The Burns and Allen Show

About The Burns and Allen Show

265 complete radio episodes (128 hours) from 1936 to 1950, across 2 series:

• Burns and Allen: 264 episodes, 1936–1950
• The Burns and Allen Show: 1 episode

Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.

The Burns and Allen Show on the radio

CBS / NBC Radio, 1932-1950. With Gracie Allen, Bea Benaderet, Meredith Willson, Mel Blanc.

• George Burns was born Nathan Birnbaum in 1896. He met Gracie Allen in vaudeville in the early 1920s, and they married in 1926.
• At first Gracie Allen was the straight man and George Burns told the jokes. Burns noticed that her straight lines were getting the bigger laughs, so he swapped the roles.
• Burns later joked that all he had to do was say "Gracie, how's your brother?" and she talked for 38 years.
• Burns explained Gracie's secret: she was the dizziest dame in the world, but she played every line as if it made perfect sense.
• Burns wrote most of the act and played the straight man. In vaudeville, he admitted, they were a good act but never the headliners, usually billed fourth in an eight-act show.
• The team's first radio broadcast was in London, on the BBC, in 1929. Back home, they failed an NBC audition in 1930.
• Eddie Cantor gave Gracie Allen her first radio role, before the team found steady radio work of its own.
• After a spot on Rudy Vallee's Fleischmann's Yeast Hour, Burns and Allen became regulars on Guy Lombardo's CBS show on February 15, 1932.
• Their first series, with Guy Lombardo's orchestra, was The Robert Burns Panatella Show on CBS in 1932-33. Fittingly, the sponsor was a cigar, and Burns smoked 10 to 20 cigars a day for most of his life.
• Burns later shared a letter from a college fraternity complaining that his and Gracie's comedy kept interrupting the Lombardo dance music at their weekly parties.
• The stunt that made them radio stars began on January 4, 1933: Gracie's search for her missing brother.
• Gracie Allen popped up unannounced on other programs, even on rival networks, asking whether anyone had seen her brother.

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