Baby Snooks Show

The Baby Snooks Show was an American radio program starring comedian and Ziegfeld Follies alumna Fanny Brice as a mischievous young girl who was 40 years younger than the actress who played her when she first went on the air. The series began on CBS September 17, 1944, airing on Sunday evenings at 6:30 pm as Post Toasties Time (for sponsor General Foods). The title soon changed to The Baby Snooks Show, and the series was sometimes called Baby Snooks and Daddy.

The Stars

Fanny Brice portrayed the title character, Baby Snooks, a precocious and mischievous young girl. Hanley Stafford was best known for his portrayal of Snooks’s long-suffering, often-cranky father, Lancelot “Daddy” Higgins, a role played earlier by Alan Reed on the 1936 Follies broadcasts. Lalive Brownell was Vera “Mommy” Higgins, later portrayed by Lois Corbet (mid-1940s) and Arlene Harris (after 1945). Beginning in 1945, the child impersonator Leone Ledoux was first heard as Snooks’s younger brother Robespierre, and Danny Thomas was the “daydreaming postman” Jerry Dingle (1944–45), who imagined himself in other occupations, such as a circus owner or railroad conductor.

Key Dates

The series began on CBS September 17, 1944, airing on Sunday evenings at 6:30 pm as Post Toasties Time. In the fall of 1946, the show moved to Friday nights at 8pm, continuing on CBS until May 28, 1948. On November 9, 1949, the series moved to NBC where it was heard Tuesdays at 8:30pm, sponsored by Tums. The Baby Snooks Show continued on NBC until May 22, 1951, two days after Fanny Brice had a cerebral hemorrhage, and the show ended with her death at age 59.

Other Information

The scripts by Bill Danch, Sid Dorfman, Robert Fisher, Everett Freeman, Jess Oppenheimer (later the producer and head writer of I Love Lucy), Philip Rapp (who often revised his scripts three times before airing), and Arthur Stander were produced and directed by Mann Holiner (early 1940s), Al Kaye (1944), Ted Bliss, Walter Bunker and Arthur Stander. Clark Casey and David Light handled the sound effects with music by Meredith Willson (1937–44), Carmen Dragon, and vocalist Bob Graham.

In 1945, when illness caused Brice to miss several episodes, her absence was incorporated into the show as a plot device in which top stars (including Robert Benchley, Sydney Greenstreet, Kay Kyser and Peter Lorre) took part in a prolonged search for Snooks.

Yet Snooks was not a mean-spirited child: “The character may have seemed a noisy one-joke idea based on Snooks driving Daddy to a screaming fit,” wrote Gerald Nachman in Raised on Radio, “Yet Brice was wonderfully adept at giving voice to her irritating moppet without making Snooks obnoxious.” Brice herself was so meticulous and fanatical about the character that, according to Nachman, “she dressed in a baby-doll dress for the studio audience,” and she also appeared in the costume at parades and personal appearances.