The line’s earliest documented appearance is in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), a compilation of other people’s sayings that Mencken selected and edited — and he printed it with the citation “IBID,” pointing back to the preceding entry’s “Author unidentified.” Quote Investigator ↗ concludes the remark is anonymous and that Mencken is sometimes incorrectly credited with it because his name sits on the spine of the book that preserved it.
“When I hear artists or authors making fun of business men, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks” Author unidentified — not H. L. Mencken. "When I hear artists or authors making fun of business men I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks" first appears in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), p. 134 — a compilation Mencken selected and edited, where he labelled it "Author unidentified." — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to H. L. Mencken. Use the credit shown above instead.
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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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Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "When I hear artists or authors making fun of business men, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks". 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
Where the line actually comes from
Popularly credited to
H. L. Mencken
Actually
Author unidentified — Mencken was the compiler, not the wit
Earliest known printing
A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources
Details
Selected and edited by H. L. Mencken; Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1942; Topic: Business, p. 134, col. 2
When I hear artists or authors making fun of business men I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks. IBID.
Anonymous, not Mencken
The entry exactly as it stands on page 134, column 2 of Mencken’s 1942 dictionary, transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ from hardcopy. “IBID” is the compiler’s shorthand for ‘same source as the entry above’ — and the entry above specified “Author unidentified.” Note the 1942 text has no comma after “business men”; the comma in the version that circulates today is a later editorial addition.
Quote Investigator ↗ begins its chronology with the 1942 A New Dictionary of Quotations, selected and edited by Mencken (Knopf), Topic: Business, p. 134, col. 2 — verified with hardcopy — where the line ends “IBID,” pointing at the preceding entry’s “Author unidentified.”
Two years on, the same wording appears with an explicit anonymous credit: Robert E. Adams’s 1944 compilation How to Get Along in This World (Nelson-Hall, Chicago), p. 40, col. 2, prints it “—Anon,” and on 18 November 1952 The Greenville News of South Carolina ran it under “AUTHOR UNIDENTIFIED” — both cited by Quote Investigator ↗.
The mis-credit hardens in 1986, when The Quotable Lawyer, edited by David S. Shrager and Elizabeth Frost, prints the line over “H. L. Mencken / A New Dictionary of Quotations, 1946” without noting that Mencken had labelled it anonymous — an attribution Quote Investigator calls misleading ↗.
Wikiquote files the line under ‘Misattributed’ ↗, tracing the modern citation chain through Eugene C. Gerhart’s Quote It Completely! (1998), p. 113 — which points at Mencken’s dictionary, p. 134 — and stating that “the authorship of the quote does not lie with any work original to Mencken, and was previously reported as an anonymous quote.”
No author of record, so no rights status can honestly be asserted for the sentence itself: the earliest documented printing, in Mencken’s 1942 Knopf compilation, already labels it “Author unidentified,” and no earlier source is documented by Quote Investigator ↗ or Wikiquote. The 1942 dictionary that preserves it is itself a post-1930 publication and remains a copyrighted compilation, so quotle.info makes no public-domain claim here.
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
How a compiler became the comedian
This is the classic quotation-dictionary error. Mencken’s name is on the book; the joke is not. Every documented printing before the mis-credit calls the author anonymous, and the confusion begins with four letters of editorial shorthand.
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The attributionH. L. Mencken Misattributed
A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles is a compilation Mencken selected and edited from other people’s sayings, not a book of his own aphorisms. He tagged this entry “IBID,” meaning the same source as the entry above it — and that entry specified “Author unidentified” (Quote Investigator ↗). Wikiquote lists it under Misattributed ↗.
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How the error hardenedThe Quotable Lawyer (1986) and later quote books Mis-citation
Shrager and Frost’s The Quotable Lawyer printed the line credited simply to “H. L. Mencken / A New Dictionary of Quotations, 1946,” dropping the anonymous label (Quote Investigator ↗); Eugene C. Gerhart’s Quote It Completely! (1998), p. 113, likewise cites it to Mencken’s dictionary, p. 134 (Wikiquote ↗).
✕
The wordingThe version that circulates online Variant
The 1942 entry reads “business men” as two words with no comma before “I think” (Quote Investigator’s hardcopy transcription ↗). Modern quote sites usually add the comma and close “businessmen” up into one word — small, silent edits to a text nobody can attribute in the first place.
✓The joke is real, old and genuinely funny — it is simply nobody’s in particular. Its first three documented printings all say so: “Author unidentified” in 1942, “—Anon” in 1944, “AUTHOR UNIDENTIFIED” in 1952 (Quote Investigator ↗).
Context
Why it sounds so much like Mencken
It is a plausible Mencken line, which is exactly the problem. He spent his career puncturing the artistic pose and taking the side of the competent professional, so a gag that ranks the regimental band below the regimental cooks reads as pure Baltimore newsroom. But the book it comes from is not a book of his opinions. A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (Alfred A. Knopf, 1942) is a compilation he selected and edited, grown out of a personal file he had started, as his preface puts it, “in 1918 or thereabout for my own use” to catch sayings the existing quotation books had missed (Open Library ↗).
Inside such a book, “IBID” is a space-saver: same source as the entry above. The entry above this one read “Author unidentified,” so the joke went into print anonymous and stayed that way through the printings of 1944 and 1952. Then later compilers copied the line but not the label, and once a quotation is set under a famous name with a real-looking book citation beside it, the correction never catches up. Mencken, who built his dictionary precisely so that sayings could be traced to their sources, ended up owning one he had carefully declined to claim.
“IBID” — four letters of editorial shorthand that quietly handed an anonymous joke to a famous man.
Why the joke lands
The comedy is in the pecking order it invokes. A regiment’s band is the ornamental part — parades, morale, ceremony — while the cooks are the part without which the regiment stops marching. Setting artists over businessmen the same way is a compressed argument that the people who make things possible outrank the people who make things beautiful, delivered in one image and without a word of theory. That economy is why it kept getting anthologised, and why so many readers assumed it had to belong to a professional wit.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1880–1956 · Baltimore journalist, critic and quotation collector
Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist and scholar of American English, and for decades one of the most quoted newspapermen in the country. Alongside his own writing he kept a private file of other people’s sayings, begun around 1918, which grew into A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles (Knopf, 1942) — the book in which this line first appears. He recorded it; he did not write it, and he marked it “Author unidentified.”
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented appearance
H. L. Mencken, ed., A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 134, col. 2 — where the line appears under the topic “Business” tagged “IBID,” i.e. the preceding entry’s “Author unidentified.” Citation trail documented in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: When I Hear Artists or Authors Making Fun of Business Men I Think of a Regiment in Which the Band Makes Fun of the Cooks,” 5 November 2019. Author unidentified; not written by Mencken.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘When I hear artists or authors making fun of business men, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks’?” Last verified 10 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/when-i-hear-artists-or-authors-making-fun-of-business-men-i/