“Groucho Marx made a small fortune in vaudeville and then lost it all in the stock market crash of 1929. His sense of humor was no help to him then. One day in the early 1930s he was sitting in a bar with his friend Morrie, and Morrie was trying to console him.
“Yes,” Morrie told Groucho, “we’ve lost a lot of money and it hurts, but we’ve still got our health and our lives ahead of us, and some people don’t even have that. Take my cousin Fred. He’s much worse off than we are but he’s pressing on as best he can. Fred lost his leg in a carriage accident when he was 5. His parents were killed in a tenement fire when he was 12. His wife ran off with his best friend when he was 27. And then he had diabetes at 29.”
Groucho was not to be consoled; he had lost too much money in the crash. He snarled back at Morrie: “Diabetes at 29? That’s nothing. I had Radio at 104.”
~ Story told by Chris Powell, GATA