“This is not so much a review as a confession. I spent a good part of an evening laughing at a very bad play — Make A Million.”
. . . tawdry, tasteless, and tatterdemalion as the evening is, “Make A Million” is — as often as not — stubbornly funny.
. . . “Make A Million” isn’t respectable by any standards I can think of; but it does have an unexpected, and just about inexplicable funnybone.
— Walter Kerr, The Cincinnati Enquirer, October 30, 1958
My college roommate forwarded me a single line of text during finals week with zero context. It read: “I spent a good part of last evening laughing at a very bad play.” I laughed immediately — then felt strangely unsettled. Something about the line felt deeply honest, almost confessional, in a way that most criticism never dares to be. It stuck with me for days. Later, I found myself using it to describe a film I’d genuinely enjoyed but couldn’t quite defend to anyone with taste. That experience — laughing freely, then retreating into judgment — turned out to be the entire story behind this quote. And that story is far richer, funnier, and more philosophically loaded than it first appears.
The Earliest Known Appearance
The quote traces directly to theater critic Walter Kerr. On October 30, 1958, Kerr published a review in The Cincinnati Enquirer with a headline that doubled as a confession: “This Is No Review; It’s a Confession.” The play in question was Make A Million, a Broadway comedy starring Sam Levene. Kerr opened the piece with remarkable candor — he admitted laughing. Then he immediately undermined that laughter with critical distance.
The line “I spent a good part of an evening laughing at a very bad play” became the review’s beating heart. Kerr didn’t bury the admission. He led with it. That choice made the piece memorable far beyond the run of the play itself. Furthermore, Kerr’s use of words like “tawdry, tasteless, and tatterdemalion” showed he wasn’t simply hedging — he genuinely believed the play failed on artistic grounds. Yet he also acknowledged it had an “unexpected, and just about inexplicable funnybone.”
This tension — between visceral enjoyment and critical judgment — became the quote’s entire philosophical engine. Kerr essentially argued that laughter alone doesn’t make something good. That position, stated so openly, invited pushback almost immediately.
Who Was Walter Kerr?
Walter Kerr wasn’t a minor figure. He was one of the most influential theater critics of the twentieth century. He wrote for major publications and later won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1978. His opinions shaped careers, closed shows, and defined what Broadway audiences expected from serious drama.
Kerr held strong views about comedy as a craft. He believed not all laughter was equal. In his critical framework, a play could provoke genuine amusement while still failing to achieve artistic coherence, emotional depth, or structural integrity. That philosophy underpinned his review of Make A Million entirely. Additionally, Kerr had written extensively about the mechanics of humor. He understood comedy from the inside — which made his willingness to dismiss a funny play even more striking.
His critics, however, saw this as a kind of intellectual snobbery. If a play made an audience laugh, wasn’t that the entire point? That argument came from a very famous corner.
Groucho Marx Fires Back
In 1959, Groucho Marx published his memoir Groucho and Me. In Chapter 14, titled “Rich Is Better,” Marx took direct aim at Kerr’s review — without naming him. He quoted the line nearly verbatim and then delivered a sharp, commonsense rebuttal.
Marx wrote that the critic “laughed all evening” but then decided it was a “very bad play.” He pointed out that Make A Million never promised to be King Lear or Death of a Salesman. All it promised, Marx argued, was laughs — and it delivered. Therefore, by any reasonable standard, it succeeded.
This argument is deceptively simple but philosophically serious. Marx was essentially challenging Kerr’s criteria for evaluation. If you judge a comedy by the standards of tragedy, of course it will fall short. However, applying the wrong measuring stick doesn’t reveal the work’s failure — it reveals the critic’s. Marx understood this intuitively, even if he expressed it with his trademark irreverence.
Interestingly, Marx chose not to name Kerr directly. That restraint added a layer of wit to the whole exchange. He described the critic as “one prominent reviewer” and noted, with dry humor, that there was “no point in mentioning his name.” That phrase itself reads like a punchline — the kind of dismissal that stings precisely because it sounds so casual.
The Quote Evolves in Retelling
By the time the quote traveled through decades of cultural memory, small changes crept in. A 2007 column in a New Brunswick, New Jersey newspaper recalled the line differently. The columnist attributed the story to Groucho and rendered the quote as: “I spent two hours last night laughing at a very bad play.”
Notice the shift. “Two hours” replaced “a good part of an evening.” “Last night” replaced “last evening.” These small changes feel natural in oral retelling — people round numbers and simplify phrasing. However, they also subtly change the tone. Kerr’s original phrasing — “a good part of an evening” — carries a rueful, almost self-mocking quality. “Two hours” sounds more precise, more like a complaint. The difference matters.
This evolution illustrates how memorable quotes drift. Each retelling smooths out idiosyncratic phrasing. Additionally, attribution often shifts in transit. By 2007, some readers might have assumed Groucho himself coined the line — since he was the one complaining about it. In reality, Kerr wrote it, and Groucho quoted it to argue against it.
Why This Tension Still Matters
The debate between Kerr and Marx wasn’t just a spat between a critic and a comedian. It touched something fundamental about how we evaluate entertainment. Critics operate within aesthetic frameworks — they apply standards developed through exposure, study, and reflection. However, audiences operate within experience. They feel what they feel. Laughter is involuntary. You can’t fake a genuine laugh the way you can fake appreciation for a painting.
Kerr’s position was that his laughter didn’t override his judgment. He laughed — and still found the play artistically deficient. That’s a coherent position. Many people enjoy films they’d never defend as great art. Meanwhile, Marx’s position was equally coherent: a comedy’s job is to produce comedy. Judging it by extra-comedic standards is a category error.
Both men were right. That’s what makes the quote so enduring. It captures a genuine paradox in human aesthetic experience — the gap between pleasure and quality, between what we enjoy and what we esteem.
**The Play Itself: *Make A Million***
Make A Million opened on Broadway in 1958. Sam Levene, a veteran character actor known for his work in Guys and Dolls, led the cast. The show ran for a modest stretch and didn’t make theatrical history. Today, most people who know the title know it only because of Kerr’s review and Marx’s rebuttal.
That’s a particular kind of immortality — remembered not for what you achieved but for what you provoked. The play’s “inexplicable funnybone,” as Kerr put it, outlasted the production itself. Furthermore, the show’s premise — lightweight, crowd-pleasing, commercially motivated — made it a perfect flashpoint for the larger argument about critical standards. It wasn’t trying to be profound. That was precisely the point.
Comedies and Critical Bias
Kerr’s review also touched a longstanding sore spot in theatrical culture. Comedies have historically received less critical respect than dramas. Awards bodies, critics, and academic curricula have consistently elevated tragedy and drama over comedy. The reasons are complex — partly cultural, partly rooted in Aristotelian hierarchies that placed tragedy above comedy in the order of artistic seriousness.
Kerr himself was aware of this bias. Source His book Tragedy and Comedy engaged with exactly this question. Yet his review of Make A Million arguably reproduced the very bias he understood intellectually. He laughed — and then reached for the language of high criticism to explain why that laughter didn’t count. Groucho, who spent his career making people laugh and watching critics sniff at the results, found this infuriating. Additionally, Marx had personal experience with critics who enjoyed his work publicly and then wrote dismissive reviews.
Modern Usage and Cultural Resonance
Today, the quote lives in a broader conversation about guilty pleasures, critical honesty, and the gap between taste and enjoyment. People use versions of it to describe blockbuster films, reality television, pop music, and fast food. The structure — I enjoyed this, but I know it’s bad — has become a template for a certain kind of self-aware confession.
Social media has amplified this dynamic considerably. Audiences now broadcast their opinions instantly, without the mediation of editorial standards or critical frameworks. As a result, the Kerr-Marx debate plays out thousands of times daily across comment sections and review threads. Someone admits they loved a trashy film. Someone else argues that enjoyment is the only valid criterion. The argument never resolves — because both sides are correct.
However, Kerr’s specific phrasing retains its elegance. “I spent a good part of an evening laughing at a very bad play” works because it’s honest in two directions simultaneously. It doesn’t pretend the laughter didn’t happen. It also doesn’t pretend the laughter settled the question. That double honesty is rare in criticism — and rarer still in public discourse generally.
Misattribution and the Groucho Problem
Because Groucho Marx quoted the line so memorably, Source and because Marx is far more famous than Kerr in popular culture, the quote sometimes drifts toward Groucho as its apparent author. This is a classic misattribution pattern. The person who repeats a line memorably often gets credit for coining it.
Additionally, Groucho’s voice — sardonic, quick, irreverent — fits the quote’s rhythm so naturally that the misattribution feels almost logical. However, the record is clear. Walter Kerr wrote those words in a newspaper review in October 1958. Groucho quoted them the following year specifically to disagree with them. The quote belongs to Kerr. The argument belongs to both of them.
What Kerr Was Really Saying
It’s worth sitting with Kerr’s position a moment longer, because it’s more nuanced than it first appears. He wasn’t arguing that enjoyment is irrelevant. He was arguing that his own enjoyment wasn’t a reliable guide to quality in this particular case. That’s an act of intellectual humility, not snobbery. He essentially said: I laughed — and I don’t fully trust that laughter as a critical instrument here.
That’s a harder position to hold than either pure enjoyment or pure dismissal. Furthermore, it requires a critic to separate their personal experience from their evaluative judgment — something most people find genuinely difficult. Kerr did it openly, in print, at the top of his review. That transparency is precisely what made the line stick.
Marx, meanwhile, wasn’t wrong to push back. Source His argument reminded critics — and still reminds them — that aesthetic hierarchies can become self-serving. When the standards used to evaluate work consistently exclude the work that gives people the most pleasure, those standards deserve scrutiny.
Conclusion
The quote “I spent a good part of an evening laughing at a very bad play” originated with Walter Kerr in a 1958 theater review. Groucho Marx immortalized it by quoting it — and arguing against it — in his 1959 memoir. Together, they created one of the most honest and enduring debates in the history of criticism. The line captures something true about human experience: we enjoy things we can’t fully defend, and we defend standards that sometimes override our enjoyment. Neither impulse is wrong. Both are deeply human. Next time you laugh at something you can’t quite recommend, remember — you’re in excellent company. Walter Kerr laughed too. He just couldn’t let himself leave it at that.