Joy Boys
comedy Radio show
The Joy Boys was a popular daily improvised comedy radio show in Washington, D.C., between 1955 and 1974 that launched the co-hosts Willard Scott and Ed Walker. The two did various skits and satirized prominent people of the day, such as Scott's character "Arthur Codfish" (mocking Arthur Godfrey). They both regularly parodied NBC-TV's Huntley-Brinkley Report with their own zany "Washer-Dryer Report". Walker told an interviewer years later that the duo imitated some 20 voices in all.
Scott and Walker teamed as co-hosts on AM station WRC, the NBC-owned-and-operated station in Washington, beginning July 11, 1955. Initially, the program was titled Two at One and aired at 1 p.m. The term Joy Boys originated when they adopted a brief song of that title, set to the "Billboard March" as their theme music:
We are the Joy Boys, of radio,
We chase electrons to and fro-o-o-o...
Later, the Joy Boys became a nightly feature at 7 p.m. on WRC. In a 1999 article recalling the Joy Boys at the height of their popularity in the mid-1960s, The Washington Post said they "dominated Washington, providing entertainment, companionship, and community to a city on the verge of powerful change". One of their many running gags was "As the Worm Turns", a spoof of the television soap opera, As the World Turns.
The public source identifies “Joy Boys” as comedy Radio show. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Boys, comedy and Radio.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joy Boys” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.