A resident of mythical Senior City, crotchety old Aunt Maud (Pat McMahon) would ‘entertain’ the audience by reading ghastly ‘children’s stories’ that would end tragically for all involved. Some of the show’s most popular skits centered around Aunt Maud’s infatuation with Phoenix Police Officer Harry Florian, a regular guest on the show. “When I want an officer friend, I want someone with steely-grey, Barry Goldwater hair . . .”

Aunt Maud was one of the first regular characters on the show besides Wallace and Ladmo. “She” pre-dates Gerald, Boffo, Captain Super and Marshall Good. At first, she was the local celebrity gossip, with a regular column in the Phoenix-area TeeVee Magazine.

One of my personal favorites was Aunt Maud. I remember a story she told one day about a couple of kids named Jenny and Bobby. Jenny and Bobby’s mother won a trip to Las Vegas and never came back. When Aunt Maud told the story . . . in my childish mind, hearing that terrible story left me with a strange sense of comfort knowing that at least my mom probably wasn’t going to leave us.

-Brenda F.

Aunt Maud, I guess I could relate to because not that I had aunts reading me stories in real life, but I knew that her stories were so counter what you would normally get at bedtime. I understood them and I thought they were hysterical. Even at that tender age I could appreciate their sarcasm and their ludicrousness.

-Ken K.

AUNT MAUD’S STORYTIME

. . . today’s story: “The Quaint Little Cottage”

Once upon a time there was a quaint little cottage at the edge of the woods. And in this cottage lived an old hermit. Nearby, in a cave, lived an elderly lady. The nice elderly lady thought to herself “Something’s not right. I should be living in that quaint little cottage and that old hermit should be living here in this cave.” So she went over to ask the hermit about it, but he threw her off his property. Naturally, that didn’t stop the elderly lady. She snuck back late that night, tipped over his garbage cans, and decorated his yard with a roll of you-know-what paper. Next morning, when the old hermit woke up and saw what she had done, he rushed over to attack the elderly lady’s cave. He ran inside with grenades and a flame thrower, but the elderly lady wasn’t there. She had been hiding outside the entrance with a stack of bricks. She quickly sealed up the entrance with the bricks while the hermit was inside. A lot of muffled yelling could be heard, but after a few days it stopped. The elderly lady moved into the quaint little cottage and lived happily ever after. The moral of this story is . . . “Don’t mess with elderly ladies, especially if they got a stack of bricks.”

[FADE]

Wallace on Aunt Maud (2007)