Admit it. You’ve never heard of Irving Brecher. You don’t even know how to pronounce his name. (It’s BRECK-er.)
But when asked to name the fastest wits on the planet, Groucho Marx and S. J. Perelman singled out George S. Kaufman, Oscar Levant, and Irving Brecher.
Four of those five names are legends. The fifth nobody knows, except for old-time Hollywood insiders and historians of comedy.
Sadly, I’m not and never will be an old-time Hollywood insider. But here’s a little comedy history.
Irving Brecher had been doing Groucho imitations from the age of 12. He was the funniest kid around. Still a teenager, he published an ad in *Variety *offering his services as a joke writer. In a style we now associate with today’s post-ironic absurdest comedy, the ad ran:
So of course Berle himself hired him. (At his 75th birthday party Berle said, “As a writer he has no equals. Superiors, yes.”)
Within a few years he had made his way out to Hollywood, where he once told mogul Darryl Zanuck that one of his films hadn’t been released, it had escaped.
To punish him they put him to work for the Marx Brothers, notoriously the worst chewer-uppers of writers in all of Hollywood. Brecher survived to write not one but two Marx Brothers films, Go West and At the Circus. Those are the best of the Marx’s post Irving Thalberg films, the period when Louis B. Meyer, who despised them, was trying to wring money out of them and destroy them at the same time. They’re not great films, admittedly. Joe Adamson, in Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and sometimes Zeppo has the best line of anyone on this situation:
Any man that could survive two bouts with the Brothers was a national treasure. Brecher was one of the script doctors on Gone with the Wind, leading Groucho to call him The Wicked Wit of the West.
Following the Marxes, they gave him to the eminently sane William Powell and Myrna Loy for Shadow of the Thin Man. He won an Academy Award for the screenplay of Meet Me in St. Louis. He wrote movies for Fred Astaire and Lucille Ball and Red Skelton. He turned a Eugene O’Neill play into a musical.
That was too much surrealism even for a Hollywood comedy writer. He moved to radio and created the classic The Life of Riley, starring William Bendix, later turning it into a movie and a long-lived and beloved television series, giving the world the immortal catchphrase, “what a revoltin’ development this is.” Stan Lee wrote the Thing’s dialog in pure imitation of Chester A. Riley. [citation needed: I can’t prove it but it’s obvious to me]
He even wrote the screenplay for the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie.
A posthumous autobiography, titled The Wicked Wit of the West, will be published in January. I’ll be grabbing it as soon as it comes off the presses.
Goodbye, Mr. Brecher. Say hello to Sid and Oscar and Groucho and Zeppo.
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