Groucho Marx: The Cigar as Punchline

Glasses, moustache, cigar: the caricature of Groucho Marx consists of three strokes, and one of them glows. On stage and in film the cigar was for him above all a tool. Comedians of his generation valued it as a timekeeper — a draw buys time, bridges a gap, and places the pause exactly where the punchline needs it. Timing was Groucho’s capital, and the cigar was his metronome.

Among his trademarks is also a quotation that everyone knows. A contestant on his quiz show You Bet Your Life is said to have declared that she had so many children because she loved her husband — whereupon Groucho allegedly replied: “I love my cigar too, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally.” The anecdote has circulated for decades in magazines and collections of quotations. Only: by everything that can be verified, it never happened. Groucho himself denied it in 1972 in the magazine Esquire, drily — he had just received 25 dollars from Reader’s Digest “for something I never said”. The production history supports this: the show was recorded and edited, and such a line would never have passed the censors of American television in the 1950s.

What is reliably attested is instead a more innocuous scene from the mid-1950s: to a contestant from a family of seventeen children who explained that her father simply loved children, Groucho replied: “I like pancakes, but I don’t have closets full of them.” The mechanism of the joke is identical — only the prop is missing.

That posterity attributes the sharper version to him nonetheless would doubtless have galled him doubly: once for the punchline he wished he had invented, and once for the fee others earned from it.