Minerva Pious

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Minerva Pious (March 5, 1903 - March 16, 1979), an actress/comedian in American radio, became a radio icon playing malaprop-prone Jewish housewife Pansy Nussbaum in Fred Allen's famous "Allen's Alley" current-events skits.

Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Pious spent the majority of her life and career in New York. She worked extensively as a radio comedian, but gained a regular such job when she joined Allen's Mighty Allen Art Players in the 1930s, when Allen hosted the hourlong Town Hall Tonight. Playing a number of dialect roles in Allen's clever news spoofs and various other satires, Pious had developed those into the single Russian-Jewish housewife Mrs. Nussbaum by 1942, the year in which Allen's news spoofs finally developed into the "Allen's Alley" routines.

Pious became a fixture in the routines until Allen's show ended in 1949. Invariably, she greeted Allen's knock on her door with her Yiddish "Nuuuuuu," then answered Allen's cheery "Mrs. Nussbaum!" with lines like

You are expectink maybe Veinstein Chuychill?

You are expecting maybe Cecil B. Schlemeil?

You are expecting maybe Tulalulalula Bankhead?

You are expecting maybe Dinah Schnorra?

Pious's portions of the Alley segments usually involved one or another joke at the expense of Mrs. Nussbaum's never-heard husband, Pierre. In one episode, Pierre had a bad cold, and one of the remedies involved vegetables of all types. According to Mrs. Nussbaum the vegetables included "Carrots, stringle-a-beans and rutta-bagels." Her distinctive accented voice and Jane Ace-like knack for malaprops made her a series trademark, and she was enough of a favourite that she was often invited to play Mrs. Nussbaum on other comedies such as The Jack Benny Program (inviting him to her new restaurant: "We feature soft lights and hard salami") and Duffy's Tavern.

Pious also enjoyed frequent parts in the radio plays of Norman Corwin (especially playing a Brooklynese crime solver in Murder in Studio One) and on the Columbia Workshop, comedy routines on Kate Smith's series as well as appearances on shows hosted by Ed Wynn and Bob Hope, and parts on The Goldbergs and on the soap opera Life Can Be Beautiful, amongst others. Her few film credits included playing Mrs. Nussbaum on-camera in Fred Allen's It's in the Bag and a featured voice role in Pinocchio in Outer Space.

"Minnie could do a million things," remembered one-time Fred Allen writer Bob Weiskopf, to author Jordan R. Young, for The Laugh Crafters, a book gathering interviews with vintage radio comedy writers. "Nice lady. She had a physical affliction---she had a bad hip, a severe limp. She was very concerned about television; she never worked very much. But radio was fine."

The hip condition didn't stop Pious from making several television appearances, anyway, on shows like The Colgate Comedy Hour and The Chevrolet Television Theatre. She appeared briefly in the television soap The Edge of Night in 1956, playing a landlady, and she had small roles in the films Joe MacBeth (1955) and Love in the Afternoon (1957, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn). Her last known role was as a woman in the theater in the 1973 Joanne Woodward film, Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.

[edit] References

Robert Taylor, Fred Allen: His Life and Wit (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.)
Jordan R. Young, The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and TV's Golden Age (Beverly Hills, California: Past Times Publishing, 1998.)