Quotations and Literature Forum

I am writing a book and am using the quote "dying is easy comedy is hard." I have searched for the source to whom to attribute this quote. The only thing I've found is that it is attributable to a vaudevillian but no name has been attached to this quote. If anyone knows the source of this qhote please email me at yepstein@rci.rutgers.edu.

Thanks.

Yakov Epstein

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Yakov M. Epstein, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology - Rutgers Univ.
yepstein@rci.rutgers.edu

Not conclusive but here are a couple of things I found online.



Suspiciously similar but with completely different names:


Hey, here's the column in question.



Other attributions include Edmund Gwenn, David Garrick, Groucho Marx, Marcel Marceau, and of course Oscar Wilde.

Hmmm. Edmund Gwenn, Edmund King, Edward Kean... I sense a mutating meme here. I suspect this is one of those apocryphal things we'll never figure out. It probably really appears as a line in "My Favorite Year" but I know it didn't originate there.

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Michael Moncur
Owner and maintainer, The Quotations Page

Thanks. That's interesting and helpful. My wife says that it is probably attributable to Edward Kean. She heard it first when she was in acting school.
I guess we'll never know. But at least we can be fairly certain it did NOT originate in Spy Kids 2

Yakov

_________________
Yakov M. Epstein, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology - Rutgers Univ.
yepstein@rci.rutgers.edu

I hate attributions like "some young actor" etc. If someone actually caught a famous person's last words, it is beyond belief (for me) to think that the person's name who caught those words would not also have their name recorded in history.
Most of the Internet citings I saw in the past when I searched for this give it to Kean. By the way, I also saw it attributed to Noel Coward (to add to the list).
If you have to attribute it, I would say something like "supposedly" or "it is said," etc. Or even back away from the thing entirely with:
A famous comic actor, lying on his deathbed, was asked by a friend, "Is it hard, this dying?" "No," replied the actor. "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."

Northwestern Mutual has their money on Garrick
http://www.northwesternmutual.com/nmcom ... 050_family

Yes, "famous last words" quotations are notoriously inaccurate, as we've discussed here before.

_________________
Michael Moncur
Owner and maintainer, The Quotations Page