Kenneth (Kenny) Delmar's career spanned the history of 20th-century media and popular entertainment. A versatile character actor, Delmar appeared in vaudeville, television, and motion picture productions, but he is most remembered for his work in radio. As Senator Beauregard Claghorn on The Fred Allen Show in the late 1940s, Delmar entertained millions each Sunday with his blustery rhetoric, his puns and malapropisms satirizing Southern culture, and his oft-imitated tagline, "that's a joke, son."

     Kenny Delmar was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 5 September 1910. His parents separated when he was a young boy, and he was raised in New York by his mother. A child of show business, he toured the country as early as 1918 with his mother and aunt, a vaudeville duo booked as the Delmar Sisters.

Early Radio Work

  Delmar broke into radio in the 1930s as an announcer, working on such major network programs as the musical countdown show Your Hit Parade. He began doing more acting work throughout the decade, appearing as the vain Police Commissioner Weston on The Shadow, and in various roles on the newsreel dramatization program The March of Time and on Orson Welles' dramatic series The Mercury Theater of the Air: By the end of the decade he had established himself as one of radio's elite character actors.

     Delmar's biggest role during this period was on the "War of the Worlds" broadcast of 30 October 1938. Before the broadcast, CBS censors had demanded that Orson Welles fictionalize the names of some real places and characters in the script, including changing Delmar's President Franklin Roosevelt character to the nameless "Secretary of the Interior." Delmar's impression of Roosevelt-a voice that by the late 1930s was intimately familiar to American radio listeners-was so realistic that it was a major inspiration for the panic felt by millions of listeners, despite the fact that the character was clearly identified as the "Secretary of the Interior" and not the actual President.

Senator Claghorn

  Delmar's big career break came in 1946 with his acting work on The Fred Allen Show as Senator Beauregard Claghorn, the loudmouthed Southern politician who showed his sectional loyalty by drinking only from Dixie Cups, refusing to drive through the Lincoln Tunnel, and claiming that he was so Southern, "where I live we call the people from Alabama Yankees." Senator Claghorn was one of the residents of Allen's Alley, the imaginary street Fred Allen strolled down each week on his program beginning in the early 1940s, talking current events and sharing jokes with a geographically and culturally disparate quartet of recurring characters who occupied this same fantastical radio space. As the five-minute sketch developed over time and the Alley's characters solidified, Senator Claghorn shared the street with the Jewish housewife Mrs. Nussbaum, the feisty Irishman Ajax Cassidy, and the farmer Titus Moody. Delmar landed the Claghorn role after Minerva Pious, the actress who played Mrs. Nussbaum, heard Kenny Delmar do a hilarious southern impression and recommended him to Allen. Though Fred Allen wrote most of the "Allen's Alley" dialogue himself, Delmar contributed a great deal to Claghorn's character, claiming that he modeled Claghorn after a Texas rancher who picked him up while hitchhiking in the late 1920s and barely stopped talking.

     Delmar's Senator Claghorn first appeared on 5 October 1945 and became an overnight sensation, the subject of millions of amateur impersonations throughout America. Clag­horn offered hilarious tidbits on Southern life, such as his statement that his Thanksgiving feast always began with a "Memphis Martini ... a tall glass of pure corn likker with a wad of cotton in it." Senator Claghorn's "that's a joke, son" became a national catchphrase. The new Allen's Alley quartet was a certifiable hit, and The Fred Allen Show became one of the most popular shows on radio, drawing some 20 million listeners on Sunday evenings. Consumers ate up.Claghorn memorabilia in the form of shirts and compasses that only pointed south, and the character became so popular that Delmar par­layed the role into two comedy records, a feature film entitled It's a Joke, Son, and radio and television commercial work well into the 1960s.

     Allen's Alley became popular to an American population emerging from the Depression and World War II, moving to the suburbs, and coming to grips with the tumultuous decades of the 1930s and '40s. The very idea of the nation was under intense revision by many Americans, especially as older conceptions of ethnicity and regionalism had been subjected to the crucible of war. As the most popular character on the most popular radio program of the immediate postwar years, Kenny Delmar's Senator Claghorn character played a considerable role in the shaping of national ideas about the South during the postwar period. Allen's Alley provided for a suburbanizing population a reminder of the old urban ethnic neighborhoods and people, and may have served for its millions of listeners as a sounding board for their own new postwar Americanness, as this anonymous "white" population increasingly left behind its older urban ethnic ways and mores for the mass media society of the suburbs. Kenny Delmar's character had an ambiguous role in this process, but the degree to which Senator Claghorn shaped national ideas about Southerners should not be overlooked. Some Southern newspapers printed anti-Claghorn editorials, and the real Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi was an outspoken critic of what he saw as Delmar's insulting caricature of Southern politicians. Senator Claghorn was invoked on the Senate floor several times in the 1950s, both as an example and counterexample of the nature of Southern politics and politicians, and he was for many regular Americans of the World War II generation a national reference point on Southern culture.

     Kenny Delmar as an actor never achieved the notoriety of his Senator Claghorn character, and he had wisely continued his character and journeyman work in radio throughout Clag­horn's popularity. NBC considered giving Senator Claghorn his own show in 1949, but the plans never came to fruition. Del­ mar continued to work in radio after The Fred Allen Show went off the air in 1949, and he branched out into theater and television work as well. He also provided vocal work on cartoon shows into the 1970s, including work on The Adventures of Hoppity Hooper and Underdog. The cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn was lifted almost directly from Delmar's Clag­horn character, though he received no royalties or official credit. He died on 14 July 1984 in Stamford, Connecticut.