Anything not attributable to Groucho may be attributed to Douglas Adams: “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

The… the other important joke, for me, is one that’s usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud’s “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,” and it goes like this – I’m paraphrasing – um, “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.”

Which means we want to keep Doc.

Guy

“The following morning I sent the club* a wire stating, Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”

*The Friars Club of Beverly Hills

working?

Every funny remark ever said will ultimately be attributed to Groucho.

First for the smallest, most annoying sort of comment: Woody Allen was quoting Groucho Marx.

Second, “everybody is miscellaneous” (how’d I miss trademarking that, you bahstahd!) is a great point that calls out a difference in how we categorize things and how we categorize people.

So, “everybody is miscellaneous” is important to remember as we’re being aggregated in ways that cover up differences that are important to keep in mind. But, don’t you think there are also times when we’re being divided and we want to say “But we’re in this together!”? There are commonalities that bind us conceptually, socially, economically, politically, morally, spiritually.

Everything is misc because there are innumerable attributes by which we can cluster stuff, and which ones we choose depends upon our culture, language, and interests at the moment. The same is true for how we cluster people, but human groups develop a reality that goes beyond the mere commonality of attributes: We grow to know one another beyond the mere point of similarity and our groups take on a life that a mere conceptual clustering of things does not.

The miscellaneous is a conversation??

– David Weinberger