Art & Creativity Quote by Groucho Marx

Politics, in Groucho Marx's hands, isn't civic virtue; it's a full-time hustle with bad eyesight and worse incentives. The line works because it takes the dignified phrase "the art of" - usually reserved for diplomacy, leadership, or statecraft - and uses it as a straight man. What follows is a four-beat slapstick routine: look for trouble, find it everywhere, misread it, botch the fix. Each clause escalates the indictment, turning public service into a self-perpetuating machine that thrives on panic and incompetence.

The specific intent is comic demolition. Groucho isn't offering a policy critique so much as puncturing the performance of politics: the way officials scan the horizon for threats to justify relevance, budgets, and airtime. "Finding it everywhere" nails the paranoia economy - the constant reframing of ordinary complexity as existential crisis. The real sting is "diagnosing it incorrectly": not that problems aren't real, but that power often prefers a convenient story to an accurate one. Then comes the punchline with teeth: "applying the wrong remedies". It's not mere failure; it's iatrogenic harm, the cure that becomes the disease.

Context matters. Marx's career rose alongside mass media, economic upheaval, and war - eras when politics became spectacle, and spectacle became governance. As a comedian, he translates that anxiety into a cynical comfort: you're not crazy; the system really can be this backwards. The joke lands because it feels like reportage.