First of all, this line by Groucho was in fact aired on television. I personally saw it, laughed uncontrollably, and repeated the line many times afterwards, always with an attribution to Groucho.
Secondly, it is not a “double entendre” at all.
John Crowley
A) You apparently don’t have the faintest idea of what a double entendre is.
B) You never saw this on television. Not on the original show, not on a compilation clips episode, not on a bloopers or outtakes program.
Snopes has a page on this. Their research is very good on this subject, so good it demolishes what I thought what the expert line. As I posted in an earlier thread on this very column, I have the You Bet Your Life - The Lost Episodes three-DVD box set with commentary by Robert Bader. Bader is a buff’s buff, who’s done books on Groucho and collects tapes of old radio and tv shows not in circulation. Yet his references are wrong, wrong dates, wrong dialog. His album notes quote the famous exchange. He implies that it on a private record sent out as a promo to DeSoto dealers that is a bonus extra on the DVD. The Storys can be heard for a minute but the exchange is missing.
The Snopes page has a more complete recording of that radio show. The exchange is not made at any time in the ten minutes or so it lasts.
It’s possible that the exchange was considered so dirty it was edited out even of these equivalent of blooper reels. No matter how you slice it, however, we have no audio evidence for it and certainly no video evidence. If it happened at all, the only people who ever heard it were in the radio studio audience that night in 1950.
Could somebody at some time have re-enacted it? Possible. Not a shred of evidence for it, but possible. Very low odds, though.
Sorry, but I’ve got to knock this one down. You can submit exact dates and times and locations if you want to rebut it, but your memory doesn’t cut it as a source.