Just for the Laugh

Radio's critics have complained that radio is too lazy to produce its own comedians. This summer, while such vaudeville-trained funnymen as Fred Allen and Jack Benny are on vacation, radio hopes to answer the critics with three young, homegrown comics: Henry Morgan, Abe Burrows and Dave Garroway.

Bad Boy. Brashest of the trio is Henry Morgan, 34, whose acid, uneven comedy has usually been based on his distaste for sponsors. Morgan, who will try anything, tried (and failed) this spring to do a TV show in addition to his sustaining radio program.

Of the TV fiasco he says: "I must have been out of my mind. I thought I'd just walk in and they'd point the camera at me. You have to cope with 16 people with things on their minds like making chalk marks on the floor . . . The director tells the cameraman to move to the right and he says, 'You mean your right or my right?'"

Last week, Morgan was on the air at a new time with a new sponsor, Bristol-Myers (Wed. 9 p.m., E.D.T., NBC). The ingredients were familiar: Morgan burlesquing high-flown documentaries; Morgan being badgered by bustling stooges. Biggest surprise was Morgan's respectful treatment of his sponsor and his super-generous mention (96 times) of the sponsor's name and products. As a reformed bad boy, Morgan is not necessarily funnier than before, but he might last longer on the air.

No Trunk. Bald, tubby Abe Burrows, 38, says worriedly, "I don't have the right background for show business--I wasn't born in a trunk." Brooklyn-raised, Burrows majored in Latin and accounting, got his first job in Wall Street ("I went right up the ladder: runner, board boy, bond salesman--and then I was fired"). A script he wrote for Mimic Eddie Garr gave him a start in radio. Then he began satirizing Tin Pan Alley songs at private parties and convulsed Connoisseurs Groucho Marx and Danny Kaye with such numbers as The Girl With the Three Blue Eyes and I Looked Under a Rock and Found You.

On a 15-minute CBS show last year, Burrows tried his song parodies on a mass audience. After 29 weeks, his sponsor dropped his option. Explained Burrows: "That's the equivalent of where in another business the boss says, 'I'll trouble you for your key to the washroom.' It leads to unemployment."

Last week, he made his second try with Breakfast With Burrows (Mon. 9:30 p.m., E.D.T., CBS). His explanation of the seeming contradiction between time and title: "I get up late." The show comes from his "little apartment located high above the ceiling price" and, though it is a breakfast show, Burrows says: "I got no canary, there's nobody here named Tex, and there will be absolutely no cheerfulness." For his premiere, Burrows wound up with a big production number: a Burrows version of Hamlet, adapted for Hollywood ("Hamlet is upset because he doesn't like the second husband his mother married. This Hamlet is a kind of Danish Margaret O'Brien").

Milk Bottles. In eleven years, Chicago's hulking, six-foot-two Dave Garroway, 36, has traveled from NBC page boy, amateur astronomer, Navy ensign and staff announcer--to broadcasting eleven hours a week over Chicago's WMAQ. On each of his four radio and TV shows Garroway exhibits a somewhat different facet of his extravert personality.

On his TV show, Garroway At Large (Sun. 10 p.m., E.D.T., NBC-TV), he uses what he calls "milk bottles'--visual gags like his recent pretense of severing the coaxial cable with a hatchet. The engineers cooperated with a beautiful blinding flash. Like a bashful Berle, Garroway wanders in & out of his vaudeville acts.

Nothing on his show is rehearsed--except a 35-piece orchestra--and the script contains such notations as: "Garroway talks for five minutes." His talk will range from "the ruby-polishing industry of Siam" to "the construction of eleven-foot poles for touching people you wouldn't touch with ten-foot poles." Last week, tireless Dave Garroway announced a fifth show, Reserved for Garroway, to start on TV in September.

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