Uploaded December 2017 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago

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Brand new exclusive material: An incredibly rare find of extremely valuable audio of Groucho Marx hosting the TONIGHT SHOW in 1962! (more info below. . . )

Virtually none of the TONIGHT SHOW prior to 1972 survives in any form, let alone from the week of shows hosted by Groucho just before Johnny Carson took over the program. But not only is this a very special recording due to the rarity of any pre-1972 TONIGHT SHOW material, but due to the enormous Marxian significance of the first guest featured: Lillian Roth, romantic lead of The Marx Bros second film, "Animal Crackers"! They even sing a duet (of sorts). George Fenneman reunites with Groucho, too, sitting in as temporary announcer, a year after the end of YOU BET YOUR LIFE.

The audio here is pretty rough, and the recording far from complete. Whoever recorded this originally was clearly uninterested in anything but The Marx Bros, since he didn't even bother to record the Barbra Streisand segment. But we're extremely lucky to be able to hear this in any form, thanks to a near-miraculous series of serendipitous events, which began with my friend (Patrick Barr) buying a bunch of reel to reel tapes at a garage sale without having any idea what he was buying, just because the label on one, "Groucho - Tonight Show", sounded intriguing. The heavily damaged reels were then expertly and carefully brought back to listenable quality by another friend, Steve Garland, via a very delicate and risky tape restoration process known as "baking". (I'm not making that term up: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky-shed_syndrome#Baking )

I've been sitting on this recording for far too long, because the audio needed a lot of work, most of which is well and truly beyond my amateur skills. I'm certain a true digital audio expert could make this sound quite a bit better than it does, but after countless hours of my own tinkering around with this for more than a couple of YEARS, I felt it was long overdue to get this posted once and for all in some semi-listenable form.

I hope you enjoy this historically important and immensely entertaining recording, despite the effort required to decipher the some of the dialogue. I feel incredibly honored to have been trusted to shepherd along this process, and to finally make it available to the the public here on YouTube.

Many thanks to Patrick for trusting me with the recording, to Steve for rescuing it from the dead, and most of all, to whomever made this home recording of the original broadcast in the first place! The odds were astronomically against this recording existing in the first place, let alone its having gotten into the hands of the right people so that it could be transferred, cleaned up, and made availble to fans everywhere. . . as it should be.

(PS: Please excuse the crappy slideshow. I don't have even remotely good software for this, now that YouTube decided to remove their "just slightly better than awful" slideshow creation feature.)
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