"My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something"
About this Quote
Groucho Marx takes a tiny, petty swipe at poetry and lands a broader joke about culture’s addiction to pretending. Calling a calendar mnemonic his "favourite poem" is classic Groucho: he demotes the highbrow to the practical, then acts as if he’s made a serious aesthetic judgment. The laugh comes from the mismatch between what we’re told to value (poetry as insight, beauty, transcendence) and what he claims to value (a rhyme that helps you remember which months have 30 days). It’s not anti-art so much as anti-pretension, a refusal to treat reverence as intelligence.
The line also rigs the game with that deadpan phrase "because it actually tells you something". Subtext: most poems, in his view, don’t tell you anything; they perform meaning, they gesture. Groucho isn’t arguing that poems are useless, he’s mocking a certain kind of audience posture: nodding solemnly at opaque verse to signal refinement. His metric for worth is hilariously literal, a comedian’s way of exposing how often cultural prestige is disconnected from felt experience.
Context matters. Marx came up in an America where mass entertainment was eating the old gatekeepers, and his persona thrived on puncturing seriousness wherever it tried to stand too tall. The joke doubles as a populist flex: give me a rhyme that works, not one that needs a seminar. And because it’s Groucho, the barb is affectionate; he’s not burning poetry down, he’s reminding it that clarity can be its own kind of elegance.
The line also rigs the game with that deadpan phrase "because it actually tells you something". Subtext: most poems, in his view, don’t tell you anything; they perform meaning, they gesture. Groucho isn’t arguing that poems are useless, he’s mocking a certain kind of audience posture: nodding solemnly at opaque verse to signal refinement. His metric for worth is hilariously literal, a comedian’s way of exposing how often cultural prestige is disconnected from felt experience.
Context matters. Marx came up in an America where mass entertainment was eating the old gatekeepers, and his persona thrived on puncturing seriousness wherever it tried to stand too tall. The joke doubles as a populist flex: give me a rhyme that works, not one that needs a seminar. And because it’s Groucho, the barb is affectionate; he’s not burning poetry down, he’s reminding it that clarity can be its own kind of elegance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Attributed to Groucho Marx — listed on his Wikiquote page (entry for the line beginning "Thirty days hath September"). |
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