Eliot Among The Comedians

Abstract

I had a good laugh, couple of laughs (?) real good (?) good laugh (T. S. Eliot, draft of The Waste Land)1 Who is there now for me to share a joke with? (Ezra Pound, obituary note, “For T. S. E.”)2 In 1961, Eliot thanked a new correspondent for a photo. The image, once framed, was given pride of place on his office wall. “You are my most coveted pin-up,” Eliot purred, “I would be delighted to see you wherever we are and proud to be seen in your company.”3 The receiver of this fan mail was Groucho Marx, the man Eliot praised elsewhere as “a master of nonsense” and “a comic genius, a very rare thing.”4 Groucho brushed up on Eliot’s poetry—and also on King Lear—before dining with him a few years later, and during the meal he quoted from The Waste Land before noting that Lear was “an incredibly foolish old man.” Eliot was not “bowled over”; “He quoted a joke,” Groucho recalled, “one of mine … and asked if I remembered the courtroom scene in ‘Duck Soup.’”5 It sounds as though the two men are not quite having a conversation, but they could be; the opening of King Lear and the scene in Duck Soup both feature authority-figures getting more than they bargained for. As Chico runs rings round the court, Groucho comments: “He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.” If looks can be deceiving, then someone who “really” is an idiot might fool you into thinking that you had little to learn from him. Chico teaches the bemused court what Lear’s Fool had taught his master: “This cold night will turn us all to fools.” Indeed, when Groucho said that Lear was a foolish old man, he was quoting the king, who finally learns to call himself “a natural fool,” turning to Cordelia to admit: “I am old and foolish.”6