Fred Allen

My uncle is a Southern planter. He’s an undertaker in Alabama.

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.

I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and – I can’t remember what the third thing is.

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

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

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

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

A celebrity is a person who works hard all of their life to become well known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

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

Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.

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

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

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

Television is a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.

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

An actor’s popularity is fleeting. His success has the life expectancy of a small boy who is about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match.

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

All I know about humor is that I don’t know anything about it.

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

I don’t want to own anything that won’t fit into my coffin.

What’s on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.

California is a fine place to live – if you happen to be an orange.

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.

A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I’d rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.

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.

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

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

I can’t understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

The last time I saw him he was walking down lover’s lane holding his own hand.

Television is the triumph of machine over people.

California is a great place to live if you’re an orange.

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

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

Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Committee – a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.