Every week, a ringing phone and Archie's nasal New York accent invited listeners into Duffy's Tavern, a weekly situation comedy set in a dilapidated pub in the heart of Manhattan's east side. Running the place on behalf of the ever-absent Duffy, Archie the manager and his cohorts-Eddie, Finnegan, Clancy the Cop, Miss Duffy (Duffy's daughter), and others-welcomed a new guest star or guest character every week into a defiantly low-class atmosphere of barbed but friendly give and take.

     Duffy's was famous for its play with (and mistreatment of) language, especially Archie's constant malapropisms. "Leave me dub you welcome to this distinctive establishment," Archie said to guest star Vincent Price, "and leave me further say, Mr. Price, that seldom have we behooved such an august presentiment to these confines   And feel assured, Mr. Price, that your visit is a bereavement from which we will not soon recover." As comedian Georgie Jessel once chided Fred Allen on The Texaco Star Theatre: "Fred! Two split infinitives and a dangling metaphor-people will think this is Duffy's Tavern!"

     The pilot for Duffy's Tavern aired on 29 July 1940 on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio program Forecast, which aired previews and pilots of proposed CBS shows in order to gauge audience reaction. The reaction in this case was enthusiastic, and CBS picked Duffy's up as a weekly half-hour program beginning in March 1941, running on Saturday nights at 8:30. It moved to two more time slots over the next year, until October 1942, when it switched to National Broadcasting Company's (NBC) Blue network, running at 8:30 on Tuesdays. When NBC Blue became the separate network American Broadcasting Companies (ABC), Duffy's Tavern moved to the NBC network proper, where it ran for the next seven years.

     Duffy's Tavern was largely the brainchild of its star, Ed Gardner (born Ed Poggenburg), who first created the character of Archie for the CBS program This Is New York in 1939. Archie's right-hand man was "Eddie the Waiter," played by Eddie Green, an African-American comedian with a dry wit, who often took the wind out of Archie's sails. Green's part was notable at the time for its lack of stereotype or inferiority: the writers for Duffy's Tavern received an award during "Negro History Week" in 1946 for providing Green with such posi­tive, racially inoffensive material.

     The most faithful patron of the tavern was the monumentally stupid "Clifton Finnegan," played by veteran radio comic Charlie Cantor (no relation to Eddie Cantor). Cantor had originated the slow-talking, even slower-witted stooge character Socrates Mulligan for the "Allen's Alley" segment on the Fred Allen Show, and he eventually transplanted a renamed Mulligan into Duffy's Tavern. Cantor was an enormously experienced radio talent, "the Great Mr. Anonymous of radio," appearing on programs such as The Shadow, Abie's Irish Rose, Dick Tracy, The Life of Riley, and Baby Snooks. At one point he was in such demand that he performed in 26 programs in one week, and for several months he appeared in the same time slot on three different networks in two recordings and one live show.

     Ed Gardner's wife Shirley Booth originally played "Miss Duffy," a young woman on the lookout for marriageable men, pursuing them almost as energetically as they fled from her. After Gardner and Booth divorced in 1942, at least 12 differ­ ent actresses essayed the role of Miss Duffy, most notably Florence Halop and Sandra Gould, whose combined tenure lasted approximately six years.

In 1944 production moved from Manhattan to Hollywood (though of course the tavern remained eternally in New York), and in 1945, Paramount released a Duffy's Tavern feature film, starring the central cast of the radio show as their tavern characters (Gardner, Green, and Cantor, with Ann Thomas as the Miss Duffy du jour), surrounded by literally dozens of Paramount contract players appearing as themselves (among them Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, Alan Ladd, and Paulette Goddard). The film received tepid reviews-critics appreciated the star-studded stage show within the movie much more than the framing story featuring the radio characters-but the radio show itself kept going strong.

     An NBC report in March 1949 identified Duffy's Tavern as one of the network's top four programs, "vital to the maintenance of a strong position in the industry," alongside Fred Allen, Fibber McGee, and Bob Hope. That year there were rumblings within NBC and rumors in the newspapers that Gardner planned to take the show to CBS; in fact, Gardner went so far as to obtain a release from the program's contract with longtime sponsor Bristol-Myers to free up his options to court another network. However, NBC found Duffy's important enough to renegotiate. During the 1949 summer hiatus, Gardner and NBC moved the program in its entirety-including equipment, staff, and performers-to Puerto Rico, to take advantage of a 12-year tax holiday intended to attract new industry.

     When Duffy's returned to the airwaves in the fall of 1949 with recordings sent in from Puerto Rico, the show had a new sponsor, Blatz Brewing Company, which eventually caused some trouble for NBC. Some stations could not or would not allow beer advertising, and some that allowed beer would not accept the accompanying wine trailer ads, causing a number of stations to drop the program entirely. During its last year, Duffy's Tavern relied on multiple sponsors, including Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Victor and Anacin.

     At the very end of 1951, despite a temporary rise in ratings after the Puerto Rico move, Duffy's Tavern was cancelled. In 1954, a syndicated Duffy's Tavern television show appeared, starring Gardner as Archie and Alan Reed (the radio show's Clancy the Cop) as Finnegan, but reviews were strongly negative, and the program did not last. By that time, the tavern's style of humor was considered old-fashioned and long past its prime. During the 1940s, however, Duffy's Tavern had been one of the mainstays of radio comedy, and long before television's Cheers came along, Duffy's embodied "the place where everybody knows your name."