Hey, I love my keyboard, but . . .
There are lots of Marx Brother quotes that most people get wrong. It’s just that for the rest of them, people remember the idea of the joke but not the wording and invent individual new phrasing to fill in the blanks.
The elephant joke is different. Everybody tells it wrongly and in the same way. That’s got to be significant. If there were 50 ways of ending it I’d agree with you. There isn’t. There’s only one, and that one happens to have a significant memorable meter while the original doesn’t. That may have been entirely deliberate on Ryskind’s part but somehow the effect is lost on virtually all hearers.
When everybody gets a familiar thing wrong in the same fashion, it’s meaningful, and how they get it wrong also has to be meaningful. It sure raises my antenna.
And Groucho is about as disallowable a character as I’ve ever seen [tap cigar, wiggle eyebrows, and look upward…].
Right. And Groucho was well known for sticking slavishly to the script when doing a play.
The famous Kauffman quote may never have happened, but it wouldn’t have resonated if there was no truth in it. The version of Coconuts in Kauffman’s collected plays says that the script was assembled from various places, though it seemed to stick pretty closely to the movie version as far as I can tell - but I didn’t compare it.
Back in pre-internet days, I used to pick up The National Lampoon as often as I could. Once I found a piece that was basically a list of names. The names had been collected from news accounts about self-described space alien abductees, who reported them as belonging to the spokes-aliens who led the close encounters. No way could I reproduce the list today, but to give you a feel for them, they were along the lines of:
Nakro
Goblo
Morlo
Norlo
Borlo
Klako
The title of the snippet was: Marx Brothers From the Stars
I always inferred that Manfred was the often-heard-of “Ditto Marx”…
I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.
I’d always heard that it was an homage to an angry Argentinian cowboy he spent time with in his youth, but apparently I heard wrong.
Maybe most people first heard this joke, as I did, in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
(Well, it could be! :D)
For me, it was a Bennett Cerf anthology of children’s jokes, ca. 1960.
I’m bumping the thread for a bit of 60-year-old breaking news. I found the answer.
Who said “How he got there, I’ll never know?” Groucho did. On his TV show, You Bet Your Life. And I have the clip to prove it.
I’m betting that a hit television show was more memorable to more people than the older original. People started saying the line “wrong” because Groucho did. Why exactly he made the change I’ll never know, but it feels good to nail that down.
Now that this thread has been resurrected:
He also became friends with Elton John and the band Queen.
He encountered Elton in Los Angeles and pointed his index fingers at him like a pair of revolvers. Elton raised his hands and said “Don’t shoot me, I’m only the piano player,” thereby giving the name to Elton’s recently completed album.
In 1977, after the release of the Queen albums A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera, Groucho invited the band to his home to thank them.
Cool beans!
Just to provide a data point, I first read the line as “…nobody knows” in “The Epic of Sidney Kidney”, from Plop! #13, DC Comics, June 1975. Next, I am pretty sure I heard it from Mr. Kotter as “I’ll never know”, and then eventually I saw the Marx Brothers movie.
I’ve never told the joke myself, though, because first of all I’m pretty sure that everyone has heard it, but even if not, it’s so implausible that I’d ever have shot an elephant under any conditions that everyone would be finishing the joke for me.
I’ve never watched the TV show, but the radio version of the game is a staple of old time radio broadcasts. It’s surprisingly good, not much game show, mostly Groucho and his one liners. He really was quick on his feet. They scripted some elements of the show, naturally - but people say some strange things at times, and he knew how to take advantage of that, Sort of like Johnny Carson in a way.
As long as we’re on the subject, here’s a picture of the five brothers without their costumes and make-up.
They also recorded an hour of show and cut it to the best half hour of comedy. Groucho is obviously as good as spontaneous quipsters get, but nobody is that good. Cutting out the bottom half of anything tends to make the end product look above average; cutting out the bottom half of something that’s good overall will make the end product really shine.
Cool! Groucho second from the left?
Yep - it’s (l to r) Zeppo, Groucho, Chico, Gummo, Harpo.
The family resemblance is really remarkable when they’re out of costume.