Marx defended Berlin anti-war statement

Naah. Not what you might be thinking.

Groucho Marx.

Irving Berlin.

In 1972 Groucho Marx was 82 years old, and bored.
He had not yet begun to decline into illness and senility, which marked the last 5 years of his life until his death in 1977. He was still mentally sharp, and retained a wealth of memories spanning back to vaudeville at the turn of the century. So, in one of the ways he decided to occupy his time in addition to showing up frequently on Dick Cavett’s late night talk show, he made a series of appearances in a one-man show titled An Evening With Groucho. The format was simple: accompanied on the piano by Marvin Hamlisch, Groucho sat in a chair in the middle of the stage and told stories and sang songs for a couple of hours.

Fortunately for us, one of those shows was recorded live at Carnegie Hall and released as a double album by A&M Records.
I have that album. Hadn’t listened to it or even thought about it for years, until yesterday, when unbidden I suddenly remembered a song Groucho sang called Stay Down Where You Belong. It was written in 1914 by Irving Berlin, who apparently was later embarrassed by the song’s anti-war sentiment.
The song is sung by the Devil, lecturing his son who’s bored in Hell and wants to go up to Earth to have some fun:

The Devil said ‘Listen lad,
Listen to your dear old dad’.
‘You stay down here where you belong.
The folks above you, they don’t know right from wrong.

To please their kings they’ve all gone off to war,
But not a one of them knows what they’re fighting for.
Way up above they say, that I’m a devil and I’m bad,
But the kings up there are bigger devils than your dad.
They’re breaking the hearts of mothers,
They’re making butchers out of brothers.
You’ll find more hell up there,
Than there is down here below.

I thought for sure the album would be on CD by now and still be in print, but it turns out it’s not available in nearly any format, and my vinyl double album is considered rare and hard to find.

I found a free download of the whole thing here.

And If I ever figure out how Word Press lets me post mp3 files, I’ll put up a clip from it, but in the meantime enjoy the complete transcript of the performance.