Collecting Comedy

(The following is an article from the May/June 2015 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM. Daniel Blazek, a recorded sound technician at the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Preservation, wrote the story. You can read the issue in its entirety here.)

Newspaper and Current Periodicals Reading Room.

Groucho Marx perhaps best explains the importance of the Library’s comedy collections. In a television clip of his 1965 appearance on “The Tonight Show,” Marx discusses “a rather impressive” letter he received from then-Librarian of Congress L. Quincy Mumford requesting the comedian’s personal papers. Johnny Carson read the letter aloud.

Then Marx said, “I’m so pleased, having not finished public school, to find my letters perhaps lying next to the Gettysburg Address, I thought was quite an incongruity in addition to being extremely thrilling. I’m very proud of this thing.”