Saturday, November 10, 2012

The Resignation Joke


Analyzing humor can be a pretty solemn pursuit. However, I must thank Richard Raskin of the Danish blog 16:9 for researching Groucho's famous resignation from the Friars Club. I am even more grateful that Mr. Raskin produced an English version of his essay. I wanted to use the line "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member," or some variant thereof, in an email. I went searching the internet, and of course found numerous paraphrases of the line Groucho used in a telegram when he decided he had made a mistake in joining the Friars Club. Google led me to the 16:9 blog, and this link will spare me the need to expend any more energy typing.

2 comments:

  1. From the article:

    "Paradoxically, one of the most striking examples of a self-disparaging joke turns out to have been motivated by a wish on the jokester’s part to dissociate himself once and for all from a group of people to whom he felt superior."

    Introverted people would often rather forgo company if too boisterous or uninteresting, and this can be misunderstood as high-hatted. The fact that we are superior is beside the point.

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  2. Nice to see someone dedicated as much to the Marxes as I. Do you know where to get the later movies? Already bought the ones featuring Zeppo on DVD and a night in the opera. But the later ones are hard to come by in Europe

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