Groucho Marx

I think it's about time to announce that I was born at a very early age.

Julius Henry Marx (2 October 1890 – 19 August 1977), known as Groucho Marx, was an American comedian and actor known as a member of the Marx Brothers comedy act and for his solo film and television career.

Quotes

I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.

I get credit all the time for things I never said.

• A likely story — and probably true.
  • The Al Jolson Show repartee following a trite, scripted Al Jolson joke. (1949)^{[specific citation needed]}

• Although it is generally known, I think it's about time to announce that I was born at a very early age.
  • From his autobiography Groucho and Me (1959)

• I sent the club a wire stating, "PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER".
  • Telegram to the Friar's Club of Beverly Hills to which he belonged, as recounted in Groucho and Me (1959), p. 321
• [Variant:] "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member".
  • As quoted in The Groucho Letters (1967) by Arthur Sheekman. The sentiment predates Marx by 61 years, however; it likely originated with John Galsworthy in The Forsyte Saga. In Part I, Chapter II, "Old Jolyon Goes to the Opera", it's said of Old Jolyon that, "He naturally despised the Club that did take him." after another refused him because he was in a trade.
  • See also (in en)I Don’t Want to Belong to Any Club That Will Accept Me as a Member, Quote Investigator, 18 April 2011, Wikidata Q114669932 

• No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend.
  • From his book Groucho and Me. It is a variation of a maxim by 17th-century French nobleman François de La Rochefoucauld: "In the adversity of our best friends, we often find something that is not displeasing." (Maxim 99 from Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims, 1665 edition.)

• Here's to our wives and girlfriends... may they never meet!^{[citation needed]} (Variation on an old Royal Navy wardroom toast: "Wives and Sweethearts! May they never meet!"^{[citation needed]})

• From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it.
  • To S. J. Perelman about his book Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge (1929), as quoted in LIFE (9 February 1962)

• I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.
  • Quote by Leo Rosten in The Many Worlds of Leo Rosten (1964)

• They say Allen got something from the Marx Brothers. He got nothing. Maybe twenty years ago, he might have been inspired. Today he's an original. The best, the funniest.
  • On Woody Allen, in an interview with Roger Ebert in Esquire magazine (7 March 1972)

• I got $25 from Reader's Digest last week for something I never said. I get credit all the time for things I never said. You know that line in You Bet Your Life? The guy says he has seventeen kids and I say: "I smoke a cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally"? I never said that.
  • Interview with Roger Ebert in Esquire magazine (7 March 1972); see Snopes.com: "I Love My Cigar"

• I like pancakes, but I haven't got a closet full of them!
  • Groucho's reputed response during one of You Bet Your Life episodes referred to in the above quote.

• I did a bond tour during the Second World War... We were raising money, and we played Boston and Philadelphia and most of the big cities. And we got to Minneapolis. There wasn't any big theater to play there, so we did our show in a railroad station. Then I told the audience that I knew a girl in Minneapolis. She was also known in St.Paul, she used to come over to visit me. She was known as "The Tail Of Two Cities." I didn't sell any more bonds, but eh... they didn't allow me to appear anymore.
  • Recounting a War Bonds tour in his Carnegie Hall appearance (6 May 1972)^{[specific citation needed]}

• My experience is that people are most likely to listen to reason when in bed.
  • Liner notes of An Evening With Groucho (1972) the recording of his appearance at Carnegie Hall.

• Years ago, I tried to top everybody, but I don't anymore. I realized it was killing conversation. When you're always trying for a topper you aren't really listening. It ruins communication.
  • The Groucho Phile (1976), p. 308

• I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.
  • As quoted in Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion (1984) by Leslie Halliwell

• To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx.
  • Just after completing his second autobiography, as quoted in The Marx Brothers: A Bio-bibliography (1987) by Wes D. Gehring, p. 137

• Die, my dear? Why that's the last thing I'll do!
  • Last words^{[citation needed]}
  • Lord Palmerston had similar last words in 1865: "Die, my dear doctor! That's the last thing I shall do!"^{[citation needed]}

Misattributed

• I don't have a photograph. I'd give you my footprints, but they're upstairs in my socks.
  • From at least as early as 1977 (e.g. "Comedy's King Leer," Newsweek, 29 Aug 1977, p. 44), this has frequently been characterized as a real-life response given by Marx himself to enquiring reporters; in fact, it's a slight variation on this scripted passage—"Why ... I haven't got one. I could give you my footprints, but they're upstairs in my socks."—from A Day at the Races (1937), as found in A Day at the Races : Screenplay by Robert Pirosh, George Seaton and George Oppenheimer (1972), p. 29

• I've been around so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.
  • Apparently said by Oscar Levant: "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin" (as quoted in The Wit and Wisdom of Hollywood (1972) by Max Wilk).

• Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
  • No known citation to Marx. First appears unattributed in mid-1960s logic/computing texts as an example of the difficulty of machine parsing of ambiguous statements.  Google Books.  The Yale Book of Quotations (2006) dates the attribution to Marx to a 9 July 1982 net.jokes post on Usenet, although it has not been possible to locate a matching post in the Google Groups archives.

• Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
  • As per research conducted by Quote Investigator, more than 25 years before its first in-print attribution to Marx, on April 5, 1973 (as "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. That's because inside a dog it's too dark to read"), the first appearance of this quote—as "Outside a horse, a book is man's best friend—inside it's too dark to read"—occurred in a May 31, 1947 newspaper column, where it is attributed to jockey Ted Atkinson.

• Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.
  • Variant: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
  • Apparently attributed to Marx in Bennett Cerf's Try and Stop Me, first published in 1944.  A citation of this can been seen in the Kentucky New Era on November 9, 1964.  Also attributed to Marx by Rand Paul in "The Long Stand," ch. 1 of Taking a Stand: Moving Beyond Partisan Politics to Unite America (New York, N. Y.: Center Street, 26 May 2015), p. 5.
  • The original quotation belongs to Sir Ernest Benn (Henry Powell Spring, What is Truth?, Orange Press, 1944, p. 31); a first known citation reportedly appears in the Springfield (MA) Republican on July 27, 1930.

Quotes about Marx

• Some years back, after a childhood of preoccupation with comedy that led me to observing the styles of all the great comedians, I came to the conclusion that Groucho Marx was the best comedian this country ever produced. Now I am more convinced than ever that I was right. I can't think of a comedian who combined a totally original physical conception that was hilarious with a matchless verbal delivery. I believe there is a natural inborn greatness in Groucho that defies close analysis as it does with any genuine artist. He is simply unique in the same way that Picasso or Stravinsky are, and I believe his outrageous unsentimental disregard for order will be equally as funny a thousand years from now.
  In addition to all this, he makes me laugh.
  • Woody Allen on the liner notes of An Evening With Groucho (1972)

• I admit it's not original, Mr. Marx. It's a line you used in Horse Feathers, which I assumed you ad-libbed. You didn't get a laugh with it either.
  • Irving Brecher, c. 1938, responding to Marx's harsh assessment of the first words uttered to him by the then 19-year-old Brecher (i.e. "Meeting you is like a dream come true"); as quoted in "Marx Brothers Revolutionized Early Years of Film Comedy" by Brecher, Asbury Park Press (October 8, 1979), p. B3

• Groucho appeals on so many levels at once that you could go nuts trying to figure out whether it's the funny movement, the incomparable tone of voice, what he is saying, or that keenly witty face that hits you the hardest. I swear that if he never existed, we would sense a lack in the world of comedy, like that planet in the solar system that astronomers say Ought to be there.
  For me he is The Master.
  • Dick Cavett on the liner notes of An Evening With Groucho (1972)

• Groucho Marx is the only actor I ever allowed to ad-lib in a show I wrote. That was because I couldn't stop him.
  • George S. Kaufman on the liner notes of An Evening With Groucho (1972)

• George Kaufman and I wrote a lot of funny lines for Groucho, some of which he occasionally used... but it was Groucho who by his innate sense of timing and his inimitable delivery, added the ingredient that brought the house down.
  • Morrie Ryskind on the liner notes of An Evening With Groucho (1972)

External links

• Groucho Marx on IMDb
• The Marx Brothers
• Snopes.com "The Secret Words"
• Groucho Marx Old Time Radio Mp3s from Archive.org