Time & Perspective Quote by Groucho Marx

Comedy usually works by shrinking the world down to something manageable: a gag, a gripe, a punchline. Groucho flips that instinct. He opens with the driest possible autobiography detail, the kind of fact that makes memoir feel like paperwork: I was born. Then he detonates it with mock-solemn grandeur. "These are wonderful words" is funny because it’s blatantly disproportionate; it treats the most basic human datum as if it’s a metaphysical revelation. The joke is scale: the smallest narrative unit suddenly wears a cathedral’s worth of echo.

The subtext is Groucho’s favorite trick, borrowed from his stage persona: the fast-talking cynic who can’t help stumbling into sincerity, or at least into sincerity’s costume. When he drapes birth in "neither time nor eternity can bring diminution", he’s parodying the big Victorian language of the soul and destiny. But he’s also admitting, slyly, that the pomp works on him. He’s laughing at transcendence and, for a beat, letting it stand.

Context matters: Marx came out of vaudeville and the early Hollywood machine, where identity was a product and biography a press-kit tool. Turning "I was born" into cosmic vertigo is a refusal to give the expected origin story. It’s also a comic defense against mortality. If your mind "loses itself in these depths", you don’t have to face the simpler terror underneath: that life is brief, and the joke ends.