Radio
As a panelist on the radio's Information Please (1938–48), he was the designated expert on poetry, old barroom songs and Gilbert and Sullivan, which he always referred to as Sullivan and Gilbert. A running joke on the show was that his stock answer for quotes that he didn't know was that Shakespeare was the author. (Perhaps that was a running gag: Information Please's creator/producer Dan Golenpaul auditioned Adams for the job with a series of sample questions, starting with: "Who was the Merchant of Venice?" Adams: "Antonio." Golenpaul: "Most people would say 'Shylock.'" Adams: "Not in my circle.") John Kieran was the real Shakespearean expert and could quote from his works at length.
A translator of Horace and other classical authors, F.P.A. also collaborated with O. Henry on Lo, a musical comedy.
Read more about this topic: Franklin Pierce Adams
Famous quotes containing the word radio:
“We spend all day broadcasting on the radio and TV telling people back home what’s happening here. And we learn what’s happening here by spending all day monitoring the radio and TV broadcasts from back home.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“from above, thin squeaks of radio static,
The captured fume of space foams in our ears—”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)
“Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)