page_title: Easy Aces
section_title: "I am his awfully-wedded wife"
hierarchical_section_title: Easy Aces / "I am his awfully-wedded wife"
caption_attribution_description: English: Easy Aces was a popular radio program, that was syndicated by the ZIV Company to individual stations via high quality phonograph records that were commonly known as "electrical transcriptions".
context_page_description: Easy Aces is an American serial radio comedy. It 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.
context_section_description: That and almost everything else could be forgotten amidst Jane Ace's linguistic mayhem, much of it provided by her wry husband's scripts and enough improvised by her. (Mary Hunter's real laughter, at Jane's malaprops or Ace's arch barbs, was practically the show's laugh track, years before anyone ever thought of using canned laughter.) Known as often as not as "Jane-isms," the better remembered of her twisted turns of phrase were more than a match for Gracie Allen's equally celebrated illogical logic, anticipating such later word and context manglers as Jimmy Durante, Lou Costello, Phil Harris, and, especially, All in the Family's Archie Bunker. The famed Jane-isms included:
   
  Perish forbid!
  Congress is back in season.
  You could have knocked me down with a fender.
  Up at the crank of dawn.
  Time wounds all heels.
  Now, there's no use crying over spoiled milk.
  I'm completely uninhabited.
  Seems like only a year ago they were married nine years!
  I am his awfully-wedded wife.
  He blew up higher than a hall.
  I look like the wrath of grapes!
  I wasn't under the impersonation you meant me!
  He shot out of here like a bat out of a belfry.
  I'm sitting on pins and cushions.
  The coffee will be ready in a jitney.
  This hangnail expression... 
  I don't drink, I'm a totalitarian.
  We'll be together like Simonized twins.
  Well, you've got to take the bitter with the better.
  Jane Ace's malaprops were less limited in their word play than the Mrs. Malaprop of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals. She was scripted as having a knack for making right the muddled situations she made muddled in the first place, by stumbling into the solutions right before her original muddling might have blown everything to smithereens. Some critics such as the New York Herald-Tribune's John Crosby noted her language molestation betrayed a "crazy like a fox" intelligence with its own logical illogic, but as Crosby himself said, "There are a lot of Malaprops in radio but none of them scrambles a cliché quite so skillfully as Jane."
caption: ZIV Company advertisement for radio program transcriptions (1945)
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