Monday, February 29, 2016

Lord Buckley, Groucho Marx, and Mrs. Jerry Chapman

A blast from the past. Back in the 1950s Groucho Marx had a quiz show, You Bet Your Life. This clip features two guests, Mrs. Jerry Chapman, and R. M. Buckley, a comic monologuist known as Lord Buckley. I have no idea how many in the audience would have recognized him as he never really reached the mainstream. Buckley was in the back of my mind when I wrote about the Egyptian origins of golf.



At about 1:27 Mrs. Chapman defends the importance of being a housewife. At about 5:50 Buckley does a bit of his rewriting of Marc Antony's funeral oration for Caesar (Shakespeare).

Addendum, March 2, 2016: If Lord Buckley were alive today, would he be allowed to perform or would he be boycotted for cultural appropriation? His act owes a great deal to African-American speech patterns in a way that many today would surely find offensive. 

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