John Sigvard "Ole" Olsen (November 6, 1892 – January 26, 1963) and Harold Ogden "Chic" Johnson (March 5, 1891 – February 26, 1962) were American comedians of vaudeville, radio, the Broadway stage, motion pictures and television. Their shows were noted for their crazy blackout gags and orchestrated mayhem ("anything can happen, and it probably will"). Their most famous concept, Hellzapoppin, has become show-business shorthand for freewheeling, anything-goes comedy. Comedy teams traditionally had a straight man and a stooge. However, Olsen and Johnson both took on the comic role, goodnaturedly chuckling their way through the steady barrage of gunshots, explosions, props plummeting to earth, intrusions from other performers, and input from the audience. Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson began as musical entertainers: Olsen played the violin and Johnson played ragtime piano. They met in 1914 when Olsen hired Johnson to replace the pianist in his College Four quartet. Ole and Chic hit it off immediately and joined forces for a vaudeville act. No joke was too old, no song too corny for Ole and Chic, and the two engaging comics became a minor sensation in the Midwest. Radio enlarged their audience and led to appearances in early talkie movies for Warner Bros. and two more minor features for Republic Pictures. The movies of the 1930s, though, were much too confining for Olsen and Johnson's special brand of nut humor. Ole and Chic recited their lines and played off each other well, but their scripts were too formal, leaving the team little room for their nonsensical comedy. During the summer of 1932, they were featured each week on NBC's (radio) Red Network's Fleischmann's Yeast Hour. Based on surviving samples, Rudy Vallee did not interact with them on-air. The intense and fast-paced segments were titled "The Padded Cell of the Air". As 1932 was a presidential election year, they nominated Mickey Mouse for president. The "Padded Cell" segments are clearly a predecessor of Hellzapoppin, the revue they mounted in 1938. Although Olsen and Johnson were a leading act in vaudeville, their greatest achievement was their "legitimate theater" production of Hellzapoppin. Assembled and produced by Olsen and Johnson, Hellzapoppin opened at New York's 46th Street Theatre on September 22, 1938, and ran for 1,404 performances, transferring to the Winter Garden Theatre mid-run. The show had its start in a revue called Monkey Business wherein the team began developing their signature style of observing and commenting on the lunacy taking place around them. The gags and comic premises were borrowed from classic variety entertainment, but Olsen and Johnson put an original spin on the material through their inspired improvisation in live performance. Described as a rule-breaking exercise in hysteria, Hellzapoppin was a comic amalgam of the best—or worst—of vaudeville and burlesque. It gloried in the broadest type of comedy, with no sketch too lowbrow to be included. Technically a musical because it included a score by lyricist Charles Tobias and composer Sammy Fain, it was best known for its crazy combination of comedy acts, which included clowns, midgets, and animals. Stylistically, the show consistently broke the fourth wall, using cast members planted in the audience or in the aisles, and zany audience-participation gags. It also made heavy use of prop comedy, including rubber snakes, breakaway pants and skirts, clotheslines filled with laundry, and even electric buzzers hidden inside some of the theater seats. Sophisticated Broadway audiences were unprepared for such chaos: stray props came out of nowhere, comic characters in the audience disrupted the action, Olsen and Johnson dashed on and off the stage in crazy costumes and indulged in cheerfully earthy humor, chorus girls lost their skirts, and vaudeville acts did their trick specialties. The show never played the same way twice. On some nights songs would be preempted by jokes, and on others jokes would be interrupted by songs.