Groucho Marx did say this — but he was not the first on record, and the version he said was not this one. Quote Investigator’s earliest citation ↗ is from The Marion Star of 15 January 1931, where a list of mock-superstitions belongs to the actor Jack Oakie: “A black cat crossing in front of a person signifies that the animal is going somewhere.” Six months later, in July 1931, newspapers ran “Groucho Marx Discourses On Superstition” — a longer list of fifteen jokes containing all six of Oakie’s. The familiar “crossing your path” wording appears later again, in 1936. QI ascribes the joke to Oakie only tentatively, and notes a third possibility: both men were Paramount stars, and a studio publicist may have written the whole list.
“A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere” Earliest credited to Jack Oakie (The Marion Star, 15 January 1931), not Groucho Marx, who was credited with it in July 1931. Via quotle.info · Verbatim: “A black cat crossing in front of a person signifies that the animal is going somewhere.”
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? We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.
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In context
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Provenance
Two Paramount stars, six months apart
Popular credit
Groucho Marx
Earliest citation
The Marion Star, Marion, Ohio, 15 January 1931 — credited to Jack Oakie
Groucho’s earliest credit
“Groucho Marx Discourses On Superstition”, The Salt Lake Telegram, 11 July 1931
This exact wording
Tampa Sunday Tribune, 1 November 1936 — the earlier printings read “crossing in front of a person”
Oakie, you know, doesn’t believe in signs and superstitions and has drawn up a list of good and bad signs which can’t fail. Here are a few of them:
“A black cat crossing in front of a person signifies that the animal is going somewhere. “Throwing salt over one’s shoulder is likely to give the impression that the wearer has dandruff. “Thirteen is unlucky at a dinner when the host has only twelve chops.
Transcribed by Quote Investigator
The earliest known printing, from The Marion Star of 15 January 1931, as transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗. Note the wording: “crossing in front of a person”. The version in circulation today — “crossing your path” — is not attested until 1936. QI’s citations are to Newspapers.com scans, which sit behind a subscription; the transcription above is QI’s.
Quote Investigator ↗ sets out the sequence. Its earliest citation is The Marion Star (Marion, Ohio) of 15 January 1931, in a piece about Jack Oakie that lists six mock-superstitions — the black cat among them, worded “crossing in front of a person”.
In July 1931 the Salt Lake Telegram (11 July) and The Montana Standard (12 July) ran an article headed “Groucho Marx Discourses On Superstition”, containing fifteen such jokes. As QI observes, “The six quips from the earlier 1931 article were contained within the list of fifteen jokes provided by Groucho.” Groucho’s list absorbs Oakie’s wholesale.
QI notes what the two articles have in common besides the jokes: they plug The Gang Buster and Monkey Business respectively, “Both films were created at Paramount Studios, and it is possible that a studio publicist or press agent who was shared between the two figures supplied the humorous text to newspapers to obtain publicity.”
The wording people quote today is later than both. QI dates “A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere” to a Tampa Sunday Tribune feature of 1 November 1936 headed “Groucho’s Own Signs And Omens”.
No copyright status is asserted. Authorship of the joke is genuinely unsettled — Quote Investigator ascribes it to Jack Oakie only tentatively and raises the possibility of an uncredited Paramount press agent — so there is no identifiable author or rights holder to attach it to. The newspaper items in which it appears date from 1931 and 1936, which is late enough that United States public-domain status cannot simply be assumed, and no renewal record has been checked.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Often misattributed
Groucho really did tell this joke, in print, in 1931. He just was not the first to, and QI is careful about who was.
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Credited as the originatorGroucho Marx Early user, not first
Groucho is genuinely on the record with it — QI ↗ quotes “Groucho Marx Discourses On Superstition” from the Salt Lake Telegram of 11 July 1931. But the same joke, in the same words, had already run in The Marion Star six months earlier under another comedian’s name. He is an early user of the line, not its documented author.
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Who the earliest citation creditsJack Oakie Earlier — though QI hedges
QI’s earliest citation ↗, The Marion Star of 15 January 1931, gives the list to Oakie. QI “tentatively ascribes this joke to Jack Oakie because he received credit in the earliest citation”, while adding that “future research may switch the attribution”. We follow QI and do not state it more firmly than QI does.
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A third possibility QI raisesAn uncredited Paramount press agent Early user
Both articles promoted Paramount pictures — Oakie’s The Gang Buster, Groucho’s Monkey Business. QI suggests “a studio publicist or press agent who was shared between the two figures supplied the humorous text to newspapers to obtain publicity”, which would make both comedians the deliverers of someone else’s gag.
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The wording itself“crossing your path” wording drift
The 1931 printings both read “crossing in front of a person”. The smoother “crossing your path” that everyone quotes is first attested in the Tampa Sunday Tribune of 1 November 1936, per QI ↗.
✓The honest answer is the one Quote Investigator ↗ gives: Jack Oakie holds the earliest credit, from January 1931, and is the leading candidate — but the ascription is tentative, an anonymous Paramount publicist is a live possibility, and Groucho, who was credited by that July, cannot be entirely ruled out.
Context
Why it mattered
The joke works by refusing the premise. Every other superstition answer argues about whether the omen is good or bad; this one points out that a cat walking across a road is a cat walking across a road. It is a small masterpiece of deflation, which is exactly why it sounds like Groucho.
The provenance is a useful reminder that in 1931 a comedian’s printed wit was often a studio product. Two Paramount stars with films to promote appeared in two newspapers six months apart with overlapping lists of jokes — six of Oakie’s six turning up inside Groucho’s fifteen. Whoever actually wrote them, they reached the public as publicity.
Six of Oakie’s six jokes reappear inside Groucho’s fifteen.
Read the full story
The line kept circulating on Groucho’s name for decades. QI records it as a section epigraph credited to him in An Eccentric Guide To the United States (1977), and quotes a 1988 letter to a Pennsylvania newspaper praising “Comedian Groucho Marx” for “a way of changing a superstitious expression into one that is both amusing and authentic” — by which point the January 1931 Oakie printing was fifty-seven years old and forgotten.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Jack Oakie, born Lewis Delaney Offield in Sedalia, Missouri, was a Paramount comedy star of the late silent and early sound era, best remembered now for his Mussolini parody in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), which brought him an Academy Award nomination. He appears here for a smaller reason: in January 1931 a newspaper feature promoting his film The Gang Buster printed a list of mock-superstitions under his name, six months before the same jokes appeared under Groucho Marx’s.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The primary source (Chicago)
Earliest documented in The Marion Star (Marion, Ohio), 15 January 1931, quote page 16, credited to Jack Oakie; this wording first in Tampa Sunday Tribune, 1 November 1936, section 3, quote page 10. As documented by Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: A Black Cat Crossing Your Path Signifies That the Animal Is Going Somewhere” (22 January 2019).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere’?” Last verified 11 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-black-cat-crossing-your-path-signifies-that-the-animal-is/