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The Golden Age of Radio isn’t known for featuring too many dirty jokes, probably because Jack Benny never dropped any F-bombs and Flash Gordon resisted the urge to recite obscene limericks about residents of Nantucket. But one iconic comedian made an impressively obscene quip during a popular game show – according to legend, at least.

The story goes that the great Groucho Marx, during a 1947 episode of the radio version of his popular quiz program You Bet Your Life, interviewed a female contestant with a large number of kids (the exact number varies depending on the telling). When Groucho asked how she came to have so many children, she responded, “I love my husband.” To which Groucho fired back: “I love my cigar, but I take it out once and a while.”

Several sources suggest that the anecdote is genuine, including Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx,...

Our first episode back in the studio! Robert Weide discusses a few of his favorite movies with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008)

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (2010)

Mother Night (1996)

Woody Allen: A Documentary (2011)

Mort Sahl: The Loyal Opposition (1989)

Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth (1998)

Marx Brothers in a Nutshell (1982)

W.C. Fields: Straight Up (1986)

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (2021)

It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

Mary Poppins (1964)

The French Connection (1971) – Dennis Lehane’s trailer commentary, Mark Pellington’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairing

The Magnificent Seven (1960) – Jesus Treviño’s trailer commentary

The Godfather (1972) – Ernest Dickerson’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairing

The Exorcist (1973) – Oren Peli’s trailer commentary

Patton (1970) – Rod Lurie’s trailer commentary

Mash (1970)

Short Cuts (1993) – Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Lenny...

The great Larry Wilmore joins us to share some very personal double features.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

1917 (2019)

Animal Crackers (1930)

Duck Soup (1933)

My Little Chickadee (1940)

A Night At The Opera (1935)

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

The Parallax View (1974)

Singin’ In The Rain (1952)

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Jaws (1975)

The Stepford Wives (1975)

The Party (1968)

The Return of the Pink Panther (1975)

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)

Richard Pryor: Live In Concert (1979)

Richard Pryor: Live And Smokin’ (1971)

Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986)

Dolemite Is My Name (2019)

Lenny (1974)

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)

Lolita (1962)

Caligula (1979)

The Night of the Iguana (1964)

The Elephant Man (1980)

What Would Jack Do? (2020)

Blue Velvet (1986)

The Apartment (1960)

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Double Indemnity (1944)

The Sting (1973)

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid...

Singer and philanthropist who was married to Bob Hope for 69 years

The singer Dolores Hope, who has died at the age of 102, was known primarily for her 69-year marriage to the comedian Bob Hope, with whom she performed on television and in concerts for American troops stationed overseas. Growing up in the Bronx, New York, Dolores had always wanted to be a singer. Her husky voice and striking looks quickly brought her regular work under the stage name Dolores Reade (inspired by the Broadway star Florence Reed). In 1933, at the Vogue club in New York, Dolores's rendering of It's Only a Paper Moon captivated Hope, who was a rising Broadway star and performing in the musical comedy Roberta at the time. Hope became a constant visitor to the Vogue thereafter, and the couple married on 19 February 1934. Dolores joined his vaudeville show and they moved to Los Angeles.

She had been born Dolores DeFina in Harlem,...

Novelist, screenwriter and biographer whose subjects included his father, Groucho

Arthur Marx, who has died aged 89, grew up in the shadow of his father, Groucho, and was steeped in the controlled chaos of the Marx Brothers. Torn between trying to distance himself from a demanding father, yet also prove worthy of his genius, he enjoyed a long career as a writer of screen and stage comedies, novels and biographies. Not surprisingly, however, his most successful work capitalised on the public's interest in his father and his uncles, Chico, Harpo, Gummo and Zeppo.

Marx wrote several works about Groucho, the first of which, Life With Groucho (1954), published at the height of his father's television popularity, was a warts-and-all portrait punctuated by Groucho's own annotations. (Marx wrote that he would like to correct the impression that his father was a miser; Groucho's footnote read: "You'd better or I'll cut you off without a nickle.

Arthur Marx- son of legendary funnyman Groucho- a novelist, memoirist and one-time tennis player, has passed away at the age of 89.

Marx's childhood was spent accompanying his father on the vaudeville circuit, and thanks to his father (famous for his double entendres and one-liners that were racy for the time), saw behind the scenes of shows like You Bet Your Life, which Groucho hosted. The younger Marx went on to nationally rank as a tennis player before the age of 18. He also wrote for television like All In The Family and Alice in his younger years.

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Screen and TV writer, author and playwright Arthur Marx, the son of legendary comedian Groucho Marx, died this week at his home in Los Angeles of natural causes. He was 89. Marx had a prolific career that spanned more than 60 years. Born in New York in 1921, he spent some of his early years on the road with his father and uncles, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo, during the Marx Brothers' tours of Vaudeville.  By the early 1930s, with the Marx Brothers established as film stars, the family moved to Los Angeles. Following a stint in the Coast Guard during World War II where he served in the Philippines, Marx began his Hollywood career working at MGM as a reader. Eventually, he became a screenwriter, working on the popular Pete Smith shorts and several films in the Blondie series, including Blondie In The Dough. While continuing to write for film and TV,...

Arthur Marx, a son of comedian Groucho Marx, has died of natural causes. The writer and one-time tennis player was 89.  He died in his Los Angeles home. Marx wrote 12 books, some fiction, but most memoirs and biographies of major Hollywood figures. Among his works are Goldwyn: A Biography of the Man Behind the Myth (1976), Red Skelton (1979), The Nine Lives of Mickey Rooney (1988) and the murder mystery Set to Kill (both 1993). He also addressed his relationship with his famous father in a series of memoirs including Son of Groucho...

In honor of Quentin Tarantino week here at Wamg, this column will tackle the 1968 British psycho-thriller Twisted Nerve. A music highlight of Tarantino’s first Kill Bill film in 2003 occurs during the scene when Darryl Hannah’s eye-patched Elle Driver is walking down the hospital corridors intending to dispatch Uma Thurman and she’s whistling this haunting tune that is at the same time both childlike and threatening. Curious, I read the closing credits and the strange song was identified as the theme from the movie Twisted Nerve composed by Bernard Herrmann. That title was familiar as I had its cool psychedelic U.S. one-sheet in my collection but I’d never seen the film and immediately became determined to track it down. I was able to secure a British Pal import of the film and was pleased to find Twisted Nerve an excellent, nasty little forgotten thriller about a warped young psychopath.

Budd Schulberg, who won an Academy Award for the screenplay for "On the Waterfront" and penned the definitive portrait of a Hollywood hustler in his novel "What Makes Sammy Run?" died Wednesday. He was 95.

His wife Betsy told the Associated Press that he died of natural causes at his home in Westhampton Beach, N.Y. He was taken to a nearby medical center, where efforts to revive him were unsuccessful.

Alternately scorned and lionized by Hollywood during the course of his career, Schulberg, the son of a powerful studio executive, was a writer of varied forms, including magazine articles, novels and screenplays. He adapted his short story "Your Arkansas Traveler," about the rise and fall of a popular entertainer, for the screen as "A Face in the Crowd," which Elia Kazan directed in 1957.

Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating allegations of Communism in the motion picture industry, Schulberg...

Hollywood has a long, tortured relationship with What Makes Sammy Run?,Budd Schulberg’s seminal show-biz novel about a ruthlessly ambitious Jewish striver and his desperate bid for power and fame. According to a biography of Samuel Goldwyn by Arthur Marx, the legendary mogul offered to pay Schulberg not to publish the novel, out of fear that it would exacerbate anti-Semitism with its dark portrait of an unscrupulous schemer out to make it any costs. Schulberg, whose father was a prominent studio executive in his own right, refused. Making a movie of Sammy has long been Ben Stiller’s dream ...