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. 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". 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.

Both Hulick and Taylor were working as staff announcers for WMAK in Buffalo. They came together as a team on the morning of October 10, 1930, when a transmitter failure kept the station from receiving the scheduled network programming. Hulick, then on the air, rushed into the corridor, found Taylor, and asked him to help fill the air time. Taylor grabbed a portable organ, and Hulick and Taylor took the microphone for the next 23 minutes, delivering a barrage of spontaneous, impromptu patter. Hulick addressed Taylor as "Colonel Stoopnagle" while Taylor played "I Love Coffee, I Love Tea" and other selections on the organ. The audience responded with so much enthusiasm that the duo's goofiness became a regular half-hour feature on WMAK. Taylor and Hulick, known variously as either "Stoopnagle and Budd", "The Colonel and Budd", or "The Gloom Chasers", generated such local interest that they moved to WMAK's sister station WKBW for a primetime evening slot, for two reasons according to Taylor: their morning show couldn't be heard by businessmen at work, and these same businessmen complained that it kept their wives from their housekeeping. Within a year they were headed for New York City. Taylor resigned his vice presidency at the brokerage in 1931 to devote himself to show business full time.

The Gloom Chasers went national on the CBS network on May 24, 1931, sponsored by Tastyeast candy bars. Taylor, spouting Spoonerisms, became known under the full name Colonel Lemuel Q. Stoopnagle as the partners appeared in several different formats on CBS, including some early, experimental television broadcasts, creating a variety of voices for their crazy characters, addlepated antics, and wacky interviews. Typical of the Colonel's whimsical remarks: "If it weren't for half the people in the United States, the other half would be all of them", "Stoopnocracy is peachy", and "People have more fun than anybody". The announcer on their early 1930s shows was Louis Dean (1874–1933).

For many years a rumor circulated that novelist Robert Bloch was a scriptwriter for the program, but Bloch stated that he only sold the team a few gags shortly after he graduated from high school.

NBC president Pat Weaver recalled how the two zanies "used to come into my office and, while we talked, lick my supply of stamps, one after another, and flip them up to stick on the ceiling. There was a knack to it that I never mastered, but they carried it off with amazing success. By the end of the summer my ceiling was virtually papered with stamps."

Stoopnagle and Budd made five appearances in motion pictures, all filmed in New York. The first two were filmed at the Vitaphone studio in Brooklyn: Rambling 'Round Radio Row #1 (1932), and a two-reel musical comedy Sky Symphony (1933). They filmed a brief segment for Paramount with the Colonel demonstrating his newest inventions, including "a revolving goldfish bowl for tired goldfish". It was thought that this sequence had been intended for one of the studio's Hollywood on Parade shorts, but it was in fact filmed especially for the all-star feature film International House (1933). Director Eddie Sutherland flew from Hollywood to New York to stage the scene, which was filmed at Paramount's east coast studio at Astoria, Long Island.