Portal:Comedy/Selected article/29

Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel is a situation comedy radio show starring two of the Marx Brothers, Groucho and Chico, and written primarily by Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman. It was broadcast in the United States on the Blue Network between November 28, 1932, and May 22, 1933. Episodes were initially broadcast live from NBC's WJZ station in New York City, then later from Radio Pictures in Los Angeles, California, before returning to WJZ for the final episodes. The series depicts the misadventures of a small law firm, with Groucho as attorney Waldorf T. Flywheel and Chico as Flywheel's assistant, Emmanuel Ravelli. Many of the episodes' plots were drawn from the Marx Brothers' films. The show garnered respectable ratings for its early-evening time-slot though it did not return for a second season. The episodes were thought not to have been recorded, as was usual at the time, although the scripts were stored in the Library of Congress. In 1988, 25 of the 26 scripts were rediscovered and published, and a complete recording of the final episode was later found. Adaptations of the recovered scripts were performed before modern audiences and broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Radio 4 in 1990.