Gracie Allen

"Gracie Allen transferred her popular fictional persona from vaudeville, film, and radio, to American television in the 1950s. Allen had performed with her husband and partner, George Burns, for nearly 30 years when the pair debuted in The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on CBS in October 1950. The Burns and Allen act, a classic vaudeville routine involving a "Dumb Dora" and a male straight-man, proved infinitely malleable.

The impetus to comedy within the program was the character portrayed by Allen. Her humor was almost entirely linguistic. Often an entire episode hinged on her confusion of antecedents in a sentence, as when the couple's announcer (who also took part in the program's narrative) informed her that Burns had worked with another performer until he (meaning the other performer) had married, moved to San Diego, and had two sons--at which point she concluded that her husband was a bigamist.

Allen's character challenged the rational order of things without ever actually threatening it.
The character's success on the program, and popularity with the viewing public, depended in large part on her total unawareness of the comic effects of her "zaniness." The onscreen Gracie was a sweet soul who on the surface embodied many of the feminine norms of the day--domesticity, reliance on her man, gentleness--even as she took symbolic pot shots at the gender order by subverting her husband's logical, masculine world. "