thumb|right|[[Kenny Delmar|Delmar as Claghorn in It's a Joke, Son!]] Senator Beauregard Claghorn was a popular fictional radio character on the "Allen's Alley" segment of The Fred Allen Show, beginning in 1945. Succeeding the vaguely similar but much less popular Senator Bloat from the earliest "Allen's Alley" routines, Senator Claghorn, portrayed by Allen's announcer Kenny Delmar, was a blustery Southern politician whose home was usually the first at which Allen would knock. Claghorn would typically answer the door with, "Somebody, ah say, somebody knocked! Claghorn's the name, Senator Claghorn, that is. I'm from the South. Suh."
Description
Claghorn had an unshakable obsession with the South, and would happily complain about the North in dry ways. For instance, the Senator refused to ever wear a "Union suit" or drive through the Lincoln Tunnel when he visited New York City, and he claimed to drink only out of Dixie cups. and suffered from poor box-office receipts, causing it to be pulled from some theaters after less than a week.
Delmar played a thinly veiled version of Claghorn, retitled Senator Hominy Smith, in the Broadway musical Texas Li'l Darlin. After Warner Bros. copyrighted Foghorn Leghorn, Delmar required the studio's permission to play the character elsewhere. In the 1960s, Delmar took his characterization and catchphrases back as the voice of the Hunter, a character on the animated series King Leonardo and His Short Subjects.
Dave Sim adopted the same speech patterns for Elrod the Albino, a character in his independent comic book Cerebus the Aardvark, but it is unknown whether the voice derived directly from Claghorn or from Foghorn Leghorn. Sim describes the character as "Elrod/Senator Claghorn" in the preface to the reprint of issue 51 in Cerebus Number Zero.
Sources
- Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.