right|thumb|350px|[[Don Ameche and Frances Langford as John and Blanche Bickerson.]]
The Bickersons was a series of radio and television comedy sketches which began in 1946 on NBC radio.
Radio origins
The Bickersons was created by Philip Rapp, the one-time Eddie Cantor writer who had also created the Fanny Brice skits (for The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air and Maxwell House Coffee Time) that grew into radio's Baby Snooks. Several years after the latter established itself as a long-running favorite, Rapp developed and presented John and Blanche Bickerson, first as a 15-minute situational sketch as part of the 1946 half-hour radio program Drene Time, then as a short sketch on The Old Gold Show and later, on The Chase and Sanborn Hour
<blockquote>Blanche... is one of the monstrous shrews of all time. She makes her husband... take two jobs, a total of 16 working hours, in order to bring in more money which she squanders on minks and the stock market. Meanwhile, he can't afford a new pair of shoes and goes around with his feet painted black. In the few hours he has to sleep, she heckles him all night with the accusation that he doesn't love her. Her aim appears to be to drive her husband crazy and she succeeds very nicely. The harassed John's only weapon is insult, at which he's pretty good.</blockquote>
Dialogue
As transcribed by John Crosby in his May 1948 column, this was a typical Bickersons exchange:
In The Proposal, the lead character Margaret Tate describes her quarrelsome dynamic with her pretend fiancée Andrew Paxton as that of “the Bickering Bickersons”.