The Baby Snooks Show

The Baby Snooks Show was an American radio show starring comedienne and Ziegfeld Follies alumnus Fanny Brice as a mischievous young girl who was forty years younger than the actress who played her when she first went on the air.

The Snooks character began as a vaudeville act in about 1912. On February 29, 1936, the people at the Ziegfield Follies of the Air show (where Brice already had a presence) asked Brice to fill some empty time with one of her Snooks skits. Snooks' media career had begun. In 1937, she played Snooks on the Good News Show. She was a regular character on the Maxwell House Coffee Time show in 1940, the latter finding Brice sharing the spotlight with monologuist Frank Morgan.

But in 1944, the character was given her own show, The Baby Snooks Show (sometimes known as Baby Snooks and Daddy), and it became one of the nation's favourite radio situation comedies, with the devilish imp playing such pranks---as radio historian Arthur Frank Wertheim described them---as "planting a bee's nest at her mother's club meeting, cutting her father's fishing line into little pieces, ripping the fur off her mother's coat, inserting marbles into her father's piano, and smearing glue on her baby brother."

There were those who thought Snooks may have been lucky to become a radio hit. "The character may have seemed a noisy one-joke idea based on Snooks driving Daddy to a screaming fit," wrote another radio historian, Gerald Nachman, in Raised on Radio. "Yet Brice was wonderfully adept at giving voice to her irritating moppet without making Snooks obnoxious." Nachman quoted Variety critic Hobe Morrison as writing, "Snooks was not nasty or mean, spiteful or sadistic. She was at heart a nice kid. Similarly, Daddy was harried and desperate and occasionally was driven to spanking his impish daughter. But Daddy wasn't ill-tempered or unkind with the kid. He wasn't a crab."

Brice herself was so meticulous and fanatical about the character---whose origin lay in Brice's own childhood, the comedienne often said---that she was known to perform in a six-year-old girl's costume. She also insisted on her script being printed in extremely large type so she could avoid having to use reading glasses when on the air live: she was self-conscious about wearing them in front of an audience and didn't believe they fit the Snooks image. And though Brice by her own admission was a lackadaisacal rehearser ("I can't do a show until it's on the air, kid," she was quoted as telling her writer/producer Everett Freeman), she locked in tight when the show did go on---right down to Snooks-like "squirming, squinting, mugging, jumping up and down," as comedian George Burns remembered.

Snooks proved so universally appealing that Brice and Hanley Stafford, who played Lancelot (Daddy) Higgins, were invited to perform in character on the second installment of The Big Show, NBC's big-budget, last-ditch bid to keep classic radio variety programming alive amidst the television onslaught. First, Snooks tapped on hostess Tallulah Bankhead's door to ask about a career in acting, despite Daddy's telling her she already didn't have what it took. Later in the broadcast, Snooks and Daddy appeared in a sketch with fellow guest star Groucho Marx in a hilarious half-spoof of Marx's popular quiz-and-comedy show, You Bet Your Life.

Tragically, Fanny Brice died of a cerebral hemorrhage May 29, 1951---with her memoirs unfinished and with Baby Snooks due on the air the same night. The broadcast was turned on the spot into a musical tribute to the star that ended with a short eulogy from Hanley Stafford: "We have lost a very real, a very warm, a very wonderful woman."

Characters

Baby Snooks' long-suffering, often-cranky father, Lancelot "Daddy" Higgins, had been played by Frank Morgan, Alan Reed, and Hanley Stafford.
Baby Snooks' mother, Mama Higgins, had been played by Lalive Brownel, Lois Corbet, and Arlene Harris.
Robespierre, Snooks' little brother, was played by Lenore Ledoux.
Show announcers changed frequently over the show's long history, but they included Jack Benny's longtime announcer, Don Wilson.