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Serious-minded professor Timoleon Zanders Post yearns for the carefree life that his students enjoy, but he's too timid to change.  His kindly butler Jenkins decides to help the professor by showing him a phony letter saying that Post has just inherited $750,000.  Relieved that he no longer has to scrimp and save, Post immediately withdraws his savings and embarks on an adventure.  Though Jenkins soon worries that he did the wrong thing, Post's superior at the college, Dr. Rayburn, tells Jenkins that it's the best thing that could have happened to the repressed young professor.

At the train station, Post meets a troupe of vaudevillians and is immediately smitten with one of the performers, Pansy Peets.  She is impressed with his politeness and intellectual conversation and asks him to write to her.  He also strikes up a friendship with James Dodd, the act's comic.  After being stranded at the train's next stop, Post goes to see the troupe's act and is so impressed that he decides to finance a Broadway show for them.

They then go to Broadway and start rehearsals, under the direction of Rayburn, who is frustrated by the troupe's monumental lack of talent.  Rayburn then hires Eleanor Espere, a blonde bombshell, who takes an interest in Post and convinces the naive professor that it is customary for the star to give the show's owner the key to her apartment and expect him to pay the rent.

On the night before the show opens, Eleanor lures Post to her apartment, dons a flimsy negligee and gives him a cocktail. He becomes slightly intoxicated and soon begins mixing his own concoctions.  Several hours later, both he and Eleanor are so drunk that they can hardly stand and innocently wind up spending the night together in her bedroom.

In the morning, when they awaken, Eleanor accuses Post of taking advantage of her, and pretends to be shocked when "her brother" knocks on the door.  Actually, the man is a friend of Eleanor's whom she has asked to come at the right moment to blackmail Post into proposing to her.  Fortunately for Post, when Pansy and James realize where Post has been all night, James rushes over to Eleanor's and switches places with his friend.

That morning, a lawyer arrives at the theatre and tells James that the professor's inheritance is nonexistent, and that several bill collectors are threatening to close the show before it opens.  Hoping to prevent this, James tries to keep Post away from the theater so he can't be served with any injunctions.  Nothing works, however, and all through the performance Post keeps stumbling onto the stage.  Despite Rayburn's near hysteria at Post's interruptions, the audience thinks that he is the star of the show and laughs uproariously.  Realizing that the show is a hit, a big Broadway producer offers Post $100,000 for half interest in the show and the bill collector happily goes away.  Finally, when Eleanor sees Post kissing Pansy, he is compelled to explain the situation by resorting to the unscholarly phrase, "Nuts to you!"