The Danny Kaye Show — 1946

Betty Hutton guests. The two of them spend the half-hour on a plan to appear together in a serious picture -- an unlikely pairing, which is the joke.

The conceit is that Kaye has been booked as a guest on his own program. The sketch sends up Mr. Anthony's "Court of Human Relations."

The show goes out from Milwaukee, honoring the city's hundredth anniversary, with Helen Jepson guesting. Kaye sings "Minnie the Moocher," "Frim Fram Sauce" and "Poor Jenny," and works "Jack and Jill" up into an opera.

Ann Sothern arrives with a proposition: she wants Kaye on Broadway alongside her. "Molly Malone" is the song.

The broadcast opens on a bulletin about the steel strike. Danny then hunts for an interpreter to help him talk to guest Carmen Miranda, and the two sing an extended duet in which neither one's Portuguese comes out ahead. They reprised it on the AFRS Command Performance of June 30, 1946.

Orson Welles opens the show before Kaye is on the air, sparring with an "average radio listener" who first mistakes him for Kaye and then heckles him. Welles explains that he has come to give Kaye pointers on making the right Hollywood social contacts, and offers a sample in prose so ornate that when the listener asks what it means he admits he has no idea -- only that he read it beautifully. Kaye enters on his scat signature; Georgia Gibbs sings "Come to Baby, Do." The company then cashes in Kaye's long-running Irish gag as "The Wife of O'Reilly," the sketch that gives the show its title and the longest block on the running order, after which Kaye takes "McNamara's Band" and he and Welles close by playing "Julius Caesar" as a Hollywood musical.

Jean Hersholt guests as Dr. Christian and the whole company queues up to be looked over -- Kaye among them, convinced he has turned into a horse. Georgia Gibbs sings.

George Jessel guests. The two of them turn up first as a pair of songwriters starving in Tin Pan Alley, and later as "The Dolly Brothers."

The radio quiz shows get the treatment, with Joan Blondell guesting and Kenny Delmar on hand in his running role as "the average radio listener."

Guest Billie Burke throws a party, Kaye is drawn into a parlor game there, and he sings "Bali Boogie." Kenny Delmar is again "the average radio listener."

Basil Rathbone guests and the two of them stage "Julius Caesar" as a Hollywood musical. Part of the broadcast was reused afterwards on the Armed Forces program "To The Rear March."