In 1904,
George McManus began his comic strip,
The Newlyweds, about a couple and their child, Baby Snookums. Brice began doing her Baby Snooks character in vaudeville, as she recalled in an interview shortly before her death: "I first did Snooks in 1912 when I was in vaudeville. At the time there was a juvenile actress named
Baby Peggy and she was very popular. Her hair was all curled and bleached and she was always in pink or blue. She looked like a strawberry ice cream soda. When I started to do Baby Snooks, I really was a baby, because when I think about Baby Snooks it's really the way I was when I was a kid. On stage, I made Snooks a caricature of Baby Peggy." Early on, Brice's character was sometimes called "Babykins." By 1934 she was wearing her baby costume while appearing on Broadway in the
Follies show. On February 29, 1936, Brice was scheduled to appear on the
Ziegfeld Follies of the Air, written and directed by
Philip Rapp in 1935–37. Rapp and his writing partner
David Freedman searched the closest bookcase, opened a public domain collection of sketches by
Robert Jones Burdette,
Chimes From a Jester’s Bells (1897), and adapted a humorous piece about a kid and his uncle, changing the boy to a girl named Snooks. Rapp continued to write the radio sketches when Brice played Snooks on the
Good News Show the following year. In 1940, she became a regular character on
Maxwell House Coffee Time, sharing the spotlight with actor
Frank Morgan, who sometimes did a crossover into the Snooks sketches. In 1944, the character was given her own show, and during the 1940s, it became one of the nation's favorite radio
situation comedies, with a variety of sponsors (
Post Cereals,
Sanka, Spic-n-Span,
Jell-O) being touted by a half-dozen announcers—John Conte, Tobe Reed, Harlow Willcox,
Dick Joy, Don Wilson and Ken Wilson. On screen, Brice portrayed Baby Snooks in the 1938 film
Everybody Sing in a scene with
Judy Garland as
Little Lord Fauntleroy.
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 Snooks returned full circle to the comics when comic book illustrator
Graham Ingels and his wife Gertrude named their son Robespierre (born 1946) after listening to Ledoux's child voice.
Danny Thomas was the "daydreaming postman" Jerry Dingle (1944–45), who imagined himself in other occupations, such as a circus owner or railroad conductor. Others in the cast were
Ben Alexander,
Elvia Allman,
Sara Berner,
Charlie Cantor, Ken Christy, Earl Lee,
Frank Nelson,
Lillian Randolph,
Alan Reed (as Mr. Weemish, Daddy's boss) and
Irene Tedrow. 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. 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 later, Fanny Brice had a cerebral hemorrhage, and the show ended with her death at age 59. One of the last shows in the series, "Report Card Blues" (May 1, 1951), is included in the CD set,
The 60 Greatest Old-time Radio Shows of the 20th Century (1999), introduced by
Walter Cronkite. Radio historian
Arthur Frank Wertheim recalls a few of the character's pranks: "…planting a bees' nest at her mother's club meeting, cutting her father's fishing line into little pieces, ripping the fur off her mother's coat, inserting marbles into her father's piano and smearing glue on her baby brother." 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." Nachman quoted
Variety critic Hobe Morrison: "Snooks was not nasty or mean, spiteful or sadistic. She was at heart a nice kid. Similarly, Daddy was harried and desperate and occasionally was driven to spanking his impish daughter. But Daddy wasn't ill-tempered or unkind with the kid. He wasn't a crab." 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. She also insisted on her script being printed in extremely large type so she could avoid having to use reading glasses when on the air live. She was self-conscious about wearing glasses in front of an audience and didn't believe they fit the Snooks image. By her own admission, Brice was a lackadaisical rehearser: "I can't do a show until it's on the air, kid," she was quoted as telling her writer/producer Everett Freeman. Yet she locked in tight when the show did go on—right down to Snooks-like "squirming, squinting, mugging, jumping up and down," as comedian
George Burns remembered. ==Television==