Backlisted - Harpo Speaks! by Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber

Episode Date: December 10, 2018

John and Andy are joined by Dan Schreiber, writer, producer and co-host of the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast, to discuss Harpo Marx's autobiography Harpo Speaks! (1961). Also discussed are titles by Neil Tennant, Alice Jolly, Penelope Fitzgerald and Max Wall, amongst others.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)17'28 - Harpo Speaks! by Harpo Marx* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. So I spent the afternoon wandering around I was flaneuring about Yes, I went to the Wallace Collection

and in the Wallace Collection is Poussin's painting a dance to the music of time plug not that we need to plug it but i you know we we love the books and ahead of doing the uh episode about a dance to music time i thought about which i cannot get more excited we can't we can't talk about it that's no tragedy of it that we until we're ready to go but when i looked at the painting i was listening to the audio book of uh dance the music of time books do furnish a room which i have read before but i thought i better give it a quick once over before we before we do the podcast next week it was on 1.25 and how did you find it talking really fast? Well it's okay because I've read it before so to some extent you sort of and I read it last year so I'm sort of reminding myself I could just

stick it on 2.5 I could stick it on three. Have you ever listened to it on three? No can you make out any words? Yeah you can you get a lot read. Is it chipmunk? No no because it's all done digitally. I'll tell you what is brilliant I discovered this when I was trying to read The Silmarillion this year If you're ploughing through a book and you need a bit of help then if you've got the book open in front of you and you set the audiobook to like three

you can really motor through it That's like sort of assisted living Assisted dying I used to slope off to the Wallace Collection on my lunch break because it was just down Wigmore Street and Manchester Square. What's the other most important thing about Manchester Square? Well, it was. Number 20 Manchester Square was the headquarters of EMI

where the front cover of Please Please Me, the first Beatles LP, was photographed by Angus McBean. Yeah, but the two... All the facts. But the two, the two, blue and red. Yeah. Most of us who weren't, you know, kind of buying records in the 60s

got to know the Beatles from those two compilations, didn't we? The blue and the red. That's right. And both the photographs of 1962 Three Beatles and 1969 Beatles were taken inside number 20 Manchester Square. And were they both taken by Angus McBean or not? Surely not. I think the... I don't know about the second one.

Oh, now you've put me on the spot. I don't know. The first one is definitely. I actually got inside Manchester, 20 Manchester Square, when it was the EMI studio, once. Only once. Which was in 1990. I went to a signing at Claude Gill in Oxford Street for Chris Heath's book, Pet Shop Boys Literally,

which was a signing that Neil and Chris did. And then a bunch of people went up to Manchester Square in the vague hope that the Pet Shop Boys would return there after they finished their signing yeah Chris Heath you know what there's a book that I would love to do on Backlisted which is Chris he's great he's a great writer Heath. His second Pet Shop Boys book, which is called Pet Shop Boys vs America, which is basically an account of an American tour that they did in the early 90s,

where it's basically them just, as Neil Tennant subsequently says in a lyric, bickering about where to have dinner. It is one of the best pop books, though. Oh, niche, but we're niche you know we're in this um um since you ask i've had an emotional and trying week i had to say goodbye to my dear boar my pig buster who have has been part of my life for the last eight years and who is old and no longer producing piglets. So I had to wave him goodbye.

And I didn't spare anybody on Facebook or Instagram. I didn't put it on Twitter, interestingly, because you don't have enough words. But I said I didn't spare them the details. He was going off to go to a very good kind of thumbs-up abattoir in Essex. His remains would be taken to Germany, where they'd be turned into salami and actually had the most amazing outpouring of uh of uh lovely I mean really friendly lovely stuff from people but obviously a lot of people who'd known Buster over the years who'd visited

my house but also people who didn't know it was it was very quite moving actually I was I had I'd put it up there because I felt I ought to mark it at least for the people who'd known him but lots of other people weighed in and so you know he looked like a lover and then people were sharing photographs of me with the pig or their kids with the pig um so there you go should we just start oh let's just go come on go go go hello and welcome to backlisted the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us backstage at Coney Island trying to avoid the bugs and the roaches, rid you with fear at the thought of a vaudeville gig we're about to perform. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.

And joining us today is the writer, radio producer and co-host of No Such Thing as a Fish. The UK's most successful podcast. Dan Schreiber. Hello, Dan. Hey, thank you for having me. You know, we were feeling pretty cocky because we've sold out the LRB bookshop. But then you said that you've just, last year you sold out the Sydney Opera House. Yeah, yeah, that was this year. I didn't believe it myself, so don't worry. There's no ego.

Yeah, and I grew up in Sydney. I was there in my teenage years and my dad's Australian, so I went to Australian high school. So I used to pass the Sydney Opera House most days and never stood in it, never been in it. That was the first time I've ever been inside. It's the first time my parents have ever seen me on stage doing comedy. It was pretty solid for a spouting. Did you used to go past it and think, one day there will be a format on a form of hardware that neither of which exists, which I will become supreme in

and I will go into there and be that unknown thing so i mean no no no i didn't but the the thing i must declare an interest because i've known dan now for 16 17 years 16 17 years so in our mad early days of qi we opened a club in oxford we got the kind of email you get from people who say i've got a a nephew, he's great, he's really cool, he's working in a shop called The Works. Yes, that's right. He was literally working in The Works. So we went to see Dan and we literally fell in love with him

because he was a brilliant bookseller. He was working in a remainder shop, but he was so full of passion for everything he did. So we said, well, you should come and work for us. Well, this is excellent because you can join in our our contribution about um nikki had a brilliant production idea everyone would instead of saying what we've been reading this week because this episode will go out relatively close to christmas that it's an opportunity for us to say you know if there's a book you feel like giving somebody as a present this is a great book that we've read but i was just complaining to you that all I've read is backlisted stuff.

I'm sorry. I haven't had any time in the last month. You've got a famous present. Well, there's lovely things we could say. I mean, nobody will be disappointed, as my tutor once said brilliantly about a friend of mine. Paul embarrasses no one. No one will be embarrassed by getting Sally Rooney's Normal People for Christmas. My favourite book of the year.

Is it? Quite right too. What a brilliant book. I haven't read it yet. My wife Fionnuala loves it. So that's four votes for Normal People. I'm going to fling in a vote for, because I've not said it, you'd read it when we did it on the podcast and I hadn't read it. I'm just going to say very quickly. Anna Burns.

Anna Burns, Milman, winner of the Booker Prize and bestseller. Sold a quarter of a million copies in three weeks. I know. And not difficult people. And not difficult, everybody. Funny and wise and brilliant. I bought it off the back of you tweeting about it, John.

And I'm reading it at the moment. And the opening sentence, I think, is the most glorious opening sentence I've ever read of a novel. It's stunning. I've never seen anything like it. Have you got to the scene where the almost boyfriend has got all the, he's got all the kind of car bits and the flags in the garage? No, not yet. I'm really fresh into it.

I mean, it's a properly, properly brilliant book, I think. I am a self-styled Eeyore and curmudgeon. But even I feel moved to feel faintly optimistic that a book that good can, and experimental, can win the Booker Prize and become a bestseller. It's so brilliant. So that's that. My suggestion, I've got two suggestions for what people could go to the shops and treat themselves or others to for Christmas. My first suggestion is the book 100 Lyrics and a Poem by Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys. Could not agree more.

by Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys. Could not agree more. Beautifully produced hardback by Faber with the lovely Albertus font on the front, evoking the Faber poetry of the 40s and 50s, but is a selection edited by Neil Tennant, who, of course, in addition to being a brilliant lyricist, has been a magazine editor himself. And a comic book illustrator.

That's right, yeah. His job was to sort of cut off the cleavage of certain characters because british yeah the british had different rules to how much flesh could be shown yeah and of course he worked for smash hits anyway so so this is a selection of 100 lyrics footnotes annotated by neil tenn. The thing that's so good about it is rather than reproduce only the hits of the Pet Shop Boys, though some of the hits of the Pet Shop Boys are included, he has clearly put a lot of time into thinking

what works on the page. Now, I'm a big Pet Shop Boys fan and there are lyrics reproduced in the book that I couldn't immediately bring the tune to mind and was struck by how good they are as pieces of writing. And I'm not just saying that. That's great. And the poem is quite good as well. Oh, I get that.

So that was my first suggestion. And my second suggestion, very quickly, is any of the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald. Ah, I love this. Okay. Okay, so the thing that I have read this year that I've enjoyed more than anything else, I've read seven of Penelope Fitzgerald's nine novels. I haven't read the first one or the last one. He's a machine. He's a terminator. I haven't read the first one or the last one, The Blue Flower, yet, but I'm reading Blue Flower.

You haven't read Blue Flower yet? I'm reading Blue Flower this month. Don't say anything. We so have to have a Fitzgerald. Well, the reason I mention we're going to do this really fast, the reason we will do a Penelope Fitzgerald episode next year, there is no question in my mind, in fact, or I'm already talking to people about Fitzgerald. Well, the reason I mention we're going to do this really fast, the reason we will do a Penelope Fitzgerald episode next year, there is no question in my mind, in fact, I'm already talking to people about setting that up. We need to debate slightly

which one we talk about, but if you want to give somebody a gift which is a relatively light, funny novel, there's a relatively early one called Human Voices, which is set in the BBC,c in bbc radio during the second world war which would appeal to fans of for instance kate atkinson's transcription

including kate atkinson herself because she mentions it in the acknowledgments of that novel on the other hand if you want to read one of the later historical novels I cannot recommend with any more enthusiasm and in an over earnest way which some listeners may struggle with but nevertheless it's true Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Beginning of Spring which is set in Russia in 1913 is the best novel that I've read this year and one of the best historical novels I have ever read bar none and I I cannot imagine anybody reading that novel not being at least in terms of the technique on display it plays so brilliantly on the idea that you know what is about going to happen in Russia three or four years later and and no one else does.

And no one in the book can know that. And it never dwells on it, and it never labours the point. It's such a beautiful, perfect novel. Fantastic. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. John? I've got two very quickly.

One is, I have to say, completely, nakedly, a plug for an Unbanned book which I am shocked and traumatized by not having had more coverage which is Marianne Sate imbecile by Alice Jolly which I think again talk we're talking about historical novels that take you back to a moment in time and deliver it with such integrity and beauty and sally bailey said who's a been a guest on this podcast who's one of the few people who's engaged with it said this is a classic of this century and a classic of the last century and i think it's a bit odd as many unbound books are it's written in what looks almost like a sort of ballad form, almost like poetry.

So although the book itself is nearly 600 pages long, actually it's about 250 pages long, really. Alice has written it as the discovered memoir of a servant from the early 19th century, the 1820s, in a valley in Gloucestershire near Stroud. And Marianne Saites is only preserved the whole book came about because she's preserved in one line when she died the line in the uh in the in the parish record is Marianne Saites imbecile so the book is in a way an attempt to try and completely recover a human being's life uh She's not an imbecile. She has got

a hair lip. She is a servant. She's exactly the kind of voice that history doesn't hear. But she lives through this extraordinary period of enclosure, of machinery being introduced into rural life, of the ideas of Darwin beginning to percolate down. She's the servant of a progressive farmer. It's just, Sally said it, it's like discovering a lost classic that you can't believe that nobody else knows. And it was written this year. And it's called Marianne Saita Imbecile and it's by Alice Jolly. You know, you do those things where editors get asked, what's the thing that's broken your heart this year? The fact that this hasn't had a review in a national newspaper breaks my heart my second book naked absolutely naked plugging but as you all know my much of my the last sort of 15 years of my life

has been qi and i love everything about it i love the people who are involved in it but the thing that's made me most happy and proud is something I've had absolutely nothing to do with, which is Dan's podcast. Dan and Anna and Andy and James. And they've created this brilliant podcast, but they've also created a brilliant book on the back of it called The Book of the Year.

Oh, thanks. And it is... Hey, Dan, is that your book of the year? That is, yeah. So all I'm... I'm not... This is just, honestly, because it is. Hey, Dan, is that your book of the year? That is, yeah. So all I'm not, this is just, honestly, because it is, when people say, what is your nonfiction book that you would give to the people who I would have always given a QI book to, I'm going to give them book of the year.

Because it is, A, it's fucking miraculous that you got it out in the way that you got it out. But also, it's full of good stuff. I want you to give me two or three little choice nuggets, Dan. Yeah, sure. That's in there. Well, I just, you said something just now, which I've not thought for a while, but when I had the idea for the book, it's the second book. So we did the first one last year, which is very exciting, creating a book that needs to be released in the year that you write it, that that turnaround is incredibly fun. But when you do qi research and john you know this inside out you delight in these moments when you find characters

from history just like you're talking about mary ann sate yeah these characters that get lost to the footnotes of history finding them finding their story and bringing up and there's so many books that used to collate what happened in a year or yeah almanacs and all that and i just saw do you know i'd love it one day if 200 years down the line there was another whatever podcasts are then and they find this book and it tells them about this year and it has all these characters who didn't go to the front pages of the newspaper being sort of properly recorded so that they're there you can just enjoy these footnote people who were brought to the main stage. And that's the sort of vision of the book. There's a story I really like in it, which, again, it's not a great story. It just makes me laugh, which is there was a judo final

in Dusseldorf this year. And the two finalists fought so badly. The two finalists fought so badly, they both came second. So there was a podium presentation where the two of them were standing in second place because there was no one on first. There was no national anthem played. They just had to stand awkwardly in silence. Just stuff like that. That QI moment is always a glorious thing where you just get something that is so ludicrous. It's like, you know, discovering that the Spanish national anthem has no words

because it's the only national anthem that has no words because the words that were written were very Franco-ish. And then they tried to write a new one and nobody could agree because they're none of the regions. So they now just play this tune and all the Spanish just have to stand there kind of silently. That's so good. Dan has chosen the brilliant Harpo Speaks

by Harpo Marx with Roland Barber I can't tell you the joy the joy this brought me I don't think I've enjoyed I mean you know I enjoy all our books but it's like i literally i i could if i could just live inside this book forever i would from the mad beginning right through to the sort of the kind of hollywood end it's just and the gorgeous things

that his kids wrote about him at the end yeah it's so dan where did you where did you first encounter this book? know what it was. I just took to Jerry Lewis to begin with, and then suddenly went further back and I suddenly found Buster Keaton. And, and I was in the bookshop one day, and this is the only way I could find out about these people because the internet didn't really have that much at the time about them either. And I would just find books that looked like they were talking about someone that was big. And I found this book called Harpo Speaks. I'm holding the very copy that I got as a 16 year old next to me. And I took it home and I started reading it and it just blew my mind. It was, it was so perfectly written. It was so hilarious and humble while also being at the sort of center point of all the biggest names of an

era for the writers of like George S. Kaufman, um, through to admirers like Salvador Dali, just all these names kept cropping up. And I'd never seen a Marx Brothers movie. I read the entire book and I'd not seen, and I finally saw one. There was an old channel. You know, those channels that just play old movies all the time. We had one in Sydney, TCM it was called.

And they played a movie called Love Happy, which I think is acknowledged as the worst Marx Brothers movie. It is. In that it's not even meant to be a Marx Brothers movie. It was meant to be a Harpo Marx solo movie. And the other boys needed money at the time, I think. And they came in. And I just fell in love. And that opened me up to the Marx Brothers,

which really became my love for many, many years. Which is your favourite Marx Brothers film? I want to know if I've seen it. Animal Crackers or Duck Soup. Yeah, I watched Duck Soup again yesterday. Yeah. I remember watching Duck Soup with my son when he was about six. And he kind of sat there.

He wasn't sure. He wasn't sure. And then there's a bit where Chico goes, Peanuts! Peanuts! Peanuts! To you! That was it.

That was it. My seven-year-old son then ran around the house shouting, Peanuts to you! That was it. That was it. My seven-year-old son then ran around the house shouting peanuts to you for the next 48 hours and now really likes the Marx Brothers. So I found a way in. The thing about this book is it's like discovering the lodestone of 20th century comedy. Everything that's funny,

everything that we've ever seen that's funny, you sort of feel the Marx Brothers story has in it and Harpo is this incredibly modest a perfect person to tell it better in a way than Groucho or or Chico because he's he was famously the person who played the half and didn't speak every catchphrase every routine all of that sense of hard work paying off, of the kind of eloquence of stand-up comedy. And you realise it was coming from somewhere else, but they created it out of nothing. Yeah, it was born out of vaudeville,

of them getting bored doing the same routines. And anarchy was created. The idea of horseplay being their mum, Minnie, hating horseplay. Yes, yeah. Just stick to it. Just do what you're told to do. Yeah. And I think what's most amazing for me about this book is when you guys very kindly invited me on the show,

you obviously, it's a big deal to think about what book do you want to talk about. And I just thought, honestly, I thought, what book have I read more times than ever any other book? And Harpo Speaks is the book. And I was a bit nervous because it's it's ghost written very it's very closely done with this roland barber guy and the idea of suggesting something that had a a ghost writer attached to it i thought i don't want to bring that to the table but it's so damn good well let me tell you let me give you i've got joint author credits here so harpo marks born nove November 1888 in New York City,

dies September 1964 in LA. It would have been Harpo's 130th birthday last Friday. Really? So we are just a week on from what would have been his 130th. I'm going to assume that everyone listening to this kind of knows something about Harpo Marx. The ghostwriter Roland Barber. Now, this is interesting.

So he's born in 1920 in New York. He died in 2012 in Portland, Oregon. So he had a good run, right? Before he wrote this, he was the author of Somebody Up There Likes Me, which is the autobiography of Rocky Graziano, which was made into a film in the late 50s starring Paul Newman. And after he wrote this, he was the author of a book called the night they raided minskies the novel was then made into a film in 1968 and it is a film about the invention of striptease on the bowery as part of the bowery vaudeville scene. Right. So he clearly had some background in that world,

which he's then bringing to Harpo Speaks. And it struck me that what's so interesting about you having chosen this, Dan, is this is like the grandfather, the granddaddy of... All of them. ...of comedians' memoirs. And we're recording this just in the Christmas book season when all the comedians' memoirs get published. This is like the...

And this clearly isn't the first, but lots of the books tend not to get matched with a ghostwriter who's quite so simpatico. And I think that's one of the reasons. It's great you chose something with a ghostwriter because this guy did a bang-up job. Yeah, it shows how good it can be with a great ghostwriter. Harpo always talked the book down because Groucho wrote a book as well which is called groucho and me which is

fantastic i don't know if you've read that i do highly highly recommend that it doesn't have the same heart that this does it doesn't have the same the stories that come out of this book are extraordinary there's a whole chapter about him becoming the first ever american to perform in russia um amazing incredible and the whole tale is extraordinary because he's going in at a time when there was a lot of spy uh espionage stuff going on so immediately he seemed to be someone who might be going in for alternative reasons and he stopped at immigration on the way in they open up his suitcase to see what he's got and of course it's all of harpo's stuff for the live show so it's fake guns and it's carrots carrots knives and swords and they're going what the hell is this we've busted you and he thought he was busted but he explained i'm doing this and

he gets he gets over there and there's these incredible passages about him playing to the people who've booked him in silence as they don't get it and having to rewrite narrative around the absurdity of them going they said to him after he did all of his old tricks that he used to do in the Marx Brothers movies what is the point of this that's right why that's brilliant that bit because they say to him, we'll fix it for you. And they have a couple of Russian dramatists write a five-minute prologue and a brief epilogue. I love that bit where he goes, I had no idea what this stuff was about, but they were right. They needed to frame it for the Russian audiences. So they get the five-minute prologue, no laughs. Harpo would come out, honk the horn, do the knife bit, play the harp.

Rapturous applause, people falling on the ground laughing. Epilogue two, wind it all up, ten-minute standing ovation. Yeah, and he called them, because these two writers, which he clearly saw that they knew what they were doing, and he worked with the great George S. Kaufman and Maury riskind i think morris riskind was his name yeah he nicknamed them you know um george f kaufmansky and he he saw them as his as his uh equivalents and um he did a six week tour of russia and it's just extraordinary that in 1933 i was i mean it's a it's a really bizarre time and it has the most fantastic ending because he's leaving and he gets met up by this man

who says, I need you to smuggle back papers into America. You're going to have to strap them to your leg and we're going to have to get you to do this. Are you up for it? And he said, yeah, of course. No problem. Absolutely fine. He even leaves the room where his chaperone who's part of the government looking

after him and says hey i've just been made a spy i'm gonna and she she thinks you're joking again aren't you because she has no idea when he's joking or not ah this is a joke yeah so then he's about to board the train in the boat to get back to america when suddenly someone reports to him that one of the reviewers who had made a terrible review of his show just one of the reviewers who didn't get it was executed and he goes what and they say it's not because of the bad review it turns out he was also smuggling things across the country and he suddenly thought what that oh my god i've got this thing strapped to my leg so he has to go past the immigration where they stopped him for his suitcase full of knives again but fortunately they now knew who he was yeah so they were like oh come on through yeah and there's this beautiful

story of him the most famous man in the world to a lot of i mean he was huge sitting on a boat back to america with a whole boat knowing who he is never leaving his cabin because he's too petrified he's going to be busted and he has to sit just playing solitaire with himself and oh it's just it's and that's just one chapter of this extraordinary story we'll be back in just a sec have you got a bit you could you could read us have you got like a favorite bit yeah i'll tell you this is a very very short super short extract what i really loved i forgot that he had done this in the book is that he does this thing where in the early days of the Marx Brothers he takes you on the tour gig by gig it's beautiful he has an incredible memory for not only what they did and how they evolved but all the acts that were on the scene

at the time it's so beautiful hearing a little bit of social history yeah so um Lerado Texas is one of the places he played and in Lerado we showed the bill with one of the saddest vaudeville acts i ever saw this is great the musical cow milkers the musical cow milkers it was a team the guy led a live cow on stage and while his wife in a sun bonnet and pinafore squatted on a stool and milked the cow they sang duets after the opening night the manager fired them they would be replaced on the bill he said with a second solo by the marks boy who wears the wig and plays the big zither or whatever you call it so minnie who is harpo's mom who is really the hero of the the story in a way she she took these boys and made them who they were

yeah chicago puts them on stage they loved her to death and there was no sense of her being that sort of pushy performance mom this was this is someone who truly loved her he says something beautiful somewhere he says she was so beautiful she was almost as beautiful as Minnie his mother yeah yeah so Minnie this isn't further down in the extract Minnie came down with a sudden attack of loyalty. This is for the musical cow milkers and motherly love. Mr. And Mrs. Musical cow milker had their small children.

Minnie went to bat for them. She yelled and wept and begged for the couple to be rehired at length. Her eloquence swayed the theater manager. All right. All right. He said, I'll take them back. I'll put them on.

I'll put them on in place of the Marx brothers. You're closed. And that's, and that's the end of that entry. But he goes through the entire tour and you watch them evolving through every single gig that they're playing. And what's interesting in this book is how much of it is about his charmed life. There's actually relatively little about working with the Marx Brothers, right? There's an awful lot about the things he saw and the people he knew. He was accepted into part of the Algonquin circle. So all the people you mentioned, Dorothy Parker. And he writes a lot about a, I guess,

forgotten man called Alexander Wolcott, who was a theatre critic and a writer for The New Yorker. It's fascinating, that Wolcott. I had to go and look him up. You know, Harpo, for someone who didn't speak, is king of the anecdote in this book, right? I mean, that's one of the brilliant... These things have been told and retold.

This one here, this was my favourite. When Noel Coward wrote he was leaving London for the Riviera, we journeyed through the night to Paris to catch him between trains and give him a surprise welcome to France. I met his boat train disguised as a ragged, bearded street musician playing a miniature harp. Alec Wolcott concealed himself in the shadows of the station to spy on the scene. What I had in mind was to latch on to Noel playing as badly as I could to see if I could annoy him

to the point of calling a policeman. Noel stepped off the train. I stopped playing and held out my hat for tips. Without seeming to pay me any special attention noel dropped a sixpence into the hat and said i've never seen you looking better half a little boy now tell me where the devil alec is it's so good it's worth just saying um just if you want to the listener right now wants to put in their head what is this book the equivalent of this is the sort of the unheard of david nivens yeah bring on the empty horses or the moons of the moons of bloom which is the greatest we normally do the blurb this is better than a blurb okay this me begins to sound like an

unexciting fellow doesn't he maybe i am but i've been lucky enough in my time to do a number of things that most people never get around to doing i've've played piano in a whorehouse. I've smuggled secret papers out of Russia. I've taught a gangster mob how to play pinchy-winchy. I've played croquet with Herbert Byatt Swope while he kept Governor Al Smith waiting on the phone. I've gambled with Nick the Greek, sat on the floor with Greta Garbo, sparred with Benny Leonard, horsed around with the Prince of Wales, played ping-pong with George Gershwin. George Bernard Shaw has asked me for advice. Oscar Levant has played private concerts for me at a buck a throw. I've golfed with Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. I've basked on the Riviera with Somerset Maughan and Elsa Maxwell. I've been thrown out of the casino at Monte Carlo.

Flushed with triumph at the poker table, I've challenged Alexander Wolcott to anagrams and Alice Durer Miller to a spelling match. I've given lessons to some of the world's greatest musicians. I've been a member of the two most famous round tables since the days of King Arthur, sitting with the finest creative minds of the 1920s at the Algonquin in New York and with Hollywood's sharpest professional wits at the Hillcrest. The truth is, I had no business doing any of these things. I couldn't read a note of music. I never finished the second grade. But I was having too much fun to reckon myself as an ignorant upstart.

I mean, it's a totally, totally irresistible premise. So this was done with the writer Roland Barber, we were saying. And this is a rare clip of Roland Barber's tapes of the recordings that he made of Harpo. I didn't know those existed. So here is Harpo speaking about Harpo. One night I'm playing and I felt sick and I practically keeled off the stool. And she says, get that son of a bitch back on that stool. There was a couple of customers there.

So again, I fell off the stool. She said, what the hell is the matter with him to one of the girls? And she said, well, he must be sick. So they sent for a doctor, and he looked at me, the doctor, and he said, he's got the measles. She says, get him the hell out of here.

I don't want any sick Jews around me. I mean, what I find interesting about that is that actually shows you he's much tougher sounding than you think he might be, right? And you had to be tough to live the life that they led for 15, 20 years. I mean, they're in vaudeville on the road for a long time. You can hear in his accent there as well. You can hear that real New York.

So you can hear it in the films. I noticed it in Duck Soup yesterday. They don't call him Harpo. They call him Harpo. Harpo, right? And it's not Chico. No. It's Chico.

Chico. Chico, so-called because he was always chasing after chicks, right? Yeah. Although he says it's not. He says there's another reason why he's called Chico, but it isn't. It's because he's called Chico. it isn't, it's called Chico Gummo and Zeppo Great QI fact

come on, you know you have This was one of my first ever QI facts This is when Dan got the job at QI I discovered that the clamp that held and dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima the clamp device was and dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima.

Big boy. The clamp device was invented by Zeppo Marx. Whoa! Get out of here. He was an inventor. He had the most extraordinary life, Zeppo Marx, post the Marx Brothers. Yeah. I've just suddenly remembered.

I cannot believe I forgot this. I, years ago, really wanted to make something about the Marx Brothers, a sort of documentary. And through Twitter, I managed to make a few contacts with people who knew the children of, and I had a two hour conversation with Bill Marx, the son of Harpo on the phone. And he was saying about this, particularly that Russian episode of Harpo going over to Russia, that would have made the most extraordinary movie. And it's a movie that he wants to make because there's a lot of untold stuff that he didn't tell Roland that would make it in. And it was a largely a thing about, it's a huge love story as well between him and his wife, Susan, that he doesn't touch on in the book as well. They were going through troubling times.

Yeah, it was pretty extraordinary talking to someone associated and adopted child of this god. And he's got all the hats and the wigs and the horns and the harps. And you could hear in the background him rustling through the stuff. And you're saying, oh, man. So I said I watched Duck Soup again yesterday. And the thing that comes off the screen really powerfully is they don't actually play nice, the Marx Brothers. This is the thing. Because it's old, you assume it must be quite quaint in some way. But Harpo in particular, I found this brilliant... There's a great book by a guy called Danny Peary.

He wrote three volumes of these called Cult Movies, Cult Movies 2 and more cult movies. And the first cult movies book was written in the 70s and it's a book where his criteria for selection was, if I show this film at midnight in a rep cinema, will a crowd come and see it? So there is no VHS. There is no internet, clearly.

This is just what audiences would pay to see. And they would come out to see Marx Brothers films. And he writes brilliantly about duck soup. And here's this description of Harpo by Danny Peary, which is on the money, I think. Harpo may be the team's link to silent comedy, but his character is also the missing link in man's evolution, an unsuccessful stage in man's development.

He is part man, part beast, a creature whose sole concerns are eating, grabbing blondes and destroying everything in his path. He sleeps with animals. He does in Duck City. He beds down with a horse and eats everything, capital letters, everything, including cigars, telephones and shoelaces. He is a wild man, violence personified. He cuts everything in sight with scissors,

even cutting out Kennedy's pocket and making it into a peanut bag. He burns Kennedy's hats. He carries a gun and a blowtorch in his remarkably well-supplied coat. When Chico and Harpo are together, it reminds you of the guy who walks his unleashed dog down the street and cares not a hoot that he's biting people no doubt about it harpo should be on a leash wow you know what that's great writing and that is true yeah you know that's so great because he is he is kind of id isn't he harpo yeah like no he's uncontrolled wild yeah

that's the glory of this book is watching that character from his first thing where he does the gookie you know he kind of he kind of really upsets the shoemaker in the shop window and pulls this terrible face you did which i'm i'm thinking that lovely thing you put on twitter this morning that must be the gookie it is the gookie yes the gookie is the name they gave the face that he would put but you would recognise it if you saw it I will tweet it again and it's watching how this

how somebody who fails at school and has none of the obvious talents of his other brothers finds his way into I mean it's like you know when everybody says

be yourself you know just find the thing that you can do that nobody else can I mean this story is the most brilliant example of that I think I've ever read be yourself, you know, just find the thing that you can do that nobody else can. I mean, this story is the most brilliant example of that I think I've ever read. So in the tradition of QI and Christmas,

I've prepared now a little quiz. Oh, great. For you all, because we have not talked about the art of the comedian's autobiography or memoir, and it is a subject, and to quote Douglas Adams, fraught with interest. I was going to say, Dan is a bit of a scholar of the comedian's memoir.

Well, we're about to find out. Yeah, that's going to be cute. So I'm going to give you the titles of five or six comedian's biographies. And you have to name the... Fingers on buzzers? Who is the comedian, right? Okay.

One. Well, I'll start with an easy one. Okay. The Custard Stops at Hatfield. Michael Bentine or Les Dawson? You can't just throw... I'm not... Who is this name?

It's really famous. I'm surprised. No. I've got a bit of a gap in the British. Hatfield. That's the giveaway, isn't it? Oh, well... Why don't you answer, Nicky?

I don't. I'm just trying to rack some of my brains with a comedian from Hatfield. Kenny Everett. Kenny Everett. I think that is quite a well-known one. That's like the most... Well, there you go.

So we're on a real loser. And I'm one up. Right, one up. I'm one up. Two, how to talk dirty and influence people. Lenny Bruce. It is Lenny Bruce. I think I might have even got that.

All right. Three, my autobiography. Charlie Chaplin. Charles Chaplin. Well done. Bravo. Three. My autobiography. Charlie Chaplin. Charles Chaplin. Well done. Bravo. Yes. Well done.

Okay, very good. High five. Charles Chaplin, you are right. Absolutely, yeah. Charles Chaplin, yeah. It's Hello From Him. Oh. It's got to be Ronnie Barker.

It is Ronnie Barker. For a bonus point, High Hopes. Ronnie Corbett? Yeah. It's Ronnie Corbett. I was about to say that because I interviewed him about High Hopes. Ronnie Corbett? Yeah. That's Ronnie Corbett. I was about to say that because I interviewed him about High Hopes at the Hay Festival, which is another story which we won't go into. I have a bit of an allergic reaction to him.

It just makes me go... Who, Ronnie Corbett? In the flesh or just on screen? On TV for a long time and then I once... I don't know if he's not alive anymore, but then to the women in person and physically... It makes you feel even worse. This is like Austin Powers saying he doesn't like carnies

because they've got small hands. Anyway, right, hang on. Next. Where do we get to? Life and Laughing. Ooh. One of the best-selling books of the last few years. That's its title.

Life and Laughing. Really? Ah. It's not Dick Emery, is it, Andy? It's not Dick Emery. Are they British? You are awful, John. Are they British or are they American? British. Lenny Henry? It's Michael McIntyre. Oh!

And then finally, Little Goes a Long Way. So, Ronnie Corbett? No. It's got to be the one, Little and Large, whatever it's called. It's Little Goes a Long Way, My Own Story by Sid Little. Now, I've got a copy of this here. Now, this book was made famous by Robin Ince on his book club.

I'm going to read the bit that Robin used to read because it is sensational. I saw Robin talk about this but and i sent off for a copy which i got from 1p from amazon marketplace and when it arrived it's a signed copy it says to phyllis be happy sid little oh no so she wasn't happy for that long she gave it to the charity show jesus in In April 1974, Eddie and I were offered the opportunity of appearing at the London Palladium. The star of the show was Cliff Richard. Eddie and I have always admired Cliff.

In fact, I think one of the first songs we did together back in the days of the Stonemasons was Living Doll, so you can understand our excitement. I'll always remember the party he gave on the last night of the show. It was at his flat in the Marlebone Road, and Sherry and I were invited. It was a fantastic home. As you walked in, you could see all the silver and platinum discs on the wall.

I remember that the food was brilliant. It was curry, which I really like, as does Cliff, I think. If you're ever in Ealing, there's a great Indian restaurant there called the Taj Mahal. It was actually one of Cliff's favourite haunts. While we were in London, Cherie and I were always bumping into him there.

We met him once after he'd recorded A Little In Love. He came over and said, hello, thanks for dedicating the song to me, Cliff, I said. What do you mean, he said. Well, I replied, A Little little in love he did laugh oh anyway back to the party it's it is packed with anecdotes that's another hard i mean it's not a comedian but i've had such joy publishing dave hill from slade and and the thing about dave is that he's he's very very funny and a very good storyteller but one of the things I love most about him as I said you know as you do early

on you say how did you feel Dave about the Vic and Bob kind of you know Slade at home parody I said oh I loved it I absolutely loved it. He said, it's very funny. And he said, the thing about it is, he said, you know, it's better to be on a show like that, that everybody loves. Very warm-spirited, very generous, you know,

comedy show. And then he paused and he said, and Nod and I were the funny ones in the band so dan what makes these books work do you think and what makes this one in particular work the distance of time and he wrote it at the end of his life and there's a lot of comic autobiographies now coming out of people in their 40s. And they don't make an effort for me to capture what it means to be not just your life, but the lives around you. Like the milk, the people with the cow.

Your job, I think, with certain industries and entertainment, I think, is largely one, is to record those people that you passed along the way. Who could have been as big or bigger than you were and give them their little moment to say, we were all in this together. And that's what this book has for me. It just absolutely nails that period of comedy. You can smell it coming through the words. And I can't think of a modern autobiography from a comedian that quite does that in the way that Harpo Speaks does. comedian that quite does that in the way that harpo speaks does it's very interesting how his heart his commitment is clearly to those first this before they get to hollywood what's so interesting is he clearly thought the films are really a cash-in on the once we make it on broadway we've made it that's fundamentally isn't it the act is fixed after that really you know

they know who the persona are and they're rich and they start meeting other people and they and they kind of come together for the movies but not so much that brilliant thing where he says i just wanted i decided i was going to be a character in the neighborhood he wasn't going to be good at fighting people he wasn't going to be doing that so he decided he was going to be a character and he makes a character and that character amazingly sustains him yeah for his whole life and and also um how how wonderful that in every single Marx Brothers movie you get two moments per movie of seeing the comedian get stripped away and Harpo sitting and just playing the harp

a full song with no interruption and he says in the book this is me you are seeing the guy at home who is in love with his instrument. And the same with Chico playing the piano. It's the most stunning moment to go from, as we were saying before, this absurdist, no rules character to someone who's so in love with this. And you're there for him, you allow him to do it and you look forward to those moments in the movie. So when the book came out, Groucho did a favour for his brother and had him as a surprise guest on his game show, You Bet Your Life. Oh, yeah. And I've got a clip of that here.

Groucho, Marika Abba, and Charles... And a happy new year. Groucho, Marika Abba, and Charles Kephart are waiting to talk to you. So folks, come in, please, and meet Groucho Marx. Yes. Welcome to The Groucho, Marika Abba and Charles Kephart are waiting to talk to you So folks, come in please and meet Groucho Marx Yes Welcome to the Groucho Show Say the secret word and...

Bravo! Do you want to say hello to me? This is the book my brother Harpo wrote. It's called Harpo Speaks. It's all about life and show business. Very good book, too. I didn't see how he was going to make any money out of the book if he keeps giving them away. I really, I know.

See, the thing is, you've really got to watch, please look that clip up on YouTube. It's really funny. Harpo manages to get about six bits of business into a 30-second appearance. Absolutely fantastic. Hey, I asked some people online, some friends of the show and some people I know online on Twitter,

to name their favourite comedians' memoirs. And several of them said Harpo Speaks straight away. So I asked Lisa Evans and she said Harpo Speaks straight away. But I also asked Louis Barthes and Joel Morris, Robin Ince and Danny Baker. And what's quite interesting is several of them said the same books. So they said Harpo Speaks. They said Crying With Laughter by Bob Monkhouse,

which I have read, which is a... Have you read it? Have any of you read it? I have it, but not read it. Funnily enough, I would have mentioned that because I think it's unexpected joy, that book. It's an astounding book for several reasons. Also, Born Standing Up by Steve Martin. I read that, yeah. You like that book, don'tounding book for several reasons also born standing up by steve martin

i read that yeah you like that i loved it it's it's it's not the book that you were expecting when you start reading it as in you know you think steve martin's going to write a sort of hilarious account almost like harpo marx and capture stuff but he found it a very painful process getting up on stage every night and he's's very heartfelt, but you have to readjust your expectation and suddenly realise you're sitting on a much deeper, beautiful book than you were sort of bringing yourself in for. But yeah, I recommend that as well. I love that book as well.

I saw Steve Martin talk about that book in New York. He did a Steve Martin-ish thing, which he was on for an hour, and for 58 minutes of that hour, he was the sober author, Steve Martin. And then he did two minutes where he was the sober author, Steve Martin. And then he did two minutes where he switched the comedy machine on. It was like everyone in the room was being sucked towards the stage. It was an incredible display of technique, charisma, anything.

He could do it if he wants to, he just doesn't want to. Well, I made a calculation about the fact that when he was over a few years ago to do his live banjo band, I thought, OK, this guy guy's gonna be on stage there's no way surely that he can't he'll find himself just going into routines surely so i booked myself a ticket a front row seat uh on my own and uh i sat there and i would say 30 of a 70 minute show was stand up from Steve Martin. Really? And it was incredible. Yeah, of course. Right.

Yeah. Cause he can really do it. Sorry. There's one more book that got mentioned a lot and I must share this with you. I was saying when Dan came in, I kind of resented having to record the podcast tonight because I started reading this book on the way. I got it out of the London library. I borrowed it from the London library.

I've started reading it. Everybody recommended the fool on the Hill by Max Wall. Yeah. You read that? I haven't, no, so I'm excited to. Just this one tiny bit. So he's gone on tour and he can't get in touch with his wife. And they live in Jersey.

When I got to Gatwick, I phoned to Jersey from the airport. No reply. I phoned a neighbour who went round to the front door and found newspapers stuffed in the letterbox and too much milk on the step. Everything is silent, the neighbour told me. So I phoned Jennifer's mother, but Jennifer answered. I have left you, she said. Arriving home in Jersey, I entered an empty house and found a distressing note left on the table. Another fait accompli, folks. I put the kettle on. I have put the kettle on all my life, I think,

when my world is falling apart. I made tea and re-read the note. I will not bore you with all its contents, but the concluding words are seared into my memory. You will end up in one room, alone, with nothing. Whoa! in one room alone with nothing. And the laughs keep coming, everyone. This book is absolutely fantastic.

I started reading it. So those are all good tips, I think. It's not in print, of course. I know you're rushing out, Dan, but just a tiny, quick Brian Blessed, because I know you are Brian Blessed's vicar on earth. Yes, yeah. You know more Brian Blessed stories than anyone else. Well, because I've met Brian a few times. Many times.

The one I like telling most is when I first met him, which is he was on Museum of Curiosity. It was our first series. And so we didn't know what we were doing. And I managed to book Brian right at the last minute literally we were recording on a Saturday I think and he was uh he was confirmed at Friday evening with a voicemail that he left me which went on for about 20 minutes and actually no I'm going to swap anecdotes because this is the one I rarely said is I did some filming with Brian I went to his house in the countryside and he has this little shed where he calls his explorers shed and he has all his

stuff and it was this long day of filming and the guy does not stop talking he's just brilliant at talking it just keeps going and keeps going it has no logic and I was so tired from filming that as I sat on the couch listening to him I fell asleep and I just couldn't keep my eyes open and I remember bringing my eyes back open what It must have been five minutes later, ten minutes later, and he was still looking at me, talking. He hadn't... He had not stopped. You know what? His book is great.

It's brilliant. It's really good. The chapter in Brian Bless's book about Peter O'Toole, about knowing Peter O'Toole for many, many years, is superb. All of these books that we've talked about, including Harpo Speaks, you can obviously order them through the backlisted website, and you'll be giving money to your favourite independent retailer if you do that. It's through Hive.

I think what I love about this book, just to wrap up about Harpo Speaks, is it actually is clearly, it has clearly been written. There's been a tendency, I think certainly in the last few years, to smooth out some of these books too much so that you're keeping an eye on the publisher wants to sell cereal to a newspaper you know a lot of the time they tend to be accounts of things you already know told by the person the things happen to but in fact they can't remember because they've told the story so many times or it's kind of been smoothed out a little too much. What I like with this book is,

even though it was ghosted, it's so well ghosted, this felt like the book Harpo wanted to write. You know what I mean? It's about the things that matter to Harpo Marx, not necessarily to the audience that might be reading it. And certainly the first 200 pages, that evocation of his growing up in New York City at the turn of the century, vaudeville, all that stuff,

is tremendously valuable, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, it's stunning. It really, it's just a great book. It's just flat out a great book. And the lovely notes from his kids at the end, I just love, from Billy. Dad could harmonise music like an angel, but not the clothes he wore. I can still hear mum gasping at the end i just love from billy dad could harmonize music like an angel but not the clothes he wore i can still hear mum gasping at the sight of dad coming downstairs before they went out for

an evening his wardrobe was beautifully tailored his accessories impeccable but a selection was something else again striped tie with checkered shirt under plaid suit you knew he was in a room mum gave up trying to change him like all the rest of us she loved him for what he was a free spirit and that is finally just the feeling that you get from this book it's yeah absolute poverty i mean real poverty um and unfortunately that is all we have time for this week um thank you to dan thank you so much for having me no please bring a horn next time thank you to nikki our. Thank you to Nicky, our producer. Thank you to the... Sponsors.

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