Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life

$285.00

4 in stock

Only thirty (30) prints of GROUCHO MARX by Drew Friedman were produced for this 2010 edition. Each print is signed in the lower right, hand-titled in the center, and numbered in the lower left (all beneath the image).

The image area is 13-3/4″ high x 10″ wide on an untrimmed 19″ x 13″ sheet. Paper, ink, and production specifications, as well as shipping details, are available on our PRINT SPECS page.

Purchase price does not include shipping costs, which are calculated during checkout. Prices for remaining prints will increase until the edition sells out. Any number of remaining prints can be purchased, each at the current asking price (with flat rate shipping).

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Description

After decades in vaudeville and films with his madcap brothers, GROUCHO MARX moved to TV in the 1950s hosting a weekly comedy-quiz program, You Bet Your Life. The series was less a game show than a carny-booth showcase for Groucho’s humorous quips, eye-rolling double-takes, and sarcastic asides. The contestants were total strangers seemingly introduced backstage (though some were cult celebs such as Lord Buckley and Tor Johnson, or savants with odd talents); their physical features, accents, and names were fair game for Groucho’s ridicule. The show debuted on ABC radio in 1947, moved to CBS in ’49, and jumped to NBC-TV in ’50, where it remained for a decade.

Groucho had two sidekicks: handsome emcee George Fenneman, who played the affable straight-man; and a marionette duck who bore a cartoonish resemblance to the host. The duck dropped from the ceiling on two occasions: 1) to reveal that episode’s “secret word,” and 2) clutching two $50 bills if either contestant uttered the word. In an era before puritanical tobacco bans, Groucho never appeared on-camera without a lit cigar.

Artist Drew Friedman recalls meeting Groucho three times: “The first was in 1970 at the production of the Broadway musical Minnie’s Boys, a show based on the life of the Marx Brothers. Groucho had been hired as a consultant, and was sitting in the front row. I asked for and got his autograph on my Playbill. In 1973 my father, author Bruce Jay Friedman, and I attended a NYC restaurant party thrown in Groucho’s honor by Teacher’s Scotch, for whom the comedian was doing print ads. Groucho was a fan of my dad’s work and talked to him at length; I got to join the conversation.

“The third was the charm. In 1975 my father was invited to Groucho’s Hollywood Hills home, and my brothers and I came along. We spent hours with Groucho, who despite disabling strokes was as funny and sharp as ever at age 85. The only time he left the living room/party was to retire alone to his study to watch a re-run of You Bet Your Life, which had just returned to syndication thru Viacom. It was Groucho’s daily ritual; he hadn’t seen the shows since they first aired, decades earlier. My brother Josh would chronicle our visit in New York Magazine a few years later.”