was always on his comedy, which was heavy on wordplay. One recurring bit was to read a purported "letter from home" with material such as the following: "The man next door has bought pigs; we got wind of it this morning. Your father had a terrible fight with him about it, and the man hit your father with a rock in the left ear. It didn't bother your father; he is stone deaf in that ear. The policeman who took him away said that he would get his hearing in the morning. The other man, the one who owns the pigs, was arrested for fragrancy... There is no other news except that our oil stove exploded yesterday and blew your father and me out into the backyard. It is the first time we have been out together for twenty years. Allen's wit was at times not intended for the vaudeville audience but rather for other professionals in show business. After one of his appearances failed one day, Allen made the best of it by circulating an obituary of his act on black-bordered funeral stationery. He also mailed vials of his supposed "flop sweat" to newspapers as part of his comic self-promotion. In 1921 Fred Allen and Nora Bayes toured with the company of Lew Fields. Their musical director was a nineteen-year-old Richard Rodgers. Many years later, when he and Oscar Hammerstein II appeared as mystery guests on What's My Line?, Rodgers recalled Allen's act, sitting on the edge of the stage, his legs dangling down, playing a banjo while telling jokes. Broadway Allen temporarily left vaudeville, moving to work in such Shubert Brothers stage productions as The Passing Show in 1922. The show played well in its runup to Broadway but lasted only ten weeks at the Winter Garden Theatre. Portland Hoffa, who was in the chorus of the show, was eventually to marry Allen. He received good notices for his comic work in several of the productions, particularly Vogues and Greenwich Village Follies, and continued to develop his comic writing, even writing a column for Variety called "Near Fun." A salary dispute ended the column; Allen wanted only $60 a week to give up his theater work to become a full-time columnist, but his editor tried a sleight-of-hand based on the paper's ad rates to deny him. He spent his summer in Boston, honed his comic and writing skills