Burns and Allen
Encyclopedia
Burns and Allen, an American
comedy duo
consisting of George Burns
and his wife, Gracie Allen
, worked together as a comedy team in vaudeville
, film
s, radio
and television
and achieved great success over four decades.
, continued in small town vaudeville theaters, married in Cleveland on January 7, 1926, and moved up a notch when they signed with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum
circuit in 1927.
Burns wrote most of the material and played the straight man
. Allen played a silly, addle-headed woman, a role often attributed to the "Dumb Dora
" stereotype common in early 20th-century vaudeville comedy. Early on, the team had played the opposite roles until they noticed that the audience was laughing at Gracie's straight lines, so they made the change. In later years, each attributed their success to the other.
Acts" captured vaudeville headliners of the 1920s on film.
Burns and Allen earned a reputation as a reliable "disappointment act" (someone who could fill in for a sick or otherwise absent performer on a moment's notice). So it went with their film debut. They were last-minute replacements for another act (Fred Allen
) and ran through their patter-and-song routine in Lambchops (1929). After a recent restoration, this film was re-released theatrically.
Paramount Pictures
used its East Coast studio to film New York–based stage and vaudeville stars. Eddie Cantor
, Fred Allen
, Ethel Merman
and Smith and Dale were among the top acts seen in Paramount shorts. Burns and Allen joined the Paramount roster in 1930 and made a string of one-reel comedies through 1933, usually written by Burns and featuring future Hollywood character actors such as Barton MacLane
and Chester Clute.
In 1932, Paramount produced an all-star musical comedy, The Big Broadcast
, featuring the nation's hottest radio personalities. Burns and Allen were recruited, and made such an impression that they continued to make guest appearances in Paramount features through 1937. Most of these used the Big Broadcast formula of an all-star comedy cast: International House
, Six of a Kind, etc. The team starred in a pair of low-budget features, Here Comes Cookie and Love in Bloom.
At RKO Radio Pictures, Fred Astaire
was preparing his first musical feature without Ginger Rogers
, and comedian Charley Chase
was set to appear in a comic sidekick role. When illness prevented Chase from doing the movie, Burns and Allen substituted. The resulting film, A Damsel in Distress
(1937), shows George and Gracie dancing just as expertly as Astaire. This movie led Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
to cast George and Gracie in its Eleanor Powell
musical, Honolulu
(1939). Gracie made a few isolated film appearances on her own, but the team did not return to the cameras until TV beckoned in 1950.
In 1929 they made their first radio appearance in London on the BBC. Back in America, they failed at a 1930 NBC audition. After a solo appearance by Gracie on Eddie Cantor
's radio show, they were heard together on Rudy Vallee
's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour
and on February 15, 1932 they became regulars on The Guy Lombardo Show on CBS. When Lombardo switched to NBC, Burns and Allen took over his CBS spot with The Adventures of Gracie beginning September 19, 1934. Along the way, the duo launched the temporary running gag that made them near-irrevocable radio stars: the famous hunt for Gracie's "lost brother," which began on January 4, 1933 and eventually became a cross-network phenomenon---Gracie was also liable to turn up on other shows (especially those produced by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, which produced the Burns & Allen series) looking for her brother. Bad publicity after a bid by NBC to squelch the stunt---and an accidental mention by Rudy Vallee
on his Fleischmann's Hour---helped the stunt continue, according to radio historian John Dunning's On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, which also mentioned that Gracie's real brother, a "publicity-shy accountant" living in San Francisco, went into hiding until the gag ran its course. Burns and Allen followed this up with another stunt: "Gracie Allen for President." During the election year of 1940, Gracie represented the fictitious Surprise Party and advocated nonsense as part of her platform. The "campaign" was successful enough for Gracie to actually receive write-in votes on election day.
The title of their top-rated show changed to The Burns and Allen Show on September 26, 1936. One successful episode, Grandpa's 92nd Birthday, aired on 8th July, 1940. In 1941 they moved from comedy patter into a successful sitcom format, continuing with shows on NBC and CBS until May 17, 1950. As in the early days of radio, the sponsor's name became the show title, such as Maxwell House Coffee Time (1945–49).
Burns and Allen had several regulars on radio, including Toby Reed, Gale Gordon
, Bea Benaderet
, Gracie's real-life friend Mary "Bubbles" Kelly, Ray Noble
, singers Jimmy Cash and Tony Martin
and actor/writer/director Elliott Lewis
. The Sportsmen Quartet (appearing as "The Swantet" during the years the show was sponsored by Swan Soap) supplied songs and occasionally backed up Cash. Meredith Willson
, Artie Shaw
and announcers Bill Goodwin
and Harry Von Zell
, who were usually made a part of the evening's doings, often as additional comic foils for the duo. For a long time they continued their "flirtation act" with Burns as Allen's most persistent suitor. Their real-life marriage was not written into the show until 1941, when Burns noticed that their ratings were slowly but steadily slipping. He realized that he and Gracie "were too old for our jokes," and revised the format to include husband-and-wife characters in a situation-comedy setting. Burns's assessment was correct, and the Burns and Allen program went on to new heights.
Recordings of 176 episodes of the radio shows circulate on the web, CDs and DVDs---including all installments of the "Gracie for President" routine and some of the "lost brother" episodes.
When The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, aka The Burns and Allen Show, began on CBS television October 12, 1950, it was an immediate success. The show was originally live before a studio audience. Ever the businessman, Burns realized it would be more efficient to do the series on film (beginning in the fall of 1952); the half-hour episodes could then be syndicated. From that point on, the show was shot without a live audience present, however, each installment would be screened before an audience to provide live responses prior to the episodes being broadcast. With 291 episodes, the show had a long network run through 1958 and continued in syndicated reruns for years. It started being broadcast on Antenna TV (Los Angeles affiliate: KTLA Digital Channel 5.2) in the Spring of 2011, usually airing late on Sunday through Thursday nights.
One TV running gag involved a closet full of hats belonging to various visitors to the Burns household; guests would slip out the door unnoticed, leaving their hats behind, rather than face another round with Gracie. The format had George watching all the action (standing outside the proscenium
arch in early live episodes; watching the show on TV in his study towards the end of the series) and breaking the fourth wall by commenting upon it to the viewers. Another running gag was George's weekly "firing" of announcer Harry Von Zell after he turned up aiding, abetting or otherwise not stopping the mayhem prompted by Gracie's illogical logic.
The couple's son Ronnie became a near-regular on their television show, playing himself but cast as a young drama student who tended to look askance at his parents' comedy style. However, he made a guest appearance on the October 18, 1954 episode ("Gracie Gives Wedding in Payment of a Favor") playing a character named "Jim Goodwin" prior to his debut as a regular, and was formally introduced to the audience at the episode's conclusion. Their adopted daughter Sandy was somewhat shy and not too fond of show business. Sandy declined efforts to get her on the show as a regular cast member, though she appeared in a few episodes as a classmate of Ronnie. In one episode, Ronnie's drama class puts on a vaudeville show to raise funds for the school. Gracie hosts the show while Ronnie and Sandy deliver an impersonation of their famous parents along with one of their classic routines. Since Ronnie played himself, Gracie closed the segment with a wisecrack: "The boy was produced by Burns and Allen."
In later seasons, George and Gracie would often reappear after the end of the episode, eventually before a curtain decorated with the names and locations of the various theaters they headlined in their vaudeville days, performing one of their patented "double routines," often discussing one of Gracie's fictional relatives ("Death Valley Allen", the prospector; "Florence Allen", the nurse; "Casey Allen", the railroad man, and so on).
Burns would always end the show with "Say goodnight, Gracie," to which Allen simply replied "Goodnight." She never said "Goodnight, Gracie," as legend has it. Burns was once asked this question and said it would've been a funny line. Asked why he didn't do it, Burns replied, "Incredibly enough, no one ever thought of it."
From October 1950 until March, 1953, the series aired on Thursday nights on CBS.(During its first two years on television, it aired every other Thursday night.) In March 1953, "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show" joined I Love Lucy
as part of the CBS Monday night prime-time line-up. As a result, the show entered the top 30 television program
s in the Nielsen ratings
ranking at #20. For the 1954-1955 season, it ranked #26 and for both the 1955-1956 and 1956-1957 seasons, it was #28. With "I Love Lucy" ending its six-year run on CBS in the spring of 1957, the television network
wanted to renew the Burns and Allen series, but by this time, Gracie had grown tired of the grind. Nevertheless, George committed both of them for another year, which would be their eighth on television.
Gracie retired after the 1957–1958 season. Burns attempted to continue the show with the same supporting cast but without Gracie. The George Burns Show lasted only one season (1958–59); Burns realized that viewers kept expecting Gracie to enter the scene at any time.
After trying another sitcom, Wendy and Me
, Burns turned to nightclub work as a solo performer, while Gracie enjoyed a comfortable retirement; she died of heart failure in 1964. Burns continued to work as a singing comedian and enjoyed an Oscar-winning movie resurgence at the age of 80 with The Sunshine Boys
. Then director Carl Reiner
asked him to play the title role in Larry Gelbart
's comedy, Oh, God!
, which was so successful it spawned two sequels. He also co-starred with Art Carney
and Lee Strasberg
as a businesslike bank robber in the Martin Brest
senior-citizen caper comedy Going in Style
.
George Burns died in 1996 at the age of 100.
The kinescope
recordings of the live telecasts from the 1950–1952 seasons of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show have fallen into the public domain
; they are available on "dollar DVD" collections and have rerun as part of America One
's public domain sitcom rotation and on public television stations.
In 1997, "Columbia Pictures Doing Burns and Allen Story" was ranked #56 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
comedy duo
Double act
A double act, also known as a comedy duo, is a comic pairing in which humor is derived from the uneven relationship between two partners, usually of the same gender, age, ethnic origin and profession, but drastically different personalities or behavior...
consisting of George Burns
George Burns
George Burns , born Nathan Birnbaum, was an American comedian, actor, and writer.He was one of the few entertainers whose career successfully spanned vaudeville, film, radio, television and movies, with and without his wife, Gracie Allen. His arched eyebrow and cigar smoke punctuation became...
and his wife, Gracie Allen
Gracie Allen
Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen , known as Gracie Allen, was an American comedian who became internationally famous as the zany partner and comic foil of husband George Burns...
, worked together as a comedy team in vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
, film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
s, radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
and television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
and achieved great success over four decades.
Vaudeville
Burns and Allen met in 1922 and first performed together at the Hill Street Theatre in Newark, New JerseyNewark, New Jersey
Newark is the largest city in the American state of New Jersey, and the seat of Essex County. As of the 2010 United States Census, Newark had a population of 277,140, maintaining its status as the largest municipality in New Jersey. It is the 68th largest city in the U.S...
, continued in small town vaudeville theaters, married in Cleveland on January 7, 1926, and moved up a notch when they signed with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum
Keith-Albee-Orpheum
The Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation was the owner of a chain of vaudeville and motion picture theatres. It was formed by the merger of the holdings of Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee II and Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit, Inc..-History:...
circuit in 1927.
Burns wrote most of the material and played the straight man
Double act
A double act, also known as a comedy duo, is a comic pairing in which humor is derived from the uneven relationship between two partners, usually of the same gender, age, ethnic origin and profession, but drastically different personalities or behavior...
. Allen played a silly, addle-headed woman, a role often attributed to the "Dumb Dora
Dumb Dora
A dumb Dora is considered to be 1920s American slang for a completely idiotic woman.The phrase was made popular from the vaudeville acts of George Burns and Gracie Allen ; eventually becoming a name of a classic comic strip by King Features Syndicate...
" stereotype common in early 20th-century vaudeville comedy. Early on, the team had played the opposite roles until they noticed that the audience was laughing at Gracie's straight lines, so they made the change. In later years, each attributed their success to the other.
Motion pictures
In the early days of talking pictures, the studios eagerly hired actors who knew how to deliver dialogue or songs. The most prolific of these studios was Warner Brothers. whose "VitaphoneVitaphone
Vitaphone was a sound film process used on feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects produced by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1930. Vitaphone was the last, but most successful, of the sound-on-disc processes...
Acts" captured vaudeville headliners of the 1920s on film.
Burns and Allen earned a reputation as a reliable "disappointment act" (someone who could fill in for a sick or otherwise absent performer on a moment's notice). So it went with their film debut. They were last-minute replacements for another act (Fred Allen
Fred Allen
Fred Allen was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the so-called classic era of American radio.His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but it...
) and ran through their patter-and-song routine in Lambchops (1929). After a recent restoration, this film was re-released theatrically.
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...
used its East Coast studio to film New York–based stage and vaudeville stars. Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor was an American "illustrated song" performer, comedian, dancer, singer, actor and songwriter...
, Fred Allen
Fred Allen
Fred Allen was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the so-called classic era of American radio.His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but it...
, Ethel Merman
Ethel Merman
Ethel Merman was an American actress and singer. Known primarily for her powerful voice and roles in musical theatre, she has been called "the undisputed First Lady of the musical comedy stage." Among the many standards introduced by Merman in Broadway musicals are "I Got Rhythm", "Everything's...
and Smith and Dale were among the top acts seen in Paramount shorts. Burns and Allen joined the Paramount roster in 1930 and made a string of one-reel comedies through 1933, usually written by Burns and featuring future Hollywood character actors such as Barton MacLane
Barton MacLane
Barton MacLane was an American actor, playwright, and screenwriter. Although he has appeared in many classic films from the 1930s through the 1960s, he was known for his role as Gen...
and Chester Clute.
In 1932, Paramount produced an all-star musical comedy, The Big Broadcast
The Big Broadcast
The Big Broadcast is a musical comedy film produced by Paramount Pictures, directed by Frank Tuttle, and starring Bing Crosby, Stuart Erwin, and Leila Hyams, with George Burns and Gracie Allen in supporting roles...
, featuring the nation's hottest radio personalities. Burns and Allen were recruited, and made such an impression that they continued to make guest appearances in Paramount features through 1937. Most of these used the Big Broadcast formula of an all-star comedy cast: International House
International House (1933 film)
International House is a comedy film, directed by A. Edward Sutherland and released by Paramount Pictures. The tagline of the film was "the Grand Hotel of comedy".-Actors:*Peggy Hopkins Joyce as herself*W. C. Fields as Prof. Henry R...
, Six of a Kind, etc. The team starred in a pair of low-budget features, Here Comes Cookie and Love in Bloom.
At RKO Radio Pictures, Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire was an American film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor. His stage and subsequent film career spanned a total of 76 years, during which he made 31 musical films. He was named the fifth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute...
was preparing his first musical feature without Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century....
, and comedian Charley Chase
Charley Chase
Charley Chase was an American comedian, actor, screenwriter and film director, best known for his work in Hal Roach short film comedies...
was set to appear in a comic sidekick role. When illness prevented Chase from doing the movie, Burns and Allen substituted. The resulting film, A Damsel in Distress
A Damsel in Distress (film)
A Damsel in Distress is a 1937 English-themed Hollywood musical comedy film starring Fred Astaire, Joan Fontaine, George Burns, and Gracie Allen. With a screenplay by P. G...
(1937), shows George and Gracie dancing just as expertly as Astaire. This movie led Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of films and television programs. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer...
to cast George and Gracie in its Eleanor Powell
Eleanor Powell
Eleanor Torrey Powell was an American film actress and dancer of the 1930s and 1940s, known for her exuberant solo tap dancing.-Early life:...
musical, Honolulu
Honolulu (1939 film)
Honolulu is an American musical film that was released by MGM in 1939. The film stars dancer Eleanor Powell and Robert Young, and was directed by Edward Buzzell....
(1939). Gracie made a few isolated film appearances on her own, but the team did not return to the cameras until TV beckoned in 1950.
Radio
Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor was an American "illustrated song" performer, comedian, dancer, singer, actor and songwriter...
's radio show, they were heard together on Rudy Vallee
Rudy Vallée
Rudy Vallée was an American singer, actor, bandleader, and entertainer.-Early life:Born Hubert Prior Vallée in Island Pond, Vermont, the son of Charles Alphonse and Catherine Lynch Vallée...
's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour
The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour
The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour was a pioneering musical variety radio program broadcast on NBC from 1929 to 1936, when it became The Royal Gelatin Hour, continuing until 1939...
and on February 15, 1932 they became regulars on The Guy Lombardo Show on CBS. When Lombardo switched to NBC, Burns and Allen took over his CBS spot with The Adventures of Gracie beginning September 19, 1934. Along the way, the duo launched the temporary running gag that made them near-irrevocable radio stars: the famous hunt for Gracie's "lost brother," which began on January 4, 1933 and eventually became a cross-network phenomenon---Gracie was also liable to turn up on other shows (especially those produced by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, which produced the Burns & Allen series) looking for her brother. Bad publicity after a bid by NBC to squelch the stunt---and an accidental mention by Rudy Vallee
Rudy Vallée
Rudy Vallée was an American singer, actor, bandleader, and entertainer.-Early life:Born Hubert Prior Vallée in Island Pond, Vermont, the son of Charles Alphonse and Catherine Lynch Vallée...
on his Fleischmann's Hour---helped the stunt continue, according to radio historian John Dunning's On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, which also mentioned that Gracie's real brother, a "publicity-shy accountant" living in San Francisco, went into hiding until the gag ran its course. Burns and Allen followed this up with another stunt: "Gracie Allen for President." During the election year of 1940, Gracie represented the fictitious Surprise Party and advocated nonsense as part of her platform. The "campaign" was successful enough for Gracie to actually receive write-in votes on election day.
The title of their top-rated show changed to The Burns and Allen Show on September 26, 1936. One successful episode, Grandpa's 92nd Birthday, aired on 8th July, 1940. In 1941 they moved from comedy patter into a successful sitcom format, continuing with shows on NBC and CBS until May 17, 1950. As in the early days of radio, the sponsor's name became the show title, such as Maxwell House Coffee Time (1945–49).
Burns and Allen had several regulars on radio, including Toby Reed, Gale Gordon
Gale Gordon
Gale Gordon was an American character actor perhaps best remembered as Lucille Ball's longtime television foil—and particularly as cantankerously combustible, tightfisted bank executive Theodore J. Mooney, on Ball's second television situation comedy, The Lucy Show...
, Bea Benaderet
Bea Benaderet
Bea Benaderet was an American actress born in New York City and raised in San Francisco, California. She is best remembered for her wide variety of television work, which included a starring role in the 1960s television series Petticoat Junction and Green Acres as Shady Rest Hotel owner Kate...
, Gracie's real-life friend Mary "Bubbles" Kelly, Ray Noble
Ray Noble (musician)
Ray Noble was an English bandleader, composer, arranger and actor. Noble studied music at the Royal Academy of Music and became leader of the HMV Records studio band in 1929. The band, known as the New Mayfair Dance Orchestra, featured members of many of the top hotel orchestras of the day...
, singers Jimmy Cash and Tony Martin
Tony Martin (entertainer)
Tony Martin is an American actor and singer.-Career:Tony Martin was born on Christmas Day, 1913 as Alvin Morris in San Francisco, California to Jewish immigrant parents. He received a saxophone as a gift from his grandmother at the age of ten. In his grammar school glee club, he became an...
and actor/writer/director Elliott Lewis
Elliott Lewis
Sir Neil Elliott Lewis, KCMG , Australian politician, was Premier of Tasmania on three occasions. He was also a member of the first Australian federal ministry, led by Edmund Barton....
. The Sportsmen Quartet (appearing as "The Swantet" during the years the show was sponsored by Swan Soap) supplied songs and occasionally backed up Cash. Meredith Willson
Meredith Willson
Robert Meredith Willson was an American composer, songwriter, conductor and playwright, best known for writing the book, music and lyrics for the hit Broadway musical The Music Man...
, Artie Shaw
Artie Shaw
Arthur Jacob Arshawsky , better known as Artie Shaw, was an American jazz clarinetist, composer, and bandleader. He was also the author of both fiction and non-fiction writings....
and announcers Bill Goodwin
Bill Goodwin
Bill Goodwin was for many years the announcer and regular character of the Burns and Allen radio program, and subsequently The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on television from 1950-51...
and Harry Von Zell
Harry von Zell
Harry von Zell , born in Indianapolis, made his mark as an announcer of radio programs and an actor in films and television shows....
, who were usually made a part of the evening's doings, often as additional comic foils for the duo. For a long time they continued their "flirtation act" with Burns as Allen's most persistent suitor. Their real-life marriage was not written into the show until 1941, when Burns noticed that their ratings were slowly but steadily slipping. He realized that he and Gracie "were too old for our jokes," and revised the format to include husband-and-wife characters in a situation-comedy setting. Burns's assessment was correct, and the Burns and Allen program went on to new heights.
Recordings of 176 episodes of the radio shows circulate on the web, CDs and DVDs---including all installments of the "Gracie for President" routine and some of the "lost brother" episodes.
Television
One TV running gag involved a closet full of hats belonging to various visitors to the Burns household; guests would slip out the door unnoticed, leaving their hats behind, rather than face another round with Gracie. The format had George watching all the action (standing outside the proscenium
Proscenium
A proscenium theatre is a theatre space whose primary feature is a large frame or arch , which is located at or near the front of the stage...
arch in early live episodes; watching the show on TV in his study towards the end of the series) and breaking the fourth wall by commenting upon it to the viewers. Another running gag was George's weekly "firing" of announcer Harry Von Zell after he turned up aiding, abetting or otherwise not stopping the mayhem prompted by Gracie's illogical logic.
The couple's son Ronnie became a near-regular on their television show, playing himself but cast as a young drama student who tended to look askance at his parents' comedy style. However, he made a guest appearance on the October 18, 1954 episode ("Gracie Gives Wedding in Payment of a Favor") playing a character named "Jim Goodwin" prior to his debut as a regular, and was formally introduced to the audience at the episode's conclusion. Their adopted daughter Sandy was somewhat shy and not too fond of show business. Sandy declined efforts to get her on the show as a regular cast member, though she appeared in a few episodes as a classmate of Ronnie. In one episode, Ronnie's drama class puts on a vaudeville show to raise funds for the school. Gracie hosts the show while Ronnie and Sandy deliver an impersonation of their famous parents along with one of their classic routines. Since Ronnie played himself, Gracie closed the segment with a wisecrack: "The boy was produced by Burns and Allen."
In later seasons, George and Gracie would often reappear after the end of the episode, eventually before a curtain decorated with the names and locations of the various theaters they headlined in their vaudeville days, performing one of their patented "double routines," often discussing one of Gracie's fictional relatives ("Death Valley Allen", the prospector; "Florence Allen", the nurse; "Casey Allen", the railroad man, and so on).
Burns would always end the show with "Say goodnight, Gracie," to which Allen simply replied "Goodnight." She never said "Goodnight, Gracie," as legend has it. Burns was once asked this question and said it would've been a funny line. Asked why he didn't do it, Burns replied, "Incredibly enough, no one ever thought of it."
From October 1950 until March, 1953, the series aired on Thursday nights on CBS.(During its first two years on television, it aired every other Thursday night.) In March 1953, "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show" joined I Love Lucy
I Love Lucy
I Love Lucy is an American television sitcom starring Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance, and William Frawley. The black-and-white series originally ran from October 15, 1951, to May 6, 1957, on the Columbia Broadcasting System...
as part of the CBS Monday night prime-time line-up. As a result, the show entered the top 30 television program
Television program
A television program , also called television show, is a segment of content which is intended to be broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series...
s in the Nielsen ratings
Nielsen Ratings
Nielsen ratings are the audience measurement systems developed by Nielsen Media Research, in an effort to determine the audience size and composition of television programming in the United States...
ranking at #20. For the 1954-1955 season, it ranked #26 and for both the 1955-1956 and 1956-1957 seasons, it was #28. With "I Love Lucy" ending its six-year run on CBS in the spring of 1957, the television network
Television network
A television network is a telecommunications network for distribution of television program content, whereby a central operation provides programming to many television stations or pay TV providers. Until the mid-1980s, television programming in most countries of the world was dominated by a small...
wanted to renew the Burns and Allen series, but by this time, Gracie had grown tired of the grind. Nevertheless, George committed both of them for another year, which would be their eighth on television.
Gracie retired after the 1957–1958 season. Burns attempted to continue the show with the same supporting cast but without Gracie. The George Burns Show lasted only one season (1958–59); Burns realized that viewers kept expecting Gracie to enter the scene at any time.
After trying another sitcom, Wendy and Me
Wendy and Me
Wendy and Me is an American sitcom that aired on ABC during the 1964–1965 television season, primarily sponsored by Consolidated Cigar's "El Producto"...
, Burns turned to nightclub work as a solo performer, while Gracie enjoyed a comfortable retirement; she died of heart failure in 1964. Burns continued to work as a singing comedian and enjoyed an Oscar-winning movie resurgence at the age of 80 with The Sunshine Boys
The Sunshine Boys
The Sunshine Boys is a play by Neil Simon that was produced on Broadway in 1972 and later adapted for film and television.-Plot:The play focuses on aging Al Lewis and Willy Clark, a one-time vaudevillian team known as "Lewis and Clark" who, over the course of forty-odd years, not only grew to hate...
. Then director Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner is an American actor, film director, producer, writer and comedian. He has won nine Emmy Awards and one Grammy Award during this career...
asked him to play the title role in Larry Gelbart
Larry Gelbart
Larry Simon Gelbart was an American television writer, playwright, screenwriter and author.-Early life:...
's comedy, Oh, God!
Oh, God!
Oh, God! is a 1977 comedy film starring George Burns and John Denver. Based on a novel by Avery Corman, the film was directed by Carl Reiner from a screenplay written by Larry Gelbart...
, which was so successful it spawned two sequels. He also co-starred with Art Carney
Art Carney
Arthur William Matthew “Art” Carney was an American actor in film, stage, television and radio. He is best known for playing Ed Norton, opposite Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden in the situation comedy The Honeymooners....
and Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg was an American actor, director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective"...
as a businesslike bank robber in the Martin Brest
Martin Brest
Martin Brest is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer.-Education:He was born in a Jewish family in the Bronx, New York....
senior-citizen caper comedy Going in Style
Going in Style
Going in Style is a 1979 caper film written and directed by Martin Brest. It stars George Burns, Art Carney, Lee Strasberg and Charles Hallahan. The casino scenes were shot at the Aladdin Hotel & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip.- Plot synopsis :...
.
George Burns died in 1996 at the age of 100.
The kinescope
Kinescope
Kinescope , shortened to kine , also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program made by filming the picture from a video monitor...
recordings of the live telecasts from the 1950–1952 seasons of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show have fallen into the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
; they are available on "dollar DVD" collections and have rerun as part of America One
America One
America One is an over-the-air television network in the United States. The network serves over 170 LPTV, Class A, Full Power, Cable and Satellite affiliate stations...
's public domain sitcom rotation and on public television stations.
In 1997, "Columbia Pictures Doing Burns and Allen Story" was ranked #56 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.