Melville House Books

Irving Brecher with Groucho Marx

Irving Brecher, who wrote jokes for some of Hollywood’s greatest and most subversive comedians, and who once angered all-powerful movie producer Daryl Zanuck by telling him one of his films was so bad it hadn’t been released, it had escaped, died Monday in Los Angeles, just weeks before the publication of his memoir. As a New York Times obituary by Bruce Weber notes, the book is to be called The Wicked Wit of the West, after a nickname given to Brecher by Groucho Marx, for whom Brecher wrote several movies and some memorable lines — such as in the scene in At the Circus where he has Groucho, stuck in a rainstorm, declare “If I were any drier I’d be drowning.” In the 1950s, a line Brecher wrote for a TV show he created, “The Life of Riley,” became a catch phrase: “What a revoltin’ development this is!” Brecher outlasted all of the famous comedians he wrote for, including Marx, Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason, and in 2007, at the age of 93, he wrote a final script on behalf of writers — for a video urging striking Hollywood writers not to settle: “Since 1938, when I joined what was then the Radio Writers Guild, I have been waiting for the writers to get a fair deal; I’m still waiting,” he said in the spot, then added: “As Chester A. Riley would have said, ‘What a revoltin’ development this is!’ But he only said it because I wrote it.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.