Groucho Marx was never more funny than in his autobiography, Groucho and Me. Here as some examples:
- If you write about yourself, the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.
- Although it is generally known, I think it’s about time to announce that I was born at a very early age.
- Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.
- The notion that Pop was a tailor was an opinion that was held only by him.
- Today, when foreign nations need money, they just tap the Treasury in Washington. But for Chico there was no such financial haven.
- His pipe could give any skunk in the land a lesson in pungency.
- My mother came from a small town in Germany, called Donum. It had a population of about three hundred. This included four cows that had accidentally strayed there from a neighboring town.
- When word reached him that he had been made my godfather, he dropped everything, including two aces he had up his sleeve, and quickly rushed over to our flat.
- Some day there will have to be some new rules established about name-calling. I don’t mean the routine cursing that goes on between husband and wife, but the naming of defenseless, unsuspecting babies.
- If you, dear reader, had any intelligence (which I doubt, otherwise you wouldn’t have been fool enough to buy this book…
- She {Groucho’s mother} had never heard of Hippocrates. The only oaths that were heard in my family were uttered by my father.
- Love is a many-splendored thing. I don’t quite now what this means, but song writers have to make a living, too.
- Putting on my best suit – which was also my worst suit and the only one I had…
- I was fifteen at the time, and knew as much about the world as the average retarded eight-year-old.
- If there was a Pullman car on the train we never knew it. And that goes for the dining car, as well. But I was fifteen and could have slept on a flagpole.
- I don’t know where dire straits is, but I certainly was now in the neighborhood.
- We had discovered early in life that steady and consistent lying was the only road to survival.
- There was also a cake of soap and, from the amount of lather it yielded, it must have been made of pure granite.
- A flourishing three-handed crap game was in full swing, and in the time it takes for a boy to go from a standing position to a kneeling one, the game had four players instead of three.
- Perhaps I’m not a comic. It’s not worth arguing about. At any rate, I have been making a good living masquerading as one.
- At that time {Groucho’s vaudeville days}, the actor’s position in society was somewhere between that of a gypsy fortune teller and a pickpocket.
- There were a few actors who would swipe anything they could stuff in a trunk. One actor was caught trying to get away with a midget who was part of another act.
- We were playing for Gus Sun in Cincinnati and living in a fleabag hotel that I hope, for the sake of Cincinnati’s fair name, has disappeared by this time.
- We used to go over to their hotel and sit in the lobby gazing longingly at the girls, the way a poor, underprivileged kid gazes in the window of a candy store.
- What Henry the Eight was to English history and Torquemada was to the Spanish Inquisition, the theater manager was to vaudeville.
- The brake drums were still there, but the lining was just a memory.
- The following year I was a year older and, oddly enough, all the girls I knew had also aged a year.
- She was nineteen and, as far as I knew, since she was sitting down, she had everything a young girl is supposed to have at the age of nineteen.
- Today my face is compared favorably with that of William Holden, Tony Curtis and even Clark Gable, but I must say that in those days my profile was nothing to brag about.
- A good mathematician, or even a fair one, will tell you that if you played fifty years in vaudeville, you wouldn’t play to as many people as you do now in one night on television. Frightening, isn’t it? Yes, and so is a good deal of TV.
- The producers of those {Broadway} shows spared no expense. Even in those days, when the dollar was really a dollar instead of the semi-comic certificate to which it has been reduced …
- Most of them are hard-headed businessmen who are just as crazy about money as the next fellow. (The next fellow happens to be me.)
- Boy, did we cut corners! We cut enough corners to build a whole new street.
- Critics swooned with joy. And when they came to, they raved ecstatically.
- We all know that Eddie {Cantor} is a fine comedian. Even he is quick to concede this.
- The parties were lush, and so were most of the guests.
- In case you’ve never been a stagehand, ‘golden time’ means that the crew now gets four times what they’re worth instead of only twice as much.
- His profession {the abortionist’s} may be a furtive one, but he has the courage of his convictions and, believe me, the one I’m referring to has had a number of those.
- Although he had told us to be at the dock by eight, we didn’t arrive until eleven. You see we had only been planning this trip for three months, and our sailing date came as a complete surprise to my wife.
- I sent the club a wire stating, Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.