Groucho Marx

Julius Henry Marx grew up in a crowded, musical, immigrant household on New York's Upper East Side, pushed onto the stage by a relentless mother who was determined to make her sons into performers. What began as a boy-singer act evolved, through years of hard vaudeville touring, into the most gleefully destructive comedy team the American stage and screen would ever produce. Julius became Groucho, and Groucho became the ringleader.

His character was a marvel of contradictions: a fast-talking chiseler in a painted-on mustache and wire glasses, forever hunched over a cigar, forever hurling wisecracks in every direction. He was the puncturer of pomp, the enemy of every stuffed shirt and grand dame, and his verbal comedy moved at a speed audiences had never heard, a torrent of puns, insults, and non-sequiturs that could leave a scene in ruins. Alongside the silent, harp-playing Harpo and the piano-playing schemer Chico, he anchored a series of increasingly beloved films.

The brothers refined their stage shows before live audiences before committing them to film, which gave their best pictures their extraordinary comic timing. In "Duck Soup" Groucho ruled the tiny nation of Freedonia and marched it into absurd war; in "A Night at the Opera" the team demolished the pretensions of high culture, most famously by cramming an impossible crowd into a single ship's cabin. Through it all Groucho's leering, insulting patter set the template for a century of American wit.

When the team wound down, Groucho reinvented himself yet again, this time as the host of the radio and television quiz show "You Bet Your Life," where the real point was never the questions but his improvised needling of the contestants. It made him a fixture in American living rooms for years and introduced him to generations who had never seen the films. Sharp-tongued to the end, he became an elder statesman of comedy, showered with honors, and died in 1977. His voice, that machine-gun stream of insult and pun, echoes in nearly every wisecracking comic who came after.