Easy Aces Serial radio comedy 1930-1945 starring Goodman Ace and his wife Jane Ace

Easy Aces, a long-running American serial radio comedy (1930–1945), was trademarked by the low-keyed drollery of creator and writer Goodman Ace and his wife, Jane, as an urbane, put-upon realtor and his malaprop-prone wife. A 15-minute program, airing as often as five times a week, Easy Aces wasn't quite the ratings smash that such concurrent 15-minute serial comedies as Amos 'n' Andy, The Goldbergs, Lum and Abner, or Vic and Sade were. But its unobtrusive, conversational, and clever style, and the cheerful absurdism of its storylines, built a loyal enough audience of listeners and critics alike to keep it on the air for 15 years.

Jane Ace all but retired from public life (taking a very brief turn as what her husband called "a comedienne now making her come-down as a disc jockey" in the early 1950s) after Easy Aces was laid to rest at long last. The Aces were hired as NBC Radio Monitor "Communicators" in 1955; they were given a spot just after Dave Garroway.The couple was also signed to an NBC Radio show for women called Weekday that went on the air not long after Monitor's debut. Weekday was aired Monday through Friday. They also went into commercial work.Goodman Ace enjoyed a second career as a writer. He wrote for radio (most notably, as head writer for Tallulah Bankhead's weekly variety show, The Big Show, but also for Ed Wynn, Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Danny Kaye, and others), for television (most notably, for Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Perry Como, Robert Q. Lewis, and Bob Newhart), and as a weekly columnist for Saturday Review (formerly The Saturday Review of Literature). Those columns eventually yielded three anthologies: The Book of Little Knowledge: More Than You Want to Know About Television, The Fine Art of Hypochondria, or How Are You and The Better of Goodman Ace. In 1970, Ace surprised and delighted old Easy Aces fans when he published a book with eight complete Easy Aces scripts and essays about living with, working with and loving the malaprop queen, plus a seven-inch flexidisc that extracted from the original radio performance of one of those scripts, "Jane Sees a Psychiatrist." The book was named for the show's standard introduction: Ladies and Gentlemen--Easy Aces. He also held a regular slot for humorous commentaries on New York station WPAT for a few years before spending the rest of his life as a writer and lecturer. But it was Easy Aces that made its co-stars and writer's name forever. Appropriately, the show and the Aces were inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1990.A Canadian television sitcom, The Trouble with Tracy, was adapted from the Easy Aces scripts in the early 1970s. Through a variety of factors, that show has been labelled by some television critics as one of the worst TV comedies ever produced

Radio Show Archive of vintage actress Jane Ace