Radio program AKA The Edgar Bergen - Charlie McCarthy Show, after its stars. Most popular radio show based on a ventriloquist act. W. C. Fields was a regular the first five months of the program, and started an on-the-air feud with McCarthy, threatening to carve him into a venetian blind. McCarthy's reply: "That makes me shudder."
W.C. Fields: "Is it true that your father was a gait-legged table?"
McCarthy: "If it is, your father was under it."W.C. Fields: "I love children. I can remember when, with my own little unsteady legs, I toddled from room to room."
Charlie: "When was that? Last night?" Guest stars on the show included Mae West (whose sexual innuendo so shocked listeners that the network banned her for 15 years), Spencer Tracy, Dorothy Lamour, Abbott and Costello, Gene Tierney, Judy Garland, Betty Hutton, and frequent appearances by Don Ameche. Other Bergen characters included country bumpkin Mortimer Snerd (introduced 1939) and spinster Effie Klinker (introduced 1944). The show ran from May 1937 through December 1939 as a one hour program on the NBC-Red network and from January 1940 until December 1948 as a 30 minute show with the name The Chase And Sanborn Program. In 1949, Bergen moved the show to CBS, and got Coca-Cola as a sponsor. | 
