Whoever named it necking was a poor judge of anatomy
Not Groucho Marx — tentatively Robert QuillenRobert Quillen1887–1948 · American newspaper humorist and paragrapher
?Attribution status: Disputed — Quote Investigator’s assignment to Quillen is explicitly tentative, and the exact wording is not pinned to him.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that it “tentatively assigns this joke to Robert Quillen”, a syndicated humorist who printed a matching version in his column “Paragraphs” on 16 June 1943 — though in different words: “Whoever named it necking was strangely ignorant of anatomy.” QI is careful to add that Quillen “may have been simply relaying a pre-existing anonymous quip”, and that the joke sits on a template with precursors from 1929. The exact wording in circulation is first documented in 1968 — in a quotation anthology, already credited to Groucho.
“Whoever named it necking was a poor judge of anatomy” Not Groucho Marx. Quote Investigator tentatively assigns the joke to the humorist Robert Quillen, whose column of 16 June 1943 carries a differently worded version; the wording above reached print under Groucho's name in 1968. Via quotle.info · Verbatim: “Whoever named it necking was strangely ignorant of anatomy.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Groucho Marx. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? 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
Where it actually comes from
Popular credit
Groucho Marx
Tentative author
Robert Quillen (1887–1948), syndicated humorist — per Quote Investigator
Earliest matching joke
“Paragraphs” by Robert Quillen, The News and Observer, 16 June 1943
Earliest precursor
A Nebraska newspaper advertisement, 21 November 1929
Earliest Groucho credit
Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes (Doubleday, 1968), p. 593
Whoever named it necking was strangely ignorant of anatomy.
This is Quillen’s 1943 wording, and it is not quite the famous one. The sentence people quote replaces “strangely ignorant of” with “a poor judge of” — a substitution that borrows a stock construction of the period. Evan Esar, writing in 1978, called that construction a Ryderism after the Ohio newspaper editor Robert O. Ryder, whose best-known example was “Whoever named near beer was a poor judge of distance.”
Quote Investigator’s article on the line ↗ sets out the chronology from primary citations and ends: “QI tentatively assigns this joke to Robert Quillen who placed an instance into his column in 1943. It remains possible that Quillen was simply relaying a pre-existing anonymous quip.” That hedge is reproduced here rather than resolved.
QI documents the template arriving before the joke. A 1929 advertisement in The Tilden Citizen of Nebraska runs “Otto says the fellow that named it necking was way above him”; a 1932 filler in the Greenville Daily Advocate of Ohio has “The fellow who named it necking was a poor judge of distance”. The anatomy version is a later refinement of a joke already in the air.
The Groucho attribution enters through a quotation book, not a source. Per QI the earliest is Evan Esar’s 20,000 Quips and Quotes (Doubleday, 1968), p. 593, which prints the modern wording over Groucho’s name; Esar ↗ was a humour anthologist rather than a researcher. Laurence J. Peter’s Peter’s Quotations (1977) and Fred Metcalf’s Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations (1986) then repeated it.
QI notes one point in Groucho’s favour and we record it: the 1968 attribution appeared while Marx was still alive, and QI writes that “there is some evidence that Groucho Marx also employed this joke”. Using a joke is not the same as originating it, and QI’s own conclusion assigns the origin elsewhere — but this is not a case of a line invented for a dead man.
No copyright status is asserted. The exact sentence in circulation has no established first publication: Quote Investigator’s earliest instance of this wording is Evan Esar’s 1968 anthology, which was reprinting rather than originating, and the closest documented antecedent — Robert Quillen’s syndicated column of 1943 — uses different words. With neither an established author nor an established first printing of the wording, claiming any rights status would be a guess.
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
A one-line joke with a paper trail longer than the joke, and an attribution that arrives twenty-five years late.
✕
Credited as the authorGroucho Marx Anthology credit only
Quote Investigator ↗ finds the earliest Groucho attribution in Evan Esar’s 20,000 Quips and Quotes of 1968 — a quotation anthology, twenty-five years after the joke was already in print. Wikiquote’s Groucho page does not carry the line at all.
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Who probably wrote itRobert Quillen Tentative
Quillen ↗ printed a matching joke in his syndicated column on 16 June 1943, and QI assigns it to him — but explicitly “tentatively”, allowing that he may have been relaying an anonymous quip. His wording, “strangely ignorant of anatomy”, is also not the famous one.
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Where the shape came fromRobert O. Ryder Template
Evan Esar, in The Comic Encyclopedia (1978), named the “whoever named X was a poor judge of Y” construction a Ryderism after the Ohio State Journal editor Robert O. Ryder, citing his “Whoever named near beer was a poor judge of distance.” QI records that Esar called the necking version the most quoted Ryderism of all — and noted in the same breath that it was credited to Groucho.
~
And a note in Groucho’s favourGroucho, as a user Possible
QI writes that “there is some evidence that Groucho Marx also employed this joke”, on the strength of the 1968 attribution appearing in his lifetime. Telling a joke is not writing one, but this is a genuine hedge in his direction and we record it rather than flatten it.
✓The honest answer is that nobody has nailed this one down. Quote Investigator ↗ points tentatively at Robert Quillen in 1943, with the joke’s scaffolding older still — and Groucho’s name arriving in 1968, from an anthologist.
Context
Why it mattered
This is the classic shape of a joke that has no author: not one origin story but a slow accretion. The template arrives first — “whoever named it necking was a poor judge of distance” in an Ohio paper in 1932 — and the better punchline is fitted to it later. By the time anyone writes the sentence down as a quotation, five different columnists have handled it.
What the trail shows most clearly is how attribution actually happens. The joke was not credited to Groucho by anyone who heard him say it; it was credited to him in a quotation book, and then two more quotation books copied the entry. That is a mechanism, and it runs in only one direction: towards the famous name.
Not credited by someone who heard him say it — credited by a quotation book.
Read the full story
Quote Investigator records other names that briefly held the joke, which is the tell. A 1946 syndicated column called “Office Cat” printed Quillen’s version almost verbatim with no credit at all. In 1975 a columnist in The Des Moines Register attributed it to “Agro B. Arlo, an acquaintance”. In 1979 Earl Wilson printed it as Groucho’s but with “called” in place of “named”. Each printing is a small mutation, and none of them is a source.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1887–1948 · American newspaper humorist and paragrapher
Robert Quillen was a South Carolina newspaperman who became one of the most widely syndicated paragraphers in America — a now-extinct trade whose whole craft was the single-sentence joke, produced daily, in bulk. His column “Paragraphs” ran in hundreds of papers, and lines from it circulated for decades afterwards with his name stripped off. That is precisely the difficulty here: Quote Investigator assigns him this joke only tentatively, because a paragrapher printing a gag is exactly as likely to be passing one along as coining it.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The primary source (Chicago)
Earliest matching joke located by Quote Investigator: Robert Quillen, “Paragraphs”, The News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), 16 June 1943, p. 4 — in the wording “strangely ignorant of anatomy”. Earliest attribution to Groucho Marx: Evan Esar, comp., 20,000 Quips and Quotes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 593.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Whoever named it necking was a poor judge of anatomy’?” Last verified 12 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/whoever-named-it-necking-was-a-poor-judge-of-anatomy/