Radio program
AKA The Edgar Bergen - Charlie McCarthy Show, after its stars. Most popular radio show based on a ventriloquist act.
W. C. Fields was a regular the first five months of the program, and started an on-the-air
feud with McCarthy, threatening to
carve him into a
venetian blind. McCarthy's reply: "That makes me
shudder."
W.C. Fields: "Is it true that your father was a gait-legged table?"
McCarthy: "If it is, your father was under it."W.C. Fields: "I love children. I can remember when, with my own little unsteady legs, I toddled from room to room."
Charlie: "When was that? Last night?"
Guest stars on the show included
Mae West (whose sexual innuendo so shocked listeners that the network banned her for 15 years),
Spencer Tracy,
Dorothy Lamour,
Abbott and Costello,
Gene Tierney,
Judy Garland,
Betty Hutton, and frequent appearances by
Don Ameche. Other Bergen characters included country bumpkin Mortimer Snerd (introduced
1939) and spinster Effie Klinker (introduced
1944). The show ran from May
1937 through December 1939 as a one hour program on the
NBC-Red network and from January
1940 until December
1948 as a 30 minute show with the name
The Chase And Sanborn Program. In 1949, Bergen moved the show to
CBS, and got
Coca-Cola as a
sponsor.