Customer Reviews

Memoirs Of A Mangy Lover

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It's almost impossible to read MEMOIRS OF A MANGY LOVER without hearing the distinct voice of Groucho Marx echoing in your head. The writing style in evidence here is very close to Groucho's unique manner of speaking that was so prevalent in his movie, radio, and television careers. His train of thought weaves dangerously, one moment he'll be discussing romance in the dark ages, the next he'll be looping back to earlier sentences, picking apart his own grammar or dragging a double entendre from the brink of reason. The narrative moves quickly and easily, but the reader should be careful, as speedy perusal will cause you to miss some of the subtler jokes.

The subject matter is very much a product of its era and its author. Most of the jokes revolve around how terrible it is to be married, how much of a pain one's wife is, and how much men like to sit around playing poker. Not to say that the anecdotes and remembrances aren't hilarious, because some of them are painfully funny, but the subject matter is fairly limiting. Fortunately, Groucho is clever enough to keep the jokes moving so that it doesn't feel like the same story repeated endlessly. The book is just the right length for the amount of material. Any longer and it would have seemed repetitious, any shorter and it would have been insubstantial.

Not surprisingly, my favorite stories of the bunch were the ones that included cameos from the author's famous siblings. Harpo and Chico do put in short appearances here, which would give one the impression that some of the stories that are written about here actually happened. To be honest, most of the anecdotes seem to have been fairly embellished, so to differentiate between what is reality and what is the result of Groucho's mad mind is a game that simply can't be won. If you're looking for an in-depth and accurate biography of Groucho Marx, then there are loads of other books you should be investigating. This tome may not tell you much about Groucho Marx, but it wasn't meant to. It's a cliché to say that a really funny book will cause one to laugh out loud in embarrassingly public places, but clichés like that come about because of hilarious books like MEMOIRS OF A MANGY LOVER.

Fans of the Marx Brothers know that chasing women was a part of their comedy routines. Though Groucho didn't go "honking" after them like Harpo, he got the job done with rich widows (Margaret Dumont). In this book, Groucho tells about his own real life amorous adventures and gives us his priceless look at the history of love.
I'm a relatively new fan of the Marx Bros. and I absolutely fell in love with this book. Its a quick read, but extremely entertaining. Of course, there is plenty of humor throughout the book and I laughed out loud several times. Groucho's view of the opposite sex would be considered politically incorrect today, but it is hilarious (and I'm a woman!). He recounts a few stories about anonymous friends and their exploits, a few of his own exploits, as well as a few stories that aren't related to love but are still funny.
I recommend this collection to anybody that loves witty books (and isn't afraid of a few puns) and has an absurd sense of humor. Its a must for any Groucho fan.

Groucho regales us with hilarity in intimate snippets from his life and his career. You don't have to be a Groucho fan to enjoy this collection. You simply just have to be alive.

and as far as I remember, this was the first book I read that made me laugh out loud. Prior to this I had only seen Groucho on reruns of his game show and really didn't see the big deal.

This book made me start watching his movies and truely appreciating the man. Later I rewatched the gameshow (can't remember the name of it now, just remember that duck with the word of the day hanging from above) and caught more of Groucho's subtle ribbing of guests.

I enjoyed the jokes in this book, as well as, the true affection for his brothers that can be read in between the lines.

ladies and gentleman,its GROUCHO MARX the king of comedy ,the god of comedy.This book is very insightful ,it may not be his funniest or his best but its still one hell of a great book from a great man.In this book grouch speaks of life ,how sex evolved,who his best friend is ,how much chicos got in his bank acount .if you are a true marx fan ,you cant possibly over look this book,if your not a marx fan ....what the hell are you doing reading this review. all in all ,they only let me give it 5 stars ,truefully there is not enough stars in the universe to make up how good this book is .so if you bought the book because of this review .i hope you love it,and if you hated it well......please dont hurt me. LONG LIVE CAPTAIN SPAULDING......even though hes dead

After reading biographies and articles about Groucho that were written by others, I became used to the idea that this great comedian, wit and entertainer was in fact a rather unhappy and unfulfilled man. This may be true, but all the same, it was refreshingly fun to read Groucho's book "Memoirs of a Mangy Lover", and hear him describe himself and his life in his own words.

This was, I believe, never a very popular book, but to me, it reveals Groucho's character. Using his trademark silly, stream of consciousness jokes and puns, and numerous veiled self-deprecating references to himself, Groucho indirectly paints a self-portrait of an aged alley cat looking back on his life. Groucho tells stories from his life, describes his philosophies and beliefs and pet peeves, and throughout, sets an intimate, personal tone that leaves you feeling like you've spent an afternoon listening to a beloved, long-winded uncle, whose cigar smoke will linger in your clothes for days afterwards.

Loved every sentence of it! Julius describes his experiences of love, romance, and their unintended and sometimes undesired consequences with a couple gallons of humor. I rationed myself to approx. one to two chapters a night. Truly hilarious........and true.

Groucho Marx's Memoirs of a Mangy Lover, originally published in 1963, is a collection of more than 25 essays loosely themed around the subject of love or, more accurately, the pursuit of sex. Groucho writes about unfaithful husbands of his acquaintance and the perks of polygamy, about a potentially amorous evening spoiled by pigeons, about an act of martyrdom that involved his courtship of the homely daughter of a Mexican cook. But there are also stories about his brothers cheating someone at cards, for example, and about the impositions of unwelcome dinner guests.

Groucho doesn't open up much in these essays. We're not given a sense of the man behind the moustache. But to the extent that the author is humanized in the stories it is, well, a little strange: Groucho is such an iconic figure that I've never imagined him as flesh-and-blood human. It is surprising to think of him doing anything so banal as driving a car. The essays are interesting for this reason and because they are the product of a world that, some fifty years on, seems very foreign. Much of the book is arguably sexist, and it contains some racial references that wouldn't escape an editor's pen nowadays. More surprising are the author's casual references to trips with his brothers to brothels, as if such a thing were completely unremarkable, or his account of essentially ordering up a woman from an old acquaintance while in town:

"What I was looking for was a companion--a dazzling, pulchritudinous wench who would hang on my every word and eventually obey my every command."

The essays are interesting as social history, then, but I'm afraid they're not very funny. I did laugh once, when Groucho described getting lost in Bel Air with Clare Boothe Luce, then U.S. Ambassador to Italy. A producer at Twentieth Century-Fox Studios, out walking his dog in the middle of the night, happened upon the pair while they were standing in the bushes on a street corner trying to read a street sign:

"He surveyed us for a moment, unwilling to believe his eyes, then turned and addressed his dog. 'Spyros,' he said, 'up to now I thought I'd seen everything, but if someone had told me I would ever see the United States Ambassador to Italy and Grouch Marx standing in a bush in Bel Air at two in the morning, I just wouldn't have believed it.'"

But in that case the humor lay in the situation. When Groucho tries to be funny the jokes are corny, forced, dated:

"Millions of years ago, love ran wild on this daffy globe of ours. Men were slimy creatures resembling a louse or the fellow your wife almost married. They were called amoeba--until they got money and changed their name to The First National Bank."

Did our forbears in the sixties indeed laugh at this sort of thing? I have to believe they did: this is Groucho Marx we're talking about, after all. And maybe if Groucho were on screen delivering the same lines they would be funny. But don't expect to guffaw your way through this one. Read it for the sexism and antiquated social mores instead!

-- Debra Hamel

. . . but the better book of Groucho memoirs to begin with is GROUCHO AND ME, published in 1959, several years earlier than MEMOIRS OF A MANGY LOVER (1963). In each book Groucho Marx's unique wordplay, jaundiced viewpoint and occasional tracks into surrealism entertain. But in GROUCHO AND ME there is no "me" other than Groucho himself, and not only is his wit enteraining, we get a coherent family picture of the Marx parents and their five boisterous children, growing up in near-poverty in the early 20th Century in the Yorkville (upper East Side, but too upper ever to be posh) district of Manhattan. Later on Groucho touches -- with some skips and jumps but chronologically -- upon the other places the gradually more successful family troupe lived, from Chicago to Broadway to Hollywood, where they hit the celebrated American "instant stardom" after paying dues for nearly thirty years, most of it not in the first-class venues.

Now, I will not maintain that MEMOIRS OF A MANGY LOVER is "that's left-overs" in any derogatory way. Groucho's essays definitely entertain, but they are merely that, comic sketches or essays, usually arranged around the subject of Sex (Men chasing women, almost always), with occasional forays into politics and society, but only in an abstract way. Only the person with a flair for the artwork in this book and in Groucho's engaging but occasionally crotchety tone would put this book down as a product of the turn of the Sixties (as said, 1963).

The actual product I read -- the paperback edition from Da Capo Press -- has a printing error which is what led me to take my estimation from four stars down to three. The very end of the book is entitled "A Note on the Author by Groucho Marx," and it surely was meant to be short, but I can't say how short. My edition of MEMOIRS OF A MANGY LOVER -- the only edition available new that I know of -- snaps off at mid-sentence at the end of the page: turn the page and there is nothing there but the publisher's UPC code! Now, Groucho loves to talk about himself by talking around himself, so to speak; and he certainly had a talent for setting us up for puns, situational follies and quick turns of speech ("Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas; how he got into my pajamas I'll never know.") But it wouldn't in any way be a Marxian touch for a book to end in mid-sentence. Beyond transferring data, are these things still proof-read these days for line intergrity and page coherence? We, the reader, deserve more for our $15.95 than 213 pages that end with what could only charitably be described as a production blunder. After all, in memoirs as well as Vaudeville, the closing act has to be strong.

True, several of the stories are quite outdated since a night out with the friends to play pocker is almost unheard of. By the same token the women of these tales do not have any resemblance with the direct and assertive New Yorkers of nowadays. On the other hand, the elements that compose the human race remain basically unchanged, such as the dilusion of self importance, jealousy, greed etc., ang Groucho Marx is just a genious to poke fun at all those facts of life.