

#74. My hometown was so dull that one time the tide went out and never came back.

Fred Allen

#75. Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.

Fred Allen

#76. You only live once. But if you work it right, once is enough.

Fred Allen

#77. If the grass is greener in the other fellow's yard- let him worry about cutting it.

Fred Allen

#78. Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.

Fred Allen

#79. Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission.

Fred Allen

#80. To Fred, those years seemed to pass like quickly skimming a book and then finding the ending wasn't what he expected. He wished he'd paid more attention to the story.

Sarah Addison Allen

#81. He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose.

Fred Allen

#82. Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They're afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs.

Fred Allen

#83. An income tax form is like a laundry list - either way you lose your shirt.

Fred Allen

#84. Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

Fred Allen

#85. All I know about humour is that I don't know anything about it.

Fred Allen

#86. If children could vote, Jesse Jackson would be our next president.

Fred Allen

#87. It is bad to suppress laughter. It goes back down and spreads to your hips.

Fred Allen

#88. We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.

Fred Allen

#89. There are two kinds of jokes - funny jokes and Jack Benny jokes.

Fred Allen

#90. Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.

Fred Allen

#91. He dreamed he was eating shredded wheat and woke up to find the mattress half gone.

Fred Allen

#92. My uncle is a Southern planter. He's an undertaker in Alabama.

Fred Allen

#93. Hollywood is a great place if you're an orange.

Fred Allen

#94. I play a musical instrument a little, but only for my own amazement.

Fred Allen

#95. If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.

Fred Allen

#96. Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

Fred Allen

#97. Everywhere outside New York City is Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Fred Allen

#98. I'm a huge fan of Alice Hoffman, Fred Chappell and Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

Sarah Addison Allen

#99. Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.

Fred Allen