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An Introduction to Steve Allen
by Mike Ignatowski

Andy Williams once said, "Steve Allen does so many things, he's the only man I know who's listed on every one of the Yellow Pages."

In his career, Steve Allen:

     -- Created and hosted the "Tonight" show;
     -- Starred in his own TV show "The Steve Allen Comedy Hour";
     -- Created, written and hosted the Emmy award-winning PBS-TV series "Meeting of Minds."
     -- Starred on Broadway and in motions pictures
     -- Authored 52 published books
     -- Written over 7,400 songs, and the score for several musicals.
     -- Made over 52 record albums/CD’s, including both jazz and comedy.

Steve Allen was also a philosopher, commentator on religion, politics and society, and powerful advocate for the voice of reason and the skeptics movement. He died in October, 2000. He is survived by his wife, Jayne Meadows, and his four children. He was 78.

Biography
The son of American vaudeville entertainers, Steve Allen led a unsettled childhood, passed off from one relative or boarding school to another. As a balm to his loneliness, Allen became a voracious reader, providing himself with a wide and varied intellectual background.

Drafted during World War II, Allen was released from the army after just a few months due to disabling bouts with asthma. He would later say "Asthma doesn't seem to bother me any more unless I'm around dogs or cigars, or the thing that bothers the me most - a dog smoking a cigar."

Breaking into show biz as a radio disc jockey, Allen soon learned that inserting humor here and there would draw a lot more attention than merely announcing the records and reading the stockyard reports. In order to supply himself with an endless stream of material, Allen memorized every joke book and "college humor" magazine that he could get his hands on; the result was his uncanny ability to conjure up precisely the right wisecrack at the right time.

For years he was known as one of the greatest ad-lib specialists in the business, taking advantage of situations as they come up and getting laughs out of them. He once had to announce the final score of a big game between Harvard and William and Mary, it came out: "Harvard 14, William 12, Mary 6." Then someone in the studio audience asked him, "Do they get your program in Boston?", he replied, "They see it, but they don't get it!"

Developing a strong following while hosting a radio program in Los Angeles in 1948, Allen received his first network exposure in 1949, and was also featured in several films. In 1953, Steve Allen was hired to host a local late-night TV program in New York, which later developed into the NBC network's Tonight Show. Extraordinarily busy during the years 1956 and 1957, Allen hosted Tonight, headlined his own hour-long weekend variety TV series, starred as the title character in The Benny Goodman Story (1956), composed several popular songs (his piano skills were showcased on his TV programs), and filled up his spare time by writing books, plays, and magazine articles. He left the Tonight Show in 1957 and closed out his NBC weekend show in 1960. One year later, he was back with a Wednesday-night comedy show on ABC, which had the misfortune of being scheduled opposite Wagon Train.

Steve Allen has been referred to as "the most imitated man on television." He was the first comedian to do funny and totally ad-libbed interviews with studio audiences or on the street, originated the Question Man in which the answer comes before the question, originated the idea of taking close-up pictures of people in his audience and building a comedy routine around them, and was the first comic to regularly do crazy and sometimes dangerous physical stunts on his shows. For example, he once dove into nine feet of jell-o on the Tonight show. About the only thing they could not find a record of him doing was a Top 10 list.

On the Steve Allen TV show in the early sixties, he and a relatively unknown young musician got together and played a tune on a bicycle. The young musician’s name was Frank Zappa. Video footage of this still exists.

He kept busy in television throughout the 1970s and 1980s with such highly praised projects as PBS' Meeting of Minds, where Allen would host roundtable discussions with actors posing as the great leaders and intellects of history.

Long married to actress Jayne Meadows, Steve Allen showed no signs of slowing down in his early seventies, despite a bout with cancer. He continued to write books on a multitude of subjects, accept TV and movie guest-star appearances, made "standing-room-only" personal appearances, and even occasionally returned to his roots by hosting TV and radio shows.

Steve Allen on Politics
Quoting Steve Allen on some politicians: "The hair is real - it's the head that's a fake."

Allen’s political views, generally liberal, have prodded him into good-natured clashes with spokesmen on both the right and left. During his debate with William Buckley, Jr. Steve Allen recited the following limerick:

     There is a young man named Bill Buck-i-ly
     Who debates all the liberals quite pluckily,
     But when all’s said and done,
     It must be just in fun,
     For few are persuaded - quite luckily.

He commented that conservatives, among others, speak repeatedly, and correctly, about the necessity to uphold high intellectual standards. Yet in their recent opportunities to select presidential candidates, Allen observed that they have offered us men of rather modest intelligence, such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. (Steve Allen died the month before the 2000 elections.)

In the category of odd statements made by political leaders there’s no question he considered the national champion to be the former Vice President Dan Quayle (as I said, Steve Allen died the month before the 2000 elections.) Some of his favorite Quayle quotes listed in his book are:

"We understand the importance of having the bondage between the parent and the child."

"I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy. But that could change."

Quayle supported efforts "to limit the terms of members of Congress - especially members of the House and members of the Senate".

"If we do not succeed - then we run the risk of failure"

Steve Allen felt a special responsibility to improve the quality of the electronic media. It is not sensationalism or ratings (the bottom line), he said, that should be the sole criteria of programming, but the ideas and values that are expressed. Although he believed in freedom of expression and was opposed to censorship, he thought that the public had every right to criticize the purveyors of false or tasteless programs.

Most recently he took TV and movies to task for their excessive violence and vulgarity, though many of his former libertarian friends turned against his campaign against obscenity in the mass media because he allied himself with conservatives as well as liberals. His final book which was published posthumously, "Vulgarians at the Gate: Trash TV and Raunch Radio: Raising the Standards of Popular Culture" was focused on this topic.

Steve Allen on Reason
Steve Allen was a strong outspoken supporter for the power of reason, and an advocate for the teaching of it in our schools. He promoted the idea that we must add a fourth R to our formal process of early education. The four R’s would be reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic, and reasoning. He said we must encourage a respect for reason and wisdom in our society, and not put such heavy emphasis on material or financial accomplishment.

He lamented that much of what currently passes for mental process in human experience is a matter of the rationalization of bias, prejudice, fear, anger, desire, or hope, whereas pitiably little can be accurately described as disinterested reason.

He warned that "Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences."

Interestingly, he also mentioned that courses should be taught in "How to Feal", since our emotionality is too often a thing of blind instinctual or impulsive response - which most of us go to our graves never really understanding. Our children should receive instruction in "How to Feal" and "How to Love".

In one of his better selling books "Dumbth: The Lost Art of Thinking", he lists 101 ways to think better. Some examples of which include:

     (1) Decide that in the future you will reason more effectively.
     (2) Do some casual studying about the brain, the mind, memory, the whole field of psychology.
     (3) Beware of rushing to judgment.
     (4) Beware of falling in love with your first answer
     (7) Examine your superstitions
     (17) Learn how to learn
     (18) Develop the old-fashioned virtue of humility.
     (25) Be realistically skeptical - even of leaders.
     (27) Understand the process of rationalization.
     (31) When it is possible to check facts for yourself, do so.
     (34) Decide to continue your education until death.
     (49) After you have done your homework, speak out.
     (52) Rethink your religion.
     (53) When possible, spend time with people brighter than yourself
     (61) Don’t be afraid to change your mind
     (66) Eliminate trash from your reading
     (77) Play thinking games and amuse yourself by trying to answer puzzle questions that exercise your mind.
     (80) Become more familiar with history than you are.
     (83) If you are a parent, resolve to make it possible for your children to become more intelligent      than you are.
     (84) Take good care of the organ you think with.
     (94) Form the habit of attending lectures.

Steve Allen on Religion
Steve Allen was reared a Roman Catholic. However, in his early thirties he was automatically excommunicated because of a second marriage. He claimed, though, that in his mid-twenties he began to have doubts about Catholicism and Christianity. Steve Allen did not consider himself an atheist. He accepted the probability that there is some kind of divine force, though he never publicly defined this any further.

Steve Allen would state that all religions are not equal. Some religions are rationally superior to others. Some religious opinions are beautiful, moral, enlightening, uplifting. Others are bizarre, crazy, socially dangerous, and personally destructive.

While he criticized most religious beliefs as stupid, he raised money for the Unitarian church, the Salvation Army and other religious groups. He saw no contradiction in helping churches even as he belittled their ideology. He explained it this way in Time in 1992, "if someone were to invent a religion tomorrow in which, if you want to contact God, all you have to do is buy a pumpkin, everyone at first would scoff at the stupid person who believes that somehow pumpkins are physically part of God. But now, chapter 2: these people open soup kitchens, buy clothing and build shelters for the homeless. I think their views about pumpkins are dumb, but they are helping starving, miserable people and I admire them, and I will help them."

Steve Allen on Humanism
Humanists are a somewhat loosely organized group that exists for the primary purpose of civilizing Christians and others - both religious believers and nonbelievers. Historically speaking, those who have been faced with the necessity of becoming civilized have generally submitted to the process with ill-concealed displeasure....

The attack on secular humanism by certain fundamentalist religious groups is absurd, especially the claim that it is Humanism that is largely responsible for the present moral collapse of our society. The American Humanist Association has an extremely modest official membership of about 5000. It is nonsense to see any connection between this small group of rationalists and the ethical anarchy of society... Secular Humanists, Unitarians, Universalists, academic atheists, and such people are, in fact generally characterized by a commendable degree of moral restraint.

Most churches have a poor record of reforming themselves or promoting the reforming of society. Reform, moral uplift, civilization itself - all were forced upon them by a statistically small brigade of courageous humanists, freethinkers, Deists, progressives, and liberals, including the American Founding Fathers.

A Tribute to Steve Allen
by Paul Kurtz

Steve Allen, who died Oct. 30, 2000, was a unique, even heroic, figure in popular American culture. He was closely identified with the entertainment industry, and was heralded as one of the pioneers of television talk shows. His talents were multifarious: He was a comedian, wrote thousands of songs, innumerable short stories, novels, plays, and books.

I had known and worked with Steve Allen for almost thirty years-as a friend and colleague and in my capacity as publisher of Prometheus Books and as Chairman of CSICOP and the Council for Secular Humanism. His intellectual interests were encyclopedic, his devotion to liberal and charitable causes exemplary. He was his own man, standing against the bombast and bunkum of the passing parade.

He was a powerful advocate of the skeptics movement; and he did what he could to further its aims, ever willing to speak at our conferences and workshops. He never tired of lending his support to our efforts. We are particularly grateful for the fact that he was at the inaugural openings of the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York (1995) and the Center for Inquiry-West in Los Angeles (1997).

Most notably, Steve Allen accepted the appointment as Co-chairman (along with Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg) of the Council for Media Integrity, a CSICOP-sponsored organization aimed at getting some balance in scientific reporting in the media and some fairness in evaluating pseudoscientific claims.

Most recently he took TV and movies to task for their excessive violence and vulgarity, though many of his former libertarian friends turned against his campaign against obscenity in the mass media because he allied himself with conservatives -- as well as liberals, I might add.

Steve Allen felt a special responsibility to improve the quality of the electronic media. It is not sensationalism or ratings (the bottom line), he said, that should be the sole criteria of programming, but the ideas and values that are expressed. Although he believed in freedom of expression and was opposed to censorship, he thought that the public have every right to criticize the purveyors of false or tasteless programs.

Last spring I invited Steve to a humanist conference in Los Angeles to test his ideas before a liberal audience -- and he withstood both criticism and applause with decorum and aplomb. His controversial views will appear in Vulgarians at the Gate-TV Trash and Raunch Radio: Raising the Standards of Popular Culture, which will be published posthumously by Prometheus Books in April 2001.

All told, Steve published fifteen books with Prometheus, including Dumbth: The Lost Art of Thinking with 101 Ways to Reason Better and Improve Your Mind (reissued in 1998)-which became a bestseller. Critical thinking was high on his agenda. He produced Gullible's Travels, an audiotape for Prometheus Books with original music and script (read and sung by him and his wife, Jayne Meadows), "in order to introduce youngsters to the brain and its proper use."

His award-winning television series Meeting of the Minds, which he wrote and produced (with Jayne, two decades ago), stands out in distinguished contrast with the mundane wasteland of televised fare. This series pitted Socrates, Marie Antoinette, Sir Thomas More, Tom Paine, Karl Marx, Emily Dickinson, Galileo, Charles Darwin, and other historical figures in dialogue and disputation. When efforts were made by Prometheus (which had published four volumes of the scripts of Meeting of the Minds) to relaunch the series, it was difficult to find syndicators because many in the television industry felt that the series was "too thoughtful" for the American public-a sad commentary on the decline of taste and intelligence.

Two of his most courageous books were critiques of the Bible (Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion and Morality [1989] and a sequel). Martin Gardner, in the preface to the first volume, compared this favorably with Tom Paine's The Age of Reason. Steve was willing to publish these books because he wished to counter the rise of the Religious Right. What other celebrity in the American media would have the courage to do so? All that we have on the national scene today are professions of piety, almost never reflective dissent - a testament to the independence of the man.

Steve Allen was a freethinker-skeptic and humanist-in the best sense of those terms. His creative accomplishments were so many that I could only touch on some of them. What a grievous loss his death is to American culture and to those of us who knew him personally, admired, and loved him.