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Who really said it

I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member

Written by Groucho Marx 1890–1977 · American comedian, Marx Brothers star & memoirist
Verified In copyright

This exact sentence is Groucho’s own: he prints it as the text of his resignation wire in his 1959 memoir Groucho and Me, at p. 321 — chapter 26, “Foot in Mouth Disease,” the chapter numbered 24 in the 1995 Da Capo reprint Quote Investigator cites. What is not settled is the event behind it — no telegram has ever surfaced, the memoir calls the club by a joke name, and the wording was already drifting when Hollywood columnists first reported the story in October 1949.

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Verified quote & credit

“I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member” Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me (New York: B. Geis Associates, 1959), chap. 26, p. 321 — this exact wording is Groucho's own, printed as the text of his resignation wire. The joke first reached print in October 1949, when Hollywood columnists reported his resignation from the Friars' Club; no telegram has ever surfaced, and the wording varied from the first reports onward. Via Quotle.info

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Groucho Marx; originally published by B. Geis Associates, New York). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Groucho Marx — American comedian, Marx Brothers star & memoirist. Theme: "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member". 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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Provenance

Where the line actually appears

Work
Groucho and Me
Locator
p. 321 — ch. 26, “Foot in Mouth Disease” in the edition WIST cites; ch. 24 in the 1995 Da Capo reprint Quote Investigator used
Published
1959 · B. Geis Associates, New York, distributed by Random House
First in print
20 October 1949, in Erskine Johnson’s syndicated Hollywood column — in a different wording

PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER. the memoir version

The telegram as Groucho prints it in Groucho and Me, in a chapter where he calls the club “the Delaney Club” — a club Quote Investigator ↗ describes as part of a humorously fictionalised account, and which WIST ↗ takes to be Groucho’s invention. Reproduced here from QI’s transcription of the passage.

Quote Investigator: every dated citation, 1949 to 1988

How it reached print

  • 20 October 1949. The joke reaches print when the Hollywood columnist Erskine Johnson reports Groucho’s resignation from the Friars’ Club as “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members” — the earliest instance located by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 27 October 1949. One week on, Jimmie Fidler’s column in the Oregonian prints the sentence in the form Groucho himself would later print in the memoir. This and the Johnson citation were posted to the American Dialect Society list by Garson O’Toole in March 2011 ↗, alongside John Crosby’s 2 November column.
  • 1959. Groucho tells the story himself in Groucho and Me at p. 321, chapter 26, “Foot in Mouth Disease” — the citation carried by WIST ↗. This is the first time this wording appears over Groucho’s own name.
  • Still missing. No telegram, wire or letter has ever been produced. Every account is a retelling — by columnists, by Groucho’s son Arthur, and by Groucho himself, who changed the club’s name when he wrote it down. QI’s verdict ↗ is that the joke is his but its original form is unrecoverable.
In copyright

Groucho and Me was first published in 1959, well after the 1931 US public-domain cutoff, so it remains in copyright — as do the 1949 newspaper columns that first carried the joke. The short quotation above is reproduced here for identification and commentary; the book itself is not free to reuse.

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

The variants, and who added them

This is not a case of a joke pinned on the wrong man — the joke really is Groucho’s. It is a case of a joke that never had one fixed form. Here is what circulates, and where each version actually comes from.

“…any club that would have me as a member” variant

Probably the most-quoted form, and it is not the memoir’s. Quote Investigator ↗ traces it to Groucho’s son Arthur, who printed “Because I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member!” in Collier’s in 1951 and “I just don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member” in Life with Groucho in 1954.

“…accept people like me as a member” variant

Wikiquote ↗ renders the memoir telegram with the extra words “people like me,” but QI’s transcription of the same passage ↗ does not contain them; QI records “people like me” instead in Leo Rosten’s 1950 Look profile, “I do not care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.”

“I don’t care to belong…” variant

The form given in The Groucho Letters (1967), edited by Arthur Sheekman, as recorded by Wikiquote ↗: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”

The Friars, the Lambs or Hillcrest unsettled

All three have been named, along with the “Delaney Club” of Groucho’s own telling — a club Quote Investigator ↗ describes as part of a humorously fictionalised account and WIST takes to be his invention. The earliest reports, in October 1949, say the Friars’ Club; a 1951 Los Angeles Sentinel item says the Lambs; Arthur Marx’s 1988 My Life with Groucho says Hillcrest. The Beverly Hills Tennis Club is often swept into the list, but in that same 1988 account it is the club Groucho kept — he dropped Hillcrest rather than pay dues at both.

Woody Allen — and, in the film’s own gag, Freud borrowed

Annie Hall (1977) opens with Alvy Singer calling it “the key joke of my adult life” and paraphrasing it as “I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member,” crediting Groucho while joking that it “appears originally in Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious” — see Wikiquote ↗. Many people quote the Allen paraphrase believing it is the Marx original.

John Galsworthy earlier parallel

Wikiquote ↗ notes the same idea in The Forsyte Saga: rejected by the ‘Hotch Potch’ for being ‘in trade,’ Old Jolyon “naturally despised the Club that did take him” — chapter II of The Man of Property ↗. That is a parallel sentiment in a novel, not a source Groucho is known to have drawn on.

The line is genuinely Groucho’s and this exact wording is his own, printed in Groucho and Me (1959). But no telegram or letter has ever been produced, and as Quote Investigator concludes ↗, the evidence “does not reveal the exact wording of his comical gem or the precise circumstances of its employment.”

Context

Why it stuck

The line is a resignation, not a refusal — that is the single most-lost detail. Every 1949 report describes Groucho quitting a club he already belonged to, not turning one down. Read that way the joke stops being a piece of gentle self-deprecation and becomes a small act of demolition: the moment they let him in, the place lost whatever made it worth being in.

There is a sharper reading still. Groucho was a Jewish comedian in a Hollywood where the exclusive clubs kept lists of who was acceptable, and the Hillcrest Country Club — one of the clubs later named in versions of the story — existed because the others would not have Jewish members. A joke about the worthlessness of any club that admits you lands differently when membership has been a live question your whole life.

The moment they let him in, the place stopped being worth belonging to.

How the joke travelled

The story ran through the Hollywood column circuit within a fortnight in autumn 1949 — Erskine Johnson on 20 October, Jimmie Fidler on 27 October, John Crosby on 2 November — and each columnist printed a slightly different sentence. Reader’s Digest picked up Crosby’s version in January 1950; Leo Rosten reworked it again in Look that March. The joke was mutating before anyone thought to check it.

Its second life is cinematic. Annie Hall (1977) opens with Alvy Singer calling it “the key joke of my adult life” and paraphrasing it as “I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member” — crediting Groucho, then adding that it may appear originally in Freud. For a very large number of people that film, not the memoir, is where they first met the line.

Explore

Filed under

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

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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: the full chronologyquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation — every dated citation from Erskine Johnson’s October 1949 column through Arthur Marx’s 1988 memoir, with the exact wording printed in each.
Groucho Marx on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Cites the telegram to Groucho and Me (1959) p. 321 and gives the Groucho Letters (1967) variant; also flags the Galsworthy parallel.
Garson O’Toole’s 1949 antedating (ADS-L)listserv.linguistlist.org

The American Dialect Society list post that pushed the earliest citation back to October 1949, naming the three newspapers and transcribing each wording.
Groucho and Me, ch. 26 at WISTwist.info

Independent quotation database citing this exact sentence to chapter 26, “Foot in Mouth Disease,” and noting the “Delaney Club” was Groucho’s invention.
Groucho and Me catalogue recordarchive.org

Internet Archive’s record for the 1959 first edition — B. Geis Associates, distributed by Random House, 344 pages. Access-restricted, not free to read.
Galsworthy, The Man of Propertygutenberg.org

Free full text of the first Forsyte novel; chapter II contains Old Jolyon’s club grievance that Wikiquote cites as an earlier statement of the same sentiment.

The author

Who was Groucho Marx?

Groucho Marx

1890–1977 · American comedian, Marx Brothers star & memoirist

Born Julius Henry Marx in New York City on 2 October 1890, Groucho went from a boy singer in vaudeville to the fast-talking, greasepaint-moustached centre of the Marx Brothers — Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera. He made 26 films, 13 of them with his brothers. He then had an entire second career as a solo wit: the quiz show You Bet Your Life ran for eleven years from its 1950 television debut and was the top-rated programme by 1953. He was also a genuine writer, and Groucho and Me (1959) is his own account of the life — which is why it matters that this line appears in it.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this page

Marx, Groucho. Groucho and Me. New York: B. Geis Associates, distributed by Random House, 1959. P. 321, chapter 26, “Foot in Mouth Disease” (the same page cited as chapter 24 in the 1995 Da Capo reprint). Earliest known press report of the joke: Erskine Johnson, Hollywood column, Dunkirk Evening Observer, 20 October 1949 (per Quote Investigator).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-dont-want-to-belong-to-any-club-that-will-accept-me-as-a/

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