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Who really said it

Give the People What They Want and They'll Come

Not Goodman Ace — actually George Jessel George Jessel 3 April 1898 – 23 May 1981 · American vaudeville comedian, actor & toastmaster
Disputed In copyright

The line is a mordant showbiz joke: a hated movie mogul’s funeral draws an enormous crowd, and someone explains it as good box office. Goodman Ace printed this exact wording in “The Saturday Review” on 13 August 1955 — but he attributed it to George Jessel in the same breath, and Quote Investigator credits Jessel.

Last verified 4 Oct 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Give the People What They Want and They'll Come” George Jessel (1898–1981), as quoted by Goodman Ace in The Saturday Review, 13 August 1955 · Verbatim: “You see, you give the people what they want and they'll come.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Goodman Ace. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Saturday Review Associates and the estate of Goodman Ace). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of George Jessel — American vaudeville comedian, actor and toastmaster. Theme: "Give the People What They Want and They'll Come". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Give the People What They Want and They'll Come". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Quip by
George Jessel (1898–1981)
This wording first in print
“TV and Radio,” Goodman Ace’s column
Published
“The Saturday Review,” 13 August 1955, p. 23
Earliest instance found
“Strictly Screwball” by Katharine Brush, “The Washington Post” — dated 1941 in Quote Investigator’s prose and 8 March 1942 in its own citation

They tell the story of George Jessel’s once passing a funeral home where a celebrity lay in state and the crowd waiting to file by for a last glimpse was four-deep. “You see,” said the veteran showman, “you give the people what they want and they’ll come.”

Goodman Ace’s column of 13 August 1955, as transcribed by Quote Investigator. The words inside the quotation marks are Jessel’s; the framing is Ace’s.

Quote Investigator: “Give the People What They Want and They’ll Come”

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator’s study of the quip ↗ transcribes Goodman Ace’s 13 August 1955 “Saturday Review” column and shows Ace crediting George Jessel in the same sentence. Its stated conclusion is that “George Jessel should be credited with this quip.”
  • The same page names the earliest instance it has found as a Katharine Brush column in “The Washington Post,” where Jessel’s line is truncated to “Give ’em what they want.” QI’s prose dates that column to 1941 while its own bibliographic note gives 8 March 1942 — we report both rather than choose, because we could not read the column itself.
  • QI documents the drift directly: the joke was later pinned on Goodman Ace ↗, Red Skelton and Groucho Marx, and the funeral was retrofitted to Harry Cohn ↗ (d. 1958) and Louis B. Mayer ↗ (d. 1957) — both of whom died after the line was already in print.
  • Jessel’s life dates are confirmed against his Wikipedia entry ↗ (3 April 1898 – 23 May 1981).
In copyright

The wording shown here was first published in “The Saturday Review” on 13 August 1955, and the earliest known printing of Jessel’s line is a 1940s newspaper column. Both are well after the 1931 United States public-domain cutoff, so this text remains in copyright.

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

This is a joke with an unusually crowded field of claimants. Quote Investigator lists six humorists and two funerals, and the only name with a contemporaneous paper trail is the one the joke is rarely told under.

Goodman Ace Popularizer, not author

Ace printed this exact wording in “The Saturday Review” on 13 August 1955 and in his book “The Book of Little Knowledge” the same year — but in both cases he credited George Jessel ↗. Being the first to print a line is not the same as writing it.

Red Skelton

A 1967 biography of Harry Cohn reports Skelton delivering a version on television a few nights after Cohn’s 1958 funeral, and QI notes Skelton is “generally credited with the line” ↗ — thirteen years after Jessel’s version was in print.

Groucho Marx

Kenneth Tynan attributed a version to Groucho in “The Observer” in 1958, as QI documents ↗. That is three years after Ace’s printing and later still than the newspaper instance.

Bert Lahr and James Bacon

A 1969 Lahr biography and Bacon’s own 1976 memoir each claim the line, both recorded by QI ↗. Bacon’s account concedes the point neatly: “every joke is in the public domain.”

Harry Cohn and Louis B. Mayer Context

The joke is usually told over Cohn’s or Mayer’s coffin, but QI shows the quip in print before either man died ↗ — Mayer in 1957, Cohn in 1958. The mogul in the original telling is nameless.

Quote Investigator’s conclusion ↗ is unambiguous: the quip belongs to George Jessel, and “the joke may have been retold when Harry Cohn died and when Louis B. Mayer died, but the remark was already in circulation.”

Context

Why it mattered

The line survives because it does two jobs at once. On the surface it is the oldest platitude in show business — give the audience what it wants and it will turn up. Aimed at a funeral, it becomes an obituary: the crowd is not mourning, it is enjoying the show.

That is also why it kept changing hands. A joke this portable attaches itself to whichever wit is most famous at the moment of retelling, and to whichever studio tyrant has most recently died. Quote Investigator’s chronology is really a record of a joke migrating upward through six comedians across thirty-five years.

The crowd is not mourning. It is enjoying the show.

Read the full story

The retrofitting is the interesting part. Jessel’s version, as printed in the 1940s and again by Goodman Ace in 1955, has a nameless celebrity. Only in 1961 does a humour anthology attach it to Louis B. Mayer, and only in 1963 does Budd Schulberg attach it to Harry Cohn — by which point the line had been circulating for roughly two decades.

Both attributions are chronologically impossible as origin stories: Mayer died in 1957 and Cohn in 1958, years after the joke was in print. The funerals did not produce the joke; the joke was waiting for them.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Success Work Mortality

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigatorquoteinvestigator.com

The full chronology, 1940s to 1976, with eight claimants and QI’s conclusion that Jessel should be credited.
George Jesselen.wikipedia.org

Life dates, vaudeville career and his role as Hollywood’s unofficial “Toastmaster General.”
Goodman Aceen.wikipedia.org

The radio writer and columnist who first printed this wording — while crediting Jessel.
Harry Cohnen.wikipedia.org

The Columbia Pictures chief (d. 1958) whose funeral the joke was later attached to.
Louis B. Mayeren.wikipedia.org

The MGM chief (d. 1957), the other funeral retrofitted to the quip.

The author

About George Jessel

George Jessel

1898–1981 · American vaudeville comedian, actor and toastmaster

George Jessel was a vaudeville headliner who became one of American show business’s most reliable after-dinner speakers — so reliable that he was nicknamed the “Toastmaster General of the United States.” He starred in the stage version of The Jazz Singer and spent six decades as a performer, producer and professional wit. Jokes of exactly this kind were his stock in trade, which is part of why so many of them later drifted to better-remembered names.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Ace, Goodman. “TV and Radio.” The Saturday Review, August 13, 1955, 23. Quoting George Jessel. Earliest instance located by Quote Investigator in a Katharine Brush column in The Washington Post (dated 1941 in QI’s prose, 8 March 1942 in its citation).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Give the People What They Want and They’ll Come’?” Last verified 4 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/give-the-people-what-they-want-and-theyll-come/

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