Easy Aces - "I Am His Awfully-wedded Wife"

"I Am His Awfully-wedded Wife"

That and almost everything else could be forgotten amidst Jane Ace's linguistic mayhem, much of it provided by her wry husband's scripts and enough improvised by her.(Mary Hunter's real laughter, at Jane's malaprops or Ace's arch barbs, was practically the show's laugh track, years before anyone ever thought of using canned laughter.) Known as often as not as "Jane-isms," the better remembered of her twisted turns of phrase were more than a match for Gracie Allen's equally celebrated illogical logic, anticipating such later word and context manglers as Jimmy Durante, Lou Costello, Phil Harris, and, especially, All in the Family's Archie Bunker. The famed Jane-isms included:

• Congress is back in season.
• You could have knocked me down with a fender.
• Up at the crank of dawn.
• Time wounds all heels.
• Now, there's no use crying over spoiled milk.
• I'm completely uninhabited.
• Seems like only a year ago they were married nine years!
• I am his awfully-wedded wife.
• He blew up higher than a hall.
• I look like the wrath of grapes!
• I wasn't under the impersonation you meant me!
• He shot out of here like a bat out of a belfry.
• I'm sitting on pins and cushions.
• The coffee will be ready in a jitney.
• This hangnail expression...
• I don't drink, I'm a totalitarian.
• We'll be together like Simonized twins.
• Well, you've got to take the bitter with the better.

Jane Ace's malaprops were less limited in their word play than the Mrs. Malaprop of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals. She was scripted as having a knack for making right the muddled situations she made muddled in the first place, by stumbling into the solutions right before her original muddling might have blown everything to smithereens. Some critics such as the New York Herald-Tribune's John Crosby noted her language molestation betrayed a "crazy like a fox" intelligence with its own logical illogic, but as Crosby himself said, "There are a lot of Malaprops in radio but none of them scrambles a cliché quite so skillfully as Jane."