What happens
Gracie Allen and George Burns play a mock-game of fun for fools with Tony Martin, Henry King and Ken Niles, who are sent into a silly sentence-making contest. The game leads into a dramatized tale about Pancho Villa, the Mexican bandit, with the cast playing Mexican officials and revolutionaries. Gracie, playing a president, speaks with Tony Martin's Pancho Villa and an excitable general, and the scene turns into a rapid string of mix-ups and gunfire-filled talk. The Burns and Allen show of 1936 is built around this kind of wordplay and sketches. Campbell's chicken soup is promoted between segments.
A radio studio broadcast of the Burns and Allen program, moving into a dramatized Mexican town called San Francisco, where the president has his hideout.
Characters: Gracie Allen, George Burns, Tony Martin, Henry King, Ken Niles, Pancho Villa, Manuel Lazer, General Don Ron
Listen for: The fun for fools game, and the dramatized scene in which Gracie, playing the president, is confronted by Pancho Villa.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. 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.