November 22, 1943: Broadway Wit and Wartime Trivia with Russell Crouse & Moss Hart

In this November 22, 1943 episode of Information Please, Clifton Fadiman quizzes regulars John Kieran and Franklin P. Adams alongside special guests Russell Crouse and Moss Hart—fresh from Broadway hits and wartime stages—for a brisk, funny hour of brainy parlor sport. Highlights include year-matching puzzles spanning Washington’s inauguration to Dempsey–Willard, debates over Fulton’s steamboat lore, and a gangster suite from Blind Alley to Brother Orchid and The Earl of Chicago. The panel riffs on etymology (from “hussy” to “coquette”), psychiatry-by-song (“I Love Me,” “Sometimes I’m Happy,” “I Ain’t Got Nobody”), and billiards terms in verse. Wartime flavor runs through musical clues to aircraft (Zero, Corsair, Thunderbolt, Hurricane, and the Soviet Stormovik), color similes in poetry, and “last lines” lightning rounds touching Rain, The Show-Off, and Kaufman & Hart’s Once in a Lifetime. They even decode service slang—topside, upstairs, and “going over”—and nod to stage tunes from Lady in the Dark and Oklahoma, with timely Thanksgiving asides from the Heinz mic.