Can You Top This?

Can You Top This? is a popular radio panel show in which comedians told jokes. The unrehearsed program, sponsored at one point by Colgate-Palmolive, was created by veteran vaudevillian "Senator" Edward Ford, who claimed he was taking part in a joke session at a New York theatrical club when he conceived the idea. However, the format was quite similar to a prior joke-telling radio series, Stop Me If You've Heard This One, which featured Ford and cartoonist Harry Hershfield as panelists. Many jokes involved ethnic humor told in dialect. Listeners contributed approximately 3,000 jokes a week. Host Peter Donald told the best of these jokes, each one centered around a different topic, while a "laugh meter" took note of the audience reaction. The "Knights of the Clown Table" - Ford, Hershfield and Joe Laurie, Jr. - attempted to top listeners with their own jokes, which sometimes presented an extra challenge as their jokes had to be pertinent to the topic. Any submission used on the program received ten dollars. Each time a panelist failed to top Peter Donald's joke, an additional five dollars was added, so a listener could potentially win as much as $25, though on many occasions Donald's jokes would score perfect 1000s which would guarantee the top prize to the submitter regardless of how the rest of the panel fared. Further, listeners were also given phonograph recordings of Peter Donald telling their jokes on the air. The panelists claimed that together they knew over 15,000 jokes.