Monday Afternoon Diversion: Groucho Marx Being Groucho Marx

One urban legend about Groucho Marx goes is about an ad-libbed line he claims to have never said. According to the legend, when he was hosting the game show You Bet Your Life he asked a woman why she had nine kids. When the woman answered, "I love my husband," Groucho supposedly said, "I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while." Groucho long denied ever saying this.

Groucho Marx is on my list of four famous people I would love to have over for dinner, simply because he could cut through the conversational bullshit with his quick wit and lack of a censor between the brain and tongue. Honed by years of working on vaudeville stages and traveling road shows before he and his brothers found fame in the movies, You Bet Your Life never ran live because producers feared Groucho's loose cannon mouth and, slightly less so, because it gave him time to probe the contestants for funny exchanges.

Groucho also made a hilarious panelist, as this 1959 clip from the game show What's My Line proves. There are a couple of amazing lines here, First, Groucho says of the guest, a female professional wrestler, "Well you can't make a living by just being a blonde, although I've heard of a few who have." The second line, again, just cuts through the bullshit and lays it bare, putting forth the assumption that the guest may be a hooker. It's tame for this day and age, but the way Groucho manages to work past network censors and slay the audience is amazing.

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By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on January 2, 2012 3:00 PM 0 Comments

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Steve Stoliar

I was Groucho's personal secretary and archivist for the last 3 years of his life. One of my happy duties was helping out on the 1976 book about "You Bet Your Life" called "The Secret Word is Groucho." In the course of doing interviews for the book, the show's head writer, Bernie Smith, showed us a chart he'd kept of every contestant (!), how much they won (if any) and what the secret word was. Bernie said that when the show was still on radio - not yet on TV - Groucho DID ad-lib that line to a Mrs. Story from Bakersfield, who had a great many children. The line was excised before airtime - for obvious reasons - but it got a thunderclap of laughter from the audience, and that laughter was used - canned - for years. So he did say it, but people who claim to have "seen" it are either lying or misremembering it, because it was before the TV show and was censored anyway. I wrote about this - and a lot of other things - in my recently reissued memoir, RAISED EYEBROWS: MY YEARS INSIDE GROUCHO'S HOUSE. Best, Steve Stoliar