Gracie Allen applies for a Drivers licence

Women drivers. Amiright? ✋

lol - I love Gracie! Thanks for sharing, OP.

Gracie Allen is the reason anyone knows who George Burns was.

Learn to spell, OP.

As a child Gracie had been badly burned when a pot of boiling water fell on her. She was left with a huge scar across her shoulder and left arm. Gracie was very sensitive about this scar and would let almost no one see it. That was why she always wore dresses with long sleeves.

Grace Allen had the ability to do “misunderstanding humor” at a level that essentially no other actor has done. George recognized Gracie’s abilities soon after meeting her and was intent on marrying her. It’s been said that it was quite a strain on Gracie to learn new lines week after week in which she had to remember how to misunderstand every line other characters said and remember the correct wording of her replies to get laughs. When the world is going to hell, it’s nice to watch a Burns & Allen Show knowing I’ll get some laughs.

You know what gives me heart? I show old episode of the Burns and Allen show to young people -and they laugh and laugh. Some even get over the fact that it's in black and white! The jokes never get old -and they never put anyone down. Gracie is always kind and supremely patient with those less-intelligent people who don't understand her.

The episode below is one of my all-time favorites. If you don't want to watch the whole thing (your loss), start around 11:00 to see what Gracie does to the poor gangster.

I love "Burns and Allen." Gracie made George! She was a riot.

To be fair, George Burns always acknowledged that Gracie made him.

Interestingly, she never appeared in public out of character, she was always "Gracie." So there's still a bit of mystery about her: what was Gracie really like?

Maybe this was funny in 1902, but it's not funny today.

You're obviously outnumbered, R10.

I've already posted once.

Burns and Allen was far ahead of its time. George Burns would break character and address the audience and they even had a surreal episode in which he physically came out of a t.v. to just do a bit out of character.

It's 2022 and people are still uploading Burns and Allen onto YouTube. They were great. Just enjoy them.

Gracie had a heart condition so they adopted. George was sometimes not a loyal spouse and Gracie knew that and just let bygones be bygones but she would sometimes use that as leverage in order to be tended to really nicely and get in on some fine jewelry and the like.

I like comedy. Good comedy is joyous. Gracie Allen never ever broke character. She was like a fine tuned machine.

What about Ronnie Burns? He was HOT!

[quote]George was sometimes not a loyal spouse and Gracie knew that

George cheated on her left and right, and EVERYONE knew it

It was said Gracie was one of the sweetest people in Hollywood with no one ever having a bad word to say about her.

I remember when she announced her retirement around 1960 (yes, I'm ancient!) and it was such a big deal because she was so beloved and everyone assumed that it would be end of George Burns. I think he did a TV show of his own then and it was a disaster. Then it took many years, after Gracie's untimely death, for him to be rediscovered and appreciated in his old age.

He wore a lot of really awful toupees as he got older but I was surprised to hear that he always wore toupees, even on Burns & Allen, but they were of a much higher quality.

R13 The first I time saw Ronnie Burns on a show, I wondered how he could have been George’s offspring. I saw the shows long before the Internet, so it took years before I found out that Ronnie (and his sister Sandra) were adopted. As a gayling, I thought Ronnie was a hottie, too.

R16 Yes, he did a show named “Wendy and Me” with Connie Stevens in the 60s, but the memory of Gracie was still strong, and no one could possibly do what she did. I think the subsequent passage of time helped George re-emerge successfully on his own without everyone thinking about Gracie being gone.

By the way, although neither George nor Jack Benny took writing credits for their radio and TV shows, they were both masters at editing comedy writing. Their efforts contributed significantly to the popularity of their shows.

Gracie & Ellie

R15 Yes, Gracie was beloved universally. Well, except maybe by her “friend” Mary Livingstone Benny. The Burnses and Bennys were social and traveling friends because of George and Jack’s friendship. George thought Mary had no talent, and Mary was jealous of Gracie’s talent. Gracie, true-to-form, never said anything about it publicly.

Ronnie on the cover of TEEN magazine.

He had 1950s BDF.

Both George and Gracie started as dancers in vaudeville. They used this number to audition for Fred Astaire for parts in his film Damsel In Distress. Astaire loved them -and the number. He asked them to teach it to him, and used it in the final film.

R22 There's a story that Gracie was worried about appearing on-screen dancing with the great Fred Astaire. Fred found out about it, and at the first dance rehearsal with George and Gracie, Fred deliberately missed a step and tripped to make Gracie more comfortable dancing next to him on-screen.

[quote]George thought Mary had no talent, and Mary was jealous of Gracie’s talent.

Apparently it was known to some that although friends, Jack Benny didn't find George Burns funny at all. On the other hand George thought Jack Benny was hilarious and a super talent. Go figure.

R18 There's a book somewhere that walks through the weekly production of Benny's radio show. Lots of work went into making that half hour. The writers put down the foundation but the finishing that made all the difference was Jack's.

And the iron-clad rule on the show was: No ad-libbing! Because that could ruin the set-up for a coming joke. Even "ad-libs" were carefully scripted.

What I love about Burns & Allen on tv was that they clearly were a middle-aged couple. They did not try to be hip, sexy, or cool, they were just themselves, a middle-aged married couple. It is kind of refreshing compared to today.

A funny story that George Burns tells about an affair he had

s for George, in spite of his many books of memoirs, the line between his act and his life was also difficult to discern- especially because the act was such an important part of his life. He could turn almost any recollection into a joke. When speaking of a brief affair he had with a starlet (he didn’t name her) in the 1950s, for example, George said, “It was easy to have an affair in Hollywood. Even Lassie had puppies.”

The affair took place after (thought certainly not because) George and Gracie had fought about a silver centerpiece- she wanted to buy it, he didn’t. After a few days, feeling tremendously guilty, George brought her the centerpiece along with a diamond ring.

According to George, Gracie never said anything about the affair until seven years later, when she was shopping with Jack Benny’s wife, Mary. They were in the silver department at Saks Fifth Avenue when Gracie said to Mary, “You know, I wish George would cheat again. I really need a new centerpiece.”

Did Betty White ever acknowledge how Gracie Allen influenced her? I feel like Betty's whole shtick post-Golden Girls was Gracie Allen.

R25 There were some goofs on the Jack Benny radio show that might not have been planned. On one of the shows, Mary said she brought her car to a mechanic, and he put it up on the "grass reek" instead of "grease rack." They ribbed for her weeks about it on subsequent shows. Finally, she argued with Jack that there was such a thing as "grass reek" and told a story about something foul spilling on the lawn, and "boy did that grass reek." The original gaff may or may not have scripted, but obviously, everything after that was. I think Mary was directed to deliberately repeat the goof for the West Coast repeat of the first show, so I guess you could say it might have been only 50% unscripted. I guess Jack and the writers already knew after the East Coast show they wanted to make it a running gag for a few shows.

Fred Allen often sent Benny into hysterics on the radio show. If Allen's ad libs were pre-written, Benny did a good job laughing hysterically at them.

The Jack Benny TV program was far less funny to me because after the first few live seasons it was filmed, and there was rarely any ad-libbing, pre-written or otherwise.

R28 That's a really good comment. I never thought about that before, but Rose Nylund's humor from misunderstanding what was being said was similar to Gracie's.

R29 Those radio scripts were really tight. The TV show moved pretty slow by comparison.

My favorite Burns and Allen episode is the one where George misplaces five dollars, and he’s also looking for his old photos to use in his memoir, and everyone thinks George has gone insane over the missing five dollars, digging through old trunks, scrapbooks, etc. It’s quite hilarious and stands up to repeated viewings.

When Gracie stopped performing , George partnered for a while with Carol Channing in nightclubs and TV appearances. Carol's ditziness was a good foil for George's comedy, but the act didn't really go over because people loved Gracie so much - they didn't want to see someone else in her place.

That's an interesting article about Ronnie Burns at r21. It surprises me that Ronnie would have been so rejected by Max Shulman for the role of Dobie Gillis as I think Ronnie was quite naturally charming and funny on Burns & Allen. If anything, I think he might not have been a good fit for Dobie because he was too sexy and not enough of a "loser" type.

R20, I love Mary Livingstone! She may not have had much talent and she was a bitch off-stage/camera, but her deadpan responses to Benny were priceless.

That's oft repeated by Burns bullshit, R27. George Burns was a womanizer who chased everything in a skirt.

R36 I'm pretty sure they used a slight variation of that joke in one of their shows.

R37, the joke on George Burns from the Burns and Allen TV show was what a bad singer he was. There were no jokes about him being a philanderer or looking at women other than Gracie.

Interesting how one faction describes Burns as a skirt chaser, while another says he and Benny had a gay relationship for decades...

Should we do a poll?

R39 No, Gracie once told Blanche that whenever George needed to apologize for something he'd buy her a particular luxury item, I forget what, maybe a fur coat. She then says she hopes George does it again. Blanche asks why and Gracie explains that of course she needs another coat. Or something close to that.

R35 I too thought Mary Livingstone’s delivery of sarcastic lines to Jack was very funny. Jack said that Mary was a good arbiter of whether comedy material was funny, which is high praise considering how good Jack was at it.

The public was totally unaware of George's philandering. It was NEVER joked about on air or over the radio waves.

[quote]I remember that when Biden announced that he was going to run, he said that it would only be for one term.

He most definitely DID NOT say that, R8.

Has anyone ever seen the film The Gracie Allen Murder Case where she teams up with Philo Vance to solve a murder? I really want to see it but it doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere.

Also, according to Wikipedia Philo Vance might have been written as gay in the books. I've never read one.

R44 You might check archive.org. The author of the Philo Vance mysteries actually wrote a book that included George and Gracie's characters. The book was the basis for the movie, but George decided to not appear in the film.

...

^ Give George Burns his own thread so I can ignore it.

Thanks, R45 and R49, I had forgotten about archive.org.

"George sucked on those big cigars like they were....."

Finish that sentence as Gracie Allen would.

My grandmother can be very Gracie Allen-like, some people suspect dementia but I'm like no it's nothing new.

As another great admirer of Gracie's I hate to admit this, but I didn't enjoy her in Mr & Mrs North. I love lighthearted mysteries like The Thin Man series, so that should have been right up my alley. I can't articulate what I disliked about her performance. Maybe as others have said upthread I just didn't like seeing her without George.

Gracie and I share a birthday, July 26