[TODAY’S ENTRY INSPIRED BY YESTERDAY’S IWOSC PANEL REMINDING ME OF MARX PANEL]
So this was out in the high desert just after dinner with the son of Harpo and Susan Marx telling us one of his parents’ favorite jokes.
Bill Marx, now in his 70s, pianist by profession, twinkle in his eye by lifestyle, had just hosted “Marx Madness” — an evening at the Rancho Mirage Public Library in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Marx Brothers’ first appearance on stage. We sat at a long table in the back room of what was formerly Bing Crosby’s restaurant. Now its an Old Spaghetti Factory across Highway #111 just inside Palm Desert.
Bill’s sister Minnie Susan Marx, now Minnie Susan Marx Eagle, was here, too. Along with two of her grandchildren visiting from Orange County, as well as a journalist who came from Toronto and a funny woman named Trudy who came all the way from England for the event, where everyone sang old funny songs and Bill showed home movies featuring Groucho with children in Beverly Hills with nothing but farmland around, and Harpo and his children at 701 N. Canon — and other goofy stuff for a few hours. Also around this grand groaning board were Paul G. Wesolowski, editor of the Freedonia Gazette in Free Hope PA, comedy writer David Misch author of Funny: The Book and a panelist with me at “Marx Madness,” as well as seminal biographer of the Brothers (and of Walter Lantz, too!), Joe Adamson. Plus, Gummo Marx’s son Bob Marx, and also across from me, Robert S. Bader, whom I mentioned in yesterday’s blog. Robert is an archivist of mucho Marxian memorabilia and author of the upcoming book about this very stage career we’ve been celebrating tonight: Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage.
Now Harpo’s son Bill stood up at the end of the table, telling us this joke. He said his mother Susan Marx loved to tell the children this one, about three guys in a mental hospital who are offered the chance to get out, if they can answer the question:
“What is 3 times 3?”
“270!” says the first guy.
“No, sorry,” says the hospital administrator who is administering the test.
“Tuesday!” says the second guy.
“Sorry,” the hospital head says again.
Finally, he asks the third guy: “What is 3 times 3?”
“3 times 3 is 9.”
The administrator is amazed. “Okay,” he tells the patient. “You can leave the hospital now. Oh by the way, how did you know that?”
“Simple,” says the patient. “I just took 270 and divided by Tuesday.”
the brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not
able to invent anything that tends to laughter, more
than I invent or is invented on me: I am not only
witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other
men.
Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV Part II
Wit shall not go unrewarded while I am king of this country.
Stephano in The Tempest
Is it true you run a chain of brothels from coast to coast?
Groucho Marx in West Virginia to a hotel clerk
Brecher & Marx in 1937 or 8
Standing around at a New Year’s Eve celebration, sitting at a dinner party, cornered in a club stuck with someone with a story that you have zero interest in.
How did/do you handle it?
How about when somebody is just jaw-jacking about anything, but in a way that no matter how meandering still achieves a certain story-like wonderful roundness? And it is being fed to you in a way that you get?
You’re not in the Twilight Zone. Rather, you’ve just stepped inside a conversation containing witcraft.
This is where allasudden you feel “a flash of lightening” — this, according to musician/actor/humorist and raconteur Oscar Levant (ask your great grandmother or her new boyfriend) — how he described verbal humor. In one of his memoirs – he wrote at least three— called, “The Unimportance of Being Oscar,” Levant says that when Groucho Marx and S.J. Perelman were asked who was the fastest wit around, this is what they told English critic, Kenneth Tynan: “George S. Kaufman, Oscar Levant and screenwriter Irving Brecher.”
This was 1954. Kaufman and Perelman wrote movies for the Marx Brothers in the 1930s. And so did Brecher. I spent six years with Irv “the Nerve” (as Harpo Marx called him) in the 2000s as we worked on his memoirs, detailing his friendships with and writings for Groucho, Harpo and Chico, Milton Berle, Jack Benny and George Burns, among others. Hanging out with Irv, I bore witness (never bored!) to his comedic gifts and takes and I’ve considered him my droll model ever since. Look, how rapt:
Brecher in conversation after screening one of his Marx Bros movies in 2005
Witcraft. Irving Brecher proved a master at this, meaning he was funny as hell in magically getting out of conversations that he found dull or annoying or that asked him for money like those talking snake oil salesmen/TV pitchmen and blowhards out of all proportions.
Remember Jerry Seinfeld’s surefire way of dismissing them?
(JERRY ANSWERS PHONE; IT’S A GUY WHO WANTS HIM TO SWITCH LONG DISTANCE TELEPHONE SERVICES)
SEINFELD: Oh gee I can’t talk now, why don’t you give me your home number and I’ll call you later?
CALLER: I’m sorry we’re not allowed to do that.
SEINFELD: I guess you don’t want people calling you at home.
Likewise, Brecher was a superbly skilled athlete making plays in the game of life.
One time visiting, I arrived at his apartment on Wilshire in Westwood right as he appeared in the middle of an important phone call. He waved me into his study with one finger on his lips, leaned into the black landline from his favorite chair, and this is what I heard:
“Before I give you the number,” Irv was saying, “I want to be sure. What’s the price of that record offer again?”
Out of the speakerphone came a male telemarketer’s voice: “It’s 19.95, sir.”
“That’s the full price then?” asked Irv.
“Plus 4.95, shipping and handling,” said the voice.
“I thought you said 19.95,” Irv barked back. “Are you taking advantage of me because I’m 92 and don’t hear too well?”
“No sir,” the voice said. “The cds are 19.95, and then 4.95 for shipping and handling.”
“That’s a little too much.”
“It was printed right on the TV screen, sir.”
“Maybe it’s printed, but I didn’t see that shipping and handling. My eyes are so bad that this morning when I woke up, I couldn’t find my hearing aid.”
“So the total would be 24.90,” the voice pushed on, missing the gag.
“I’ll tell you what,” Irv said. “I’ll just take the shipping and handling.”
A pause. Then the voice said: “What?”
“Just bill me for the shipping and handling,” explained Irv. “Don’t send the albums. I can’t afford it.”
“You want us to bill you for shipping and handling? Without the cds? Uh,” the voice wavered. “We’ve never done that before.”
“Well, I’d rather not deal with pioneers.” Irv said. “So if you’ll excuse me.”
He pushed the button that disconnected the call and looked up.
“Pretty good, huh?” he said.
Now this was no performance put on by a master of merriment for my amusement—Irv was amusing himself. “People call them pranks,” he said. “But it’s more than that. It’s quiet outrage.”
I understood he could get mad at being bothered.
“But,” I asked. “Why don’t you just get caller i.d.?”
Said Brecher: “I’d just as soon talk to them and screw them around.”
Chico and Harpo wonder who is this guy dressed up as Groucho. It’s Irv, AKA “Brecho!”
THIS JUST IN~!
I just read in Dick Cavett’s recent book Brief Encounters (Henry Holt, 2014) where Groucho was on the phone and fired back with this wittily crafted line: “Extension 4-8-2, eh? 4-8-2. Sounds like a cannibal story.”
Activity
As kids, we used to call pranks like what Irv pulled, “phony phone calls.”
“Hello? Is your refrigerator running? Ya better go catch it!”
“Do you have Dr. Pepper in a can? Well, let him out!”
Try these at home, sure. But Brecher’s way was wicked, a nasty mastering of the deadpan. He admired Jack E. Leonard, Fred Allen’s antically addled quippage. Livewire ire, ridiculing societal conventions. The same anti-establishment attitude Irv wrote into the characters Groucho played: J. Cheever Loophole in “At the Circus” and S. Quentin Quale in “Go West.” (They even leap out of their movies and speak directly to the audience.)
Groucho’s wordplay would rip and snort through anything to do with sex and death. “Lulu Belle,” he greets a floozy in Go West’s version of Mos Eisley’s Cantina, “I didn’t recognize you standing up.”
Harpo with a gun at the bar while his brothers look on in GO WEST saloon
Back Pocket Banter
Do you spend time with people who bore you? Why? And how do you get out of such conversations?
Can you learn something from a dull person about yourself?
Who is your most boring relative? Do you get stuck with them for long periods at family gatherings, or hide in avoidance?
If you could, who would you give a “greatest buffoon” award to?
Do you repeatedly use catch phrases in conversation, or hear other people start sentences with, “At any rate,” “To make a long story short,” “To tell you the truth,” “In other words,” etc?
Bonus Activity
Watch “My Dinner With Andre” a movie containing some of the greatest back-and-forth you ever eavesdropped into, with director Andre Gregory and writer Wallace Shawn. Enlightening stories told by two delightful and delighted friends— all of it happening in an emptying New York restaurant, featuring an ancient waiter seemingly waiting for Godot.
Bonus Back Pocket Banter
Interrupt a boring confab with a swift kick to the midsection. (Kidding!) Better to say, “Excuse me, have we met before?” And then walk away.
Wear a button that says: “You Should Get To Know Me.” This worked surprisingly well during Freshman Orientation for my college friend David Schreff, who now consults w/ Fortune 500 companies and taught the Jimmy Carter White House administration how to speed-read.
As a surefire final try: “I’m sorry but I have to go to the bathroom now that you’ve made me so excited about your_______.” (Whatever that person was droning about)
When All Else Fails: As Catherine Blythe writes with resignation, “Be kind to the bore (one day he could be you)” (pg. 142)
Irv Brecher made the English language funny – what’s better than that? And one of the funniest and timeless of conversations is called, “The Two Thousand Year Old Man,” with Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner.
Reporter: What language did you speak two thousand years ago?
Two Thousand Year Old Man: Uhh…basically, Rock. Rock talk.
Reporter: What’s that –
Two Thousand Year Old Man: Uhh…hey put that rock down. Don’t throw that rock at me!
