This article is about the American comedian. For the rugby coach, see Fred Allen (rugby coach)

Highly literate and often absurdist, Allen's topical humour is thought an acquired taste for audiences curious about his generation of radio stars. But others find many parallels to today's world and absurdities. The "Allen's Alley" stereotypes make some cringe, but others find them lancing more than lauding stereotypes, letting listeners make up their own minds about how foolish they could be. "Interestingly enough," wrote Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, in The Big Broadcast 1920-1950, "Claghorn, Nussbaum, Moody, and Cassidy were never criticised as being anti-Southern, anti-Semitic, anti-New England, or anti-Irish. The warmth and good humour with which they were presented made them acceptable even to the most sensitive listeners."

Allen was probably his own best writer; he employed a staff (including the future author of The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk), but they served as his sounding boards and early draft consultants as much as actual writers. Allen himself worked as long as twelve hours a day on ideas and sketches. And his ad-libbing was so skilled that many a surviving show fades away behind the ending network identification, because Allen often ate up air time. It was not as unusual for him as for others to sign off with, "We're a little late, so good night, folks." Buxton and Owen believed the Allen show needed it more than anyone else of their era.

After his own show ended, Allen became a regular attraction on NBC's The Big Show (1950–1952), hosted by Tallulah Bankhead. He appeared on 24 of the show's 57 installments, including the landmark premiere, and showed he had not lost his trademark ad-lib skill or his rapier wit. In some ways, The Big Show was an offspring of the old Allen show: his one-time Texaco Star Theater announcer, Jimmy Wallington, was one of The Big Show's announcers, and Portland Hoffa made several appearances with him as well. On the show's premiere, in fact, Allen — with a little prodding from head writer Goodman Ace — could not resist one more play on the old Allen-Benny "feud," a riotous parody of Benny's show called "The Pinch Penny Program."

It was also on The Big Show's premiere that Allen delivered perhaps his best-remembered crack about television: "You know, television is called a new medium, and I have discovered why they call it a medium — because nothing is well done." This jaundiced TV eye proved a bigger influence on the medium than his cynicism would have suggested. The Museum of Broadcast Communications considers Allen "the intellectual conscience of television." Aside from his famous crack about not liking furniture that talked, Allen observed that television allowed "people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything."

Allen tried three short-lived television projects of his own, including a bid to bring "Allen's Alley" to television in a visual setting similar to Our Town. It never saw the light of day; NBC apparently rejected the idea out of hand. "Television is a triumph of equipment over people," Allen observed after that, "and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in the navel of a flea and still have enough room beside them for a network vice president." His other two short-lived tries were a quiz show (Judge For Yourself, developed to allow him to ad-lib with guests a la Groucho Marx; "lost in the confusion of a half hour filled with too many people and too much activity," wrote analyst Alan Havig); and, a comedy, Fred Allen's Sketchbook. Allen finally held down a two-year stint as a panelist on the CBS quiz show What's My Line? from 1954 until his death in 1956 (March 17, 1956).

Allen also spent his final years as a newspaper columnist/humorist and as a memoirist, renting a small New York office to work six hours a day without distractions. He wrote Treadmill to Oblivion (1954, reviewing his radio and television years) and Much Ado About Me (1956, covering his childhood and his vaudeville and Broadway years, and detailing especially vaudeville at its height with surprising objectivity); the former — which included many of his vintage radio scripts — was the best-selling book on radio's classic period for many years.

But before he finished the final chapter completely (the book was published as the author had left it), Allen took one of his regular midnight walks on West 57th Street, in New York City, on the night of St. Patrick's Day, 1956 — and suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 61 years old. (A myth for many years was that he died walking his dog, but his biographer Robert Taylor revealed Allen had never owned a dog.) A tireless (and funny) letter writer, Allen's letters were edited by his wife into the publication of Fred Allen's Letters in 1965.

Allen is buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York and has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: a radio star on 6709-1/2 Hollywood B and a TV star on 7021 Hollywood Blvd. His widow, Portland Hoffa, re-married in 1959, to bandleader Joe Rimes, and celebrated a second silver wedding anniversary well before her own death of natural causes in Los Angeles on Christmas Day, 1990. Hoffa also has a star on the Walk of Fame as well.

Fred Allen was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1988.