Stoopnagle and Budd were a popular radio comedy team of the 1930s, who are sometimes cited as forerunners of the Bob and Ray style of radio comedy. Along with Raymond Knight (The Cuckoo Hour), they were radio's first satirists.
Frederick Chase Taylor (October 4, 1897 – May 28, 1950) was Stoopnagle. The great-grandson of British-born Aaron Lovecraft of Rochester, New York, and a second cousin once removed of author H. P. Lovecraft, he was related to Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. Taylor was born in Buffalo, New York; he attended the University of Rochester and served in the U. S. Naval Reserve. Taylor seldom used his given name and was usually addressed by his middle name; he signed his name F. Chase Taylor. As a young man, Taylor had worked in his father Horace Taylor's lumber business, and entered the world of finance while in his twenties.[1] He was a vice president in a Buffalo brokerage but he had always found the pressures of business to be stifling, and he became interested in radio. He kept his brokerage job while working nights for Buffalo station WMAK (now WBEN).
Wilbur Budd Hulick (November 14, 1905 – March 22, 1961) was Budd. Like Taylor, Hulick used his middle name, which he adopted as a stage name. He was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1929 and joined bandleader Johnny Johnson as vocalist. The engagement was short-lived; the adverse business conditions of 1929–30 forced the orchestra to disband temporarily, and Hulick then worked for a telegraph company until his department "was wiped out".[2] Hulick took a job as a drugstore soda jerk, and his running patter for his customers amused a radio executive in Buffalo, New York, who hired Hulick on the spot.