Irving Brecher Wrote The Lines That Made The Whole World Smile

Irving Brecher, a comedy writer whose career in radio, television and the movies included writing two Marx Brothers comedies, co-writing the Judy Garland musical Meet Me in St. Louis and creating the radio and TV series The Life of Riley.

When he found he could make money selling lines to vaudeville comedians, he and a friend -- fledgling comedy writer Al Schwartz -- ran a small ad in Variety offering their gag-writing services. At the time, a brash young comedian named Milton Berle had a self-promoted reputation for stealing other people's material.

Brecher and Schwartz's ad offered “positively Berle-proof gags, so bad not even Milton will steal them." Their first customer: Milton Berle, who paid them $50 for a page of one-liners.

Brecher was soon under personal contract to producer-director Mervyn LeRoy, who took him to MGM, where he wrote the screenplays for the Marx Brothers' At the Circus (1939) and Go West (1940) and shared an Oscar nomination for the screenplay for Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). Among his other screenwriting credits are Shadow of the Thin Man, Du Barry Was a Lady, Yolanda and the Thief, Cry for Happy and Bye Bye Birdie.

Brecher met Groucho Marx in 1938 after LeRoy hired Brecher to punch up the comedy scenes in The Wizard of Oz. As Brecher recalled in a 2001 interview with The Times: “The straw man, the tin man, the lion -- Mervyn LeRoy said, 'They're not funny enough.' “ When LeRoy took Brecher into his office, Marx was sitting at LeRoy's desk.

I said, 'Hello, Mr. Marx.' He said, 'Hello? That's supposed to be a funny line? Is this the guy who's supposed to write our movie?' I probably turned white. Then I said, 'Well, I saw you say hello in one of your movies, and I thought it was so funny I'd steal it and use it now.' Grouch smiled, then he bought me lunch.
Irving Brecher