Irving Brecher

The quick wit who wrote for the Marx Brothers

Irving Brecher

1914–2008

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Irving Brecher was just 24 when, in 1938, he was hired by MGM to write the Marx Brothers’ film At the Circus. Meeting Groucho Marx for the first time, he said, “Hello, Mr. Marx.” Groucho retorted, “‘Hello?’ That’s supposed to be a funny line? Is this the guy who’s supposed to write our movie?” Brecher blanched but shot back, “Well, I saw you say hello in one of your movies, and I thought it was so funny I’d steal it and use it now.” With that kind of quick wit, Brecher became a top Hollywood gagman. He died last week at 94 after a series of heart attacks.

As a Bronx teenager, Brecher sent one-liners on postcards to newspaper columnists Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan, said the Los Angeles Times. He graduated to selling jokes to vaudeville. “At the time, a brash young comedian named Milton Berle had a self-promoted reputation for stealing other people’s material.” So Brecher took out a small ad in Variety, offering “positively Berle-proof gags, so bad not even Milton will steal them.” His first customer was Berle himself, who paid Brecher $50 per page of quips. “As a writer,” Berle declared, “he really has no equals. Superiors, yes.” Brecher branched into radio and then joined MGM, helping to punch up the laughs in The Wizard of Oz.

“Brecher was a literary lion, a reflexive offerer of reactive jokes, a relisher of puns, a connoisseur of often topical, arch repartee,” said The New York Times. “He once angered the film producer Darryl Zanuck, telling him the movie he had just made hadn’t been released; it had escaped.” Among his credits were Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) and Best Foot Forward (1943). Brecher also created the durable radio serial The Life of Riley and its signature line, “What a revoltin’ development this is!” But he is best remembered for the Marx Brothers’ At the Circus (1939) and Go West (1940). In the first film, he had Groucho tell Chico, “I bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork.” In the second, Chico asks Harpo what he blew his money on, and Harpo traces a curvy outline in the air. Chico asks, “Oh, you buy a snake, huh?”

Despite receiving an Oscar nomination for Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Brecher saw his MGM career “end anti-climactically,” said the London Independent. After working on Vincente Minnelli’s “stylish but fey musical Yolanda and the Thief (1945)” and an “ill-fated musical adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!” titled Summer Holiday (1948), he asked to be released from his contract. Brecher later wrote for TV and adapted the hit Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie for the big screen. In the late 1990s, he was invited to a revival showing of his first film, a flop called New Faces of 1937. “Okay, I’ll come,” he replied, “but I’ll bring a bodyguard.”