It Pays to Be Ignorant
The Show That Turned Stupidity Into a Format
The idea behind It Pays to Be Ignorant was simple and deliberately perverse: take the intellectual quiz show — the format that Information, Please and The Quiz Kids had made respectable — and build a show where the experts never, ever get anything right. Creator Bob Howell, program director at WELI in New Haven, had long believed the genre was ripe for lampooning. He sketched out the premise as "a board of experts who are dumber than you are and can prove it," then handed the outline to Ruth Howard, an aspiring scriptwriter who happened to be the daughter of vaudevillian Tom Howard. She developed it into a full script, originally calling it Crazy Quiz. The final title — It Pays to Be Ignorant — came from Ann Honeycutt, who also helped sell the show to its first sponsor with Tom Howard in the starring role.
When the show debuted on Mutual on June 25, 1942, originating from WOR in New York and sponsored by Piel's Beer, critics were not kind. Those who admitted to a grudging laugh still gave it no hope for survival, calling it too corny and too loaded with irrelevancies and chaos. They were wrong. The show ran for more than nine years across three networks, outlasted the programs it mocked, and earned ratings that put it ahead of Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby, and Groucho Marx in its peak seasons.
The Panel and How the Chaos Worked
Everything depended on the three panelists, and the casting was essentially a vaudeville reunion. Tom Howard — born Thomas Black Jr. on June 16, 1885, in County Tyrone, Ireland, and brought to the United States when he was eleven months old — had been in show business since 1905, working the Columbia and American burlesque circuits, earning Broadway credits that included a Flo Ziegfeld production (Smiles, 1930) at $1,100 a week, and teaming with George Shelton for years of comedy shorts for Paramount and Educational Pictures. As host and quizmaster, Howard held the whole thing together with a gravel voice and a straight-faced dedication to feeding the madness.
George Shelton, born March 4, 1884, in New York City, had teamed with Howard in vaudeville before their screen work together. On It Pays to Be Ignorant, his character was a working-class everyman, and his stock contribution was the line "I used to work in that town" — delivered in response to nearly any question regardless of subject. Harry McNaughton, British-born in 1896, had spent a decade playing Bottle the Butler on Phil Baker's radio shows. On the panel, he played a snobbish, put-upon Englishman whose running move was to announce "I have a poem, Mr. Howard," then recite something predictably simplistic. Whenever Howard mentioned anything unpleasant, McNaughton would pivot with "Now we're back to Miss McConnell again."
Lulu McConnell, born April 8, 1882, in Kansas City, Missouri, was the most extreme personality on the panel. She had come up through church socials, repertory theatre, and the vaudeville circuit, where she and her husband Grant Simpson built an act that eventually moved to Broadway. She attributed her distinctive sawblade voice to a bout of stage fright at the Alhambra Theatre in 1910, when she rasped through a performance and found the audience approved. When Tom Howard recruited her in 1942, she was semi-retired at sixty. On the show, Howard introduced her with insults — "the woman whose face looks as if she'd been on a sightseeing tour through a meat grinder" — and she gave as good as she got. Whenever a male guest from the audience drew a question from the dunce cap, McConnell's standard move was to call out, "Hey, honey, are you married?"
The episode format opened with warm-up jokes between Howard and the panel — "Do married men live longer than single men?" / "No, it only seems longer." — before moving to three or four main questions. Questions came both from Howard and from audience guests who drew slips from a dunce cap; some had the answer embedded in the question itself, like "What town in Massachusetts had the Boston Tea Party?" The panelists' job was to avoid answering at all costs, through tangents, crosstalk, mock-poems, and sheer noise. Howard closed every episode with "Good night, and good nonsense."
The Writing Behind the Nonsense
Bob Howell and Ruth Howard married and co-wrote the show together. Howell died in 1944, after which Ruth Howard carried the writing alone, with Tom Howard editing scripts to keep the gags flowing without pause. Howard's son Tom Howard Jr., also a radio writer, contributed to the show after Howell's death, and the panelists themselves — Shelton, McConnell, and McNaughton — had a hand in developing material as well. The show also parodied Doctor I.Q. in its opening, widening its target beyond just the intellectual quiz format.
Howard's own summation of the premise was characteristically blunt: "If you're waiting for the program to improve, you don't know us." A Time magazine piece around the Mutual debut described him as having spent forty years offering knockabout comedy, and quoted him saying "Radio is nothing but a big medicine show." It was an accurate description of what the show delivered, week after week.
The Network Years and the Ratings That Surprised Everyone
After a brief hiatus during the original Mutual run, the show returned to Mondays on March 29, 1943, finished out its Mutual stay on February 28, 1944, and jumped to CBS three days earlier than that date suggests — February 25, 1944. Philip Morris came on as sponsor and stayed through the 1947–48 season, and during that stretch the show built an audience that nobody at the start would have predicted.
The numbers from the 1946–47 season are worth noting: It Pays to Be Ignorant rated 9.9 that year, beating Information, Please (7.9) and Quiz Kids (7.3) — the exact programs it had been built to parody. When Philip Morris moved the show to 10:00 p.m. on September 20, 1946, it broke into the Friday-night Top Ten for the next two seasons. At its peak the show drew a 17.3 rating in January of one CBS season, with a seasonal average of 14.3 that outpaced Eddie Cantor at 14.0, Bing Crosby at 13.9, Jimmy Durante at 13.9, Groucho Marx at 13.0, and Abbott and Costello at 10.4. The final Philip Morris broadcast produced the show's highest CBS rating — a 17.4 — against competition that included NBC's Mystery Theater, the Friday Night Fights on Blue, and Mutual's Meet the Press.
Philip Morris dropped the show at the end of the 1947–48 season, replacing it with Call for Music starring Dinah Shore, Johnny Mercer, and the Harry James Orchestra — which fell to a 10.9 rating for the rest of that season. The switch wasn't quiet: a March 7, 1947 episode had featured Milton Berle appearing on-air to announce Philip Morris was moving its sponsorship to the Berle show. During the Philip Morris era, the iconic bellhop Johnny Roventini also joined the announcing staff, delivering his trademark "Call for Phillip Morrrrrriiiiisss" and handling guest and prize announcements.
After Philip Morris left, the show became a schedule nomad on CBS — Saturday nights as a spot carrier through 1948, then Sunday nights at 10:30 starting January 1949. The CBS radio run ended September 13, 1949, though the show returned for a summer CBS run on Wednesdays from July 5 through September 27, 1950, that time with Chrysler as the sponsor.
Radio, Television, and a British Version
The show's crossover into television happened in stages. In December 1948, a one-reel RKO comedy short with the original cast served as a television audition. The original radio cast then brought the show to CBS television, where it aired from June 6 through September 19, 1949 — running simultaneously with the radio version on Sunday nights. McConnell wore outlandish hats and garish costumes as part of her visual character during the TV run.
The NBC chapter came in the summer of 1951, when the show served as a 13-week replacement for You Bet Your Life on both NBC radio and television, beginning July 4. John Guedel, producer of the Groucho Marx show, and sponsor DeSoto arranged the substitution. The NBC television version featured Tom Howard in an elaborate cap-and-gown outfit; a surviving 1951 episode exists at the Library of Congress in the J. Fred and Leslie W. MacDonald Collection, complete with DeSoto automobile commercials. The NBC run ended September 26, 1951, closing out the original radio era.
The show also crossed the Atlantic. The BBC adapted the format as Ignorance Is Bliss, which debuted on the Light Programme on April 1, 1946, with Stewart MacPherson as host and panelists Harold Berens, Gladys Hay, and Michael Moore, produced by Pat Dixon. That version ran through at least 1953.
A television revival in 1973–74, produced by Stefan Hatos–Monty Hall Productions and syndicated beginning September 10, 1973, brought the format back with Joe Flynn — best known as Captain Binghamton on ABC's McHale's Navy — as host, and Jo Anne Worley and Charles Nelson Reilly among the panelists. Flynn died July 19, 1974, shortly after the revival ended production, not long after completing voice work for the Disney film The Rescuers. Jackie Gleason had also produced a spoof of the It Pays to Be Ignorant television format in the mid-1950s, which speaks to how recognizable the show's structure had become.
At least 69 radio episodes are known to survive, and three are held by the UCLA Film and Television Archive alongside television episodes from both the 1951 NBC run and the 1973–74 syndicated revival. Tom Howard died February 27, 1955; Lulu McConnell followed in 1962, Harry McNaughton in 1967, and George Shelton in 1971. The show they built — dismissed on arrival, then improbably durable — outlasted its critics by several decades.