The Day Comedy Lost Groucho Marx
On August 19, 1977, Groucho Marx — the quick-witted Marx Brother who never stopped joking — died at 86, three days after Elvis stole his headlines.
He joked to the very end — and almost nobody noticed he was gone.
Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx, the third of the five Marx Brothers, died on August 19, 1977, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 86 and had been hospitalized with pneumonia nearly two months earlier. It should have been front-page news across America. Instead, his death was buried beneath the coverage of another: Elvis Presley had died three days earlier, and the King consumed every headline. Comedy's king exited to an empty house.
Groucho had spent nearly seven decades making people laugh, first in vaudeville with his brothers Chico, Harpo, Gummo, and Zeppo, then in thirteen feature films that remain among the funniest ever made — Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, Animal Crackers — and finally as the leering, cigar-wagging host of the quiz show You Bet Your Life, which made him a television star to a generation that had never seen his movies. Offstage he was a serious writer, publishing memoirs like Groucho and Me, and a famously devoted correspondent whose letters are still quoted today. With his painted-on mustache and eyebrows, his stooped walk, and a mind faster than anyone in the room, he perfected a new kind of comedy hero: the man who insulted everybody and got away with it because the insults were art. He adored his longtime straight woman, Margaret Dumont, precisely because she never understood a single one of his jokes.
The wit never dimmed. When his old announcer George Fenneman lifted the frail comedian from his wheelchair during a final visit and walked him backward across the room, Groucho whispered in his ear: "Fenneman, you always were a lousy dancer." When a nurse told him she wanted to see if he had a temperature, he shot back: "Don't be silly — everybody has a temperature." Asked once to suggest his own epitaph, he offered: "Excuse me, I can't stand up."
There were tender codas, too. In March 1977, the rock band Queen visited him at home and sang their song "'39" for him a cappella. He never learned that his younger brother Gummo had died that April — his family kept the news from him, fearing the shock. He was cremated, his ashes interred at Eden Memorial Park, survived by his three children and by Zeppo, the last brother, who outlived him by two years.
Groucho Marx proved that silliness, done at genius level, is immortal. The greasepaint is gone; the one-liners are forever.
No verified image was available for this story.
