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Who really said it

Here are Two Tickets for the Opening of My Play. Bring a Friend—If You Have One

Not George Bernard Shaw — a joke he called “a flat lie” Unknown Earliest print 19 September 1946 · told then of Noël Coward and Randolph Churchill
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

There is no letter, no playbill and no contemporary source — and both supposed correspondents denied it in writing. The earliest printing anyone has found is Walter Winchell’s column of September 1946, where the joke is told of Noël Coward and Randolph Churchill; Shaw and Winston Churchill’s names are attached to it only in January 1948.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Here are Two Tickets for the Opening of My Play. Bring a Friend—If You Have One” Not George Bernard Shaw. The "two tickets — bring a friend, if you have one" exchange with Winston Churchill is unsupported: Shaw wrote in his own hand, on Derek Tatham's letter of 15 September 1949, that it was "not only a flat lie but a political libel," and Churchill's office agreed the next day (Churchill Papers, CHUR 2/165/66,68, Churchill Archives Centre). The joke's earliest known printing, in Walter Winchell's column of 19 September 1946, tells it of Noël Coward and Randolph Churchill. The wording that follows is the popular form as given in Kay Halle, Irrepressible Churchill (1966), p.116 — not a wording either man wrote. — Quotle.info · Verbatim: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to George Bernard Shaw. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the themes of friendship, creativity and character. Theme: "Here are Two Tickets for the Opening of My Play. Bring a Friend—If You Have One". 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.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Here are Two Tickets for the Opening of My Play. Bring a Friend—If You Have One". 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 earliest Shaw–Churchill telling

Verdict
Fabricated — denied in writing by both men
Earliest print
Walter Winchell’s syndicated column, 19 September 1946
First Shaw–Churchill version
Bob Considine, International News Service, January 1948
Archive reference
Churchill Papers, CHUR 2/165/66,68

George Bernard Shaw sent Winston Churchill a couple of seats for the opening night of one of his plays, some time ago… Shaw enclosed a little note with the tickets. It read, “Here are two tickets for the opening of my new play. Keep one for yourself and bring along a friend—if you can find one.” Churchill returned the tickets with a nice little note, too. “I’m sorry that a previous engagement precludes my attending your opening night,” he said. “I shall be happy to come the second night—if there is one.” Earliest Shaw–Churchill telling · January 1948

This is the oldest known printing that names Shaw and Winston Churchill — a newspaper columnist relaying gossip overheard at a New York City Hall portrait unveiling, not a letter. Note that it does not match the wording that circulates today. The familiar phrase “bring a friend—if you have one” is absent from the earliest tellings of 1946, 1947 and January 1948; it is in print by October 1948 and is fixed in its popular form by Kay Halle’s Irrepressible Churchill (1966), which is the wording Quote Investigator took for its headline.

Manuscript facsimile
Shaw’s handwritten dismissal on Derek Tatham’s letter of 15 September 1949 (Shaw’s annotation undated)
Quote Investigator: the full citation trail

How we verified this

  • 19 September 1946 — the earliest printed version Quote Investigator has located ↗ runs in Walter Winchell’s syndicated column, and Shaw is not in it. Randolph Churchill asks Noël Coward for two tickets, receives one, and is told: “Let me know if you really have a friend and I’ll send you the other ticket.” A closely similar Coward-to-Randolph version appears in Arthur Porritt’s More and More of Memories the following year.
  • January 1948 — Shaw and Winston Churchill’s names appear for the first time, in an International News Service piece by Bob Considine that QI traces to the St. Joseph Gazette of 12 January 1948 ↗. QI observes that the Shaw plays later named as the occasion all opened in the 1910s and 1920s, which makes a first appearance in the 1940s surprising.
  • 15–16 September 1949 — the denials. Asked for permission to print the story, Shaw wrote across the enclosure that it was “not only a flat lie but a political libel”; the next day Churchill’s secretary replied that Churchill “considers Mr. Bernard Shaw is quite right.” Both letters were found in the Churchill Papers by the Churchill Archives Centre’s director ↗, filed at CHUR 2/165/66,68.
  • Today — the exchange still circulates without a source. Wikiquote keeps it on Shaw’s talk page under ‘Unsourced’ ↗, in a wording different again from the popular one, with no citation offered.

No rights status can honestly be asserted, because the wording has no identifiable author. The line is not traceable to any work by Shaw, and the documented early tellings are anonymous newspaper items — and those 1946 and 1948 newspaper texts are post-1930, so their United States status turns on whether the copyright was renewed in its 28th year, which we have not checked. Shaw’s own writings from before 1931 are a separate matter; either way, this sentence is simply not among them.

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

Who has been credited, and what the record shows

This is one of the most widely repeated exchanges in English anecdote, and it has been recast repeatedly — the names swapped upward toward fame as it spread. Unusually for a quote of this kind, the record carries a denial in Shaw’s own hand and a same-day confirmation from Churchill’s office.

George Bernard Shaw Denied it in his own hand

On 15 September 1949 the bookseller’s representative Derek Tatham wrote to Shaw asking whether he objected to the story being printed. Shaw scrawled his answer directly on the enclosure: “The above is not only a flat lie but a political libel which may possibly damage me. Publish it at your peril, whether in assertion or contradiction.” The Churchill Project reproduces the note in facsimile ↗.

Winston Churchill Denied it as well

Tatham then approached Churchill. His secretary Elizabeth Gilliatt replied on 16 September 1949: “I am desired by Mr. Churchill…to inform you that he considers Mr. Bernard Shaw is quite right in calling the incident to which you refer ‘a flat lie.’” Both letters sit in the Churchill Papers at CHUR 2/165/66,68 ↗.

Noël Coward and Randolph Churchill The original cast

In 1946 Coward sends Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son, a single ticket; the 1947 Porritt version already has two, one of them for the friend — if he has a friend. By 1964 a further variant had Coward writing to Winston Churchill instead — a telling the newspaper that printed it expressly labelled apocryphal. Quote Investigator lays out each recasting in order ↗.

No letter, no date and no play has ever been produced. The oldest trace is a 1946 newspaper gag about two different men, and the only primary documents in the case are the two 1949 letters in which Shaw calls the story a flat lie and Churchill’s secretary confirms he agrees — held at the Churchill Archives Centre ↗.

Context

Why this one refuses to die

It is a perfect joke, which is exactly the problem. The setup needs no context, the punchline lands twice, and it flatters two men whose public personalities were built on precisely this kind of needling. A story that good does not need a source to travel — and this one travelled for decades without ever acquiring one.

The documentary trail runs backwards from fame rather than forwards from an event. The oldest version, in 1946, pins the gag on Noël Coward and Randolph Churchill — the less famous playwright and the less famous Churchill. Within about two years both roles had been recast with the bigger names, the exchange had grown a second half, and it had begun acquiring specifics it never had at the start. Quote Investigator notes the awkward arithmetic plainly: the Shaw plays later named as the occasion all opened in the 1910s and 1920s, yet the anecdote itself does not appear in print until the 1940s.

The above is not only a flat lie but a political libel which may possibly damage me. — Shaw, in his own hand

The one account that says Shaw told it himself — and how the standard reference work changed its mind

Honesty requires flagging the evidence that cuts the other way. In the 1962 symposium Shaw the Villager and Human Being, assembled by Allan Chappelow, an orthopaedic surgeon named L. W. Plewes — who treated Shaw in 1950, when Shaw was 94 — recalled Shaw himself relating the exchange, and placing it before the first staging of Pygmalion. That is a secondhand recollection of a very old man, published after his death, and it sits directly against Shaw’s own signed denial of a decade earlier; but it is the reason Quote Investigator leaves the case formally open ↗ rather than closing it.

The reference works have moved. Richard Langworth’s Churchill by Himself (2008) included the anecdote, dating it to 1922 and naming the play as Saint Joan. Writing for the Churchill Project in 2020, after Churchill Archives Centre director Allen Packwood surfaced the Tatham correspondence, Langworth called the exchange fictitious ↗ and identified the play at issue in that 1949 correspondence as Buoyant Billions, Shaw’s last full-length play.

Note also that the popular wording is younger than the anecdote. The phrasing that circulates today — “bring a friend—if you have one” — is absent from the earliest tellings, which word the punchline differently each time: “if you really have a friend” in 1946, “if you have a friend” in 1947, “if you can find one” in January 1948. It reaches print in October 1948, in an address by Robert L. Stearns, and settles into its familiar form in Kay Halle’s Irrepressible Churchill (1966), p.116 — the version Quote Investigator took for its headline and the one Wikiquote reproduces.

Explore

Filed under

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

Friendship Creativity Character

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 Investigator: tracing the two-tickets exchangequoteinvestigator.com

The full citation trail from Winchell's 1946 column through the 1948 Shaw–Churchill version to the 1962 surgeon's account, with QI's two competing explanations.
Churchill and Bernard Shaw: A Fictitious Exchangewinstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu

Richard Langworth for the Churchill Project, reporting the 1949 letters in which both Shaw and Churchill deny the story.
Churchill and George Bernard Shaw: Less than Meets the Eyerichardlangworth.com

Langworth's own version of the same findings, including the Tatham correspondence and the Buoyant Billions identification.
The Papers of Sir Winston Churchillarchivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk

Collection-level catalogue record for the Churchill Papers (CHAR/CHUR/CHAQ) at Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, where the denial letters are held.
Talk:George Bernard Shaw — Unsourceden.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's talk page lists it under 'Unsourced' with no citation; the article itself files it under 'Misattributed', citing Kay Halle's Irrepressible Churchill (1966) and Quote Investigator.
Buoyant Billionsen.wikipedia.org

The play the Churchill Project identifies as the one at issue in 1949 — Shaw's last full-length work, premiered in Zürich on 21 October 1948.

Wrongly credited

The man who denied it

George Bernard Shaw

1856–1950 · Irish playwright, critic & polemicist · Nobel Prize in Literature, 1925

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic and political polemicist whose influence on Western theatre ran from the 1880s until his death, and who took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. He was a famously combative correspondent, which is precisely why jokes like this one stick to him so easily. It is also why the record is unusually clear here: asked in 1949 whether the ticket exchange could be printed, Shaw wrote across the page in his own hand that it was “not only a flat lie but a political libel.”

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Sources & archive references

Earliest printed version located by Quote Investigator: Walter Winchell, “Man About Town,” Augusta Chronicle, September 19, 1946, 6 — told of Noël Coward and Randolph Churchill. Earliest Shaw–Churchill version: Bob Considine (International News Service), St. Joseph Gazette, January 12, 1948, 9. Denials: Bernard Shaw, undated annotation on Derek Tatham to Shaw, 15 September 1949, and Elizabeth Gilliatt for Winston Churchill, 16 September 1949, Churchill Papers, CHUR 2/165/66,68, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Here are Two Tickets for the Opening of My Play. Bring a Friend—If You Have One’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/here-are-two-tickets-for-the-opening-of-my-play-bring-a/

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