Fanny Brice played a key role in the history of radio. Not only was she one of the earliest women to headline a major prime­ time show, but her portrayal of the inquisitive, mischievous Baby Snooks innovated the child-centered situation comedy, later to be developed by radio and television shows such as The Aldrich Family and Dennis the Menace.

Brice was born Fannie Borach on 29 October 1891 on New York's Lower East Side to Jewish immigrant parents, Charles Borach and Rose Stern. In the lively local vaudeville scene, where Fanny earned a small but steady income appearing in amateur nights from the age of 14, she learned the "Yiddish" accent so common to the ethnic humor of the time. Her first professional successes occurred in the field of burlesque, in humorous singing and dancing acts. One of her earliest hits was the song "Sadie Salome," composed by Irving Berlin, which Florenz Ziegfeld brought to a larger venue in his Ziegfeld Follies of 1910. Brice appeared in the Follies steadily from 1910 through 1923, diversifying also into vaudeville on the Orpheum and RKO circuits and into light comedy both in the United States and in Europe. The song "My Man," first performed in the 1921 Follies, became her biggest hit and trademark vehicle. Brice's stage popularity peaked with two Broadway vehicles produced by her soon­-to-be ex-husband, Billy Rose, Sweet and Low and Crazy Quilt, which toured across the United States from 1930 through early 1932.

Though Brice developed many comic personae and acts, she is best known (aside from the perennial "My Man") for songs such as "Sadie Salome," "Second Hand Rose," and 'Tm an Indian" and for routines such as "Mrs. Cohen at the Beach," which drew from the vaudeville tradition of Yiddish dialect and humor. Her function in the Ziegfeld Follies may have been to embody, under a "disguise" of ethnicity, the working-class elements of burlesque that Ziegfeld had so carefully excised from his elevated "celebration of the American girl." Brice was adept at negotiating the double-edged weapon of ethnic humor, at once taking possession of the "othered" characterization while simultaneously disavowing or disarming it, notably through the physical, almost slapstick quality of her performance. Impersonating head-injured ballet dancers ("Becky Is Back in the Ballet"), Jewish evangelists ("Soul-Saving· Sadie," a takeoff on Aimee Semple McPherson), graceless fan dancers, or the hypersexual movie vamp ("I'm Bad"), Brice's genius for physical satire both took the edge off her ethnic and sexual humor and marked out a performance space unique to Brice-a daring one for a female comedian. Often earthy and sometimes slightly bawdy, full of double entendres and subtle references, Brice's combination of ethnic humor and physical satire earned her the highest acclaim from stage critics and audiences alike.

Brice's fortunes in radio, however, would be another matter. Brice first ventured onto the air on the Philco Hour in February 1930, a stint that proved unsuccessful. She returned to the stage, but in 1933 she agreed to appear as a guest on J. Walter Thompson's Fleischmann Yeast Hour (The Rudy Vallee Show). This led to a contract with Standard Brands for the prestigious Chase and Sanborn Hour with host Eddie Cantor. Here her brash, bawdy humor, emanating as it did from a woman, proved troublesome to the National Broadcasting Company's (NBC) Continuity Acceptance Department. After a flurry of censoring memos and script deletions, Brice came up with a new strategy designed to allow her the comic freedom that her persona as a mature, sexual woman could not: the precocious child, Baby Snooks. Snooks had been introduced earlier, as "Babykins" in the stage show Corned Beef and Roses, but Brice built her character into a continuing role on radio. In the Ziegfeld Follies of r934 she brought Snooks onstage into the spotlight of national fame, which then carried back onto radio in the Ziegfeld Follies of the Air, sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1936. Brice subsequently took Snooks to MGM/Maxwell House's Good News of r938 on NBC with Hanley Stafford as Daddy. Finally, in 1949, after a few more shifts in program and a brief return to the stage, the Dancer Fitzgerald Sample agency brought the Baby Snooks Show to NBC, where it ran to great popular acclaim until Brice's untimely death in May 1951.

"Schnooks," as Brice always called her, offered listeners a good-natured critique of adult hypocrisies, an exploration of the pitfalls of the English language, and an inverted world seen through the eyes of a precariously resistant and troublesome child, whose deflation of some of the most respected traditions, concepts, and institutions of American culture provoked sympathetic laughter while remaining safely contained and corrected by her age and innocence. In a 1939 skit, Daddy, upset by Snooks' terrible grades in school, decides to hire a tutor. In the opening lines, Snooks parodies a common attribution of schooling for women:

 

Daddy: I'm hiring a private teacher to make you work.

Snooks: Waaahhh! ... I don't want a private teacher.

Daddy: Oh now listen, dear, it's for your own good. She'll make you a little lady.

Snooks: I don't wanna be a lady ... and I don't wanna go to school.

Daddy (voice rising): Well, what do you want to do!

Snooks (smugly): I want to get married.

 

When the teacher arrives, speaking with a pretentious upper­ class accent, Snooks refuses to be intimidated or to cooperate.

 

Teacher: Now come here and kiss me, little one.

Snooks: What for? I ain't done nothin'.

Daddy: Now kiss your teacher, Snooksie.

Snooks: You kiss her, Daddy ...

Teacher: Come here.

Snooks: Leave me alone.

Teacher (threateningly): When I beckon like this, it means I want you to come.

Snooks: When I stick out my tongue like this, it means I ain't comin'!

 

Finally the teacher, at the end of her patience, turns Snooks over her knee and spanks her.

 

Teacher: There! That'll impress it on your mind.

Snooks: That ain't where my mind is!

 

This last line is a reworking of one that Brice attempted to use in 1933 on the Chase and Sanborn show:

Fanny: Abe, why do you spank the boy like that? Abe: I spanked him to impress it on his mind.

Fanny: Where do you think his mind is?

That time, network continuity acceptance editors objected and deleted the line immediately. Now, from the mouth of a child, it could be uttered over the air without repercussions.

Having not quite made it to television-and it is doubtful whether the 59-year-old actress could have carried Snooks to television without the grotesque overwhelming the humor­ous-Brice faded slowly from memory, her contributions to the development of broadcast program forms recalled in brief asides but never deeply assessed. However, her child-centered situation comedy would soon become the staple of television. And Snooks is the character with whom Brice spent more of her life and on whom she expended more of her comic energy than any of her justly famous stage routines-despite what later semi-biographical works such as Barbra Streisand's two films choose to remember. She deserves a more prominent place in the history of broadcasting than past accounts have permitted. Brice's Snooks marks a significant moment in the movement of women's humor from the private sphere to the public arena. Once heard, Baby Snooks speaks in a voice that is hard to forget.