This is one of my favorite stories of all time. The story is originally found in Harpo Marx’s autobiography Harpo Speaks.

Here is the background of this classic story:

As the Marx Brothers were growing up in New York City, they, of course, looked for ways to make a few dollars. They each had a variety of odd jobs. For a while, Chico Marx found employment playing the piano at beer gardens, nickelodeons, and the like. Chico was a pretty good piano player by this time.

Harpo Marx who learned piano by watching Chico’s lessons, was able to bang out a few songs on the piano himself, but he didn’t have the skills of his brother. Still, Harpo wanted to try his hand at making some easy money by playing the ivories. By chance, just as he was asking about this, Chico told Harpo that he was asked to play at a place across the street from the beer garden because that establishment had just fired their piano player. Chico said that Harpo could take that job pretending he was his brother. They figured no one would know the difference…

Harpo’s words tell the story best from here:

“It was a natural setup. Chico and I looked more like twins at that time than we ever had. So one night I slid onto the piano stool in the brauhaus and Chico played in the nickelodeon, and nobody knew the difference. Nobody knew the difference, that is, until I played my repertoire of two numbers in the same key six times over, ignoring all requests for other tunes…

“The manager (soon) paid me off and asked me to leave the premises. He couldn’t figure out how I had degenrated to such a lousy piano player overnight.”

In other words, Harpo was fired. The piano player who was originally fired that allowed Harpo to take that job in the first place was another kid growing up in New York City at the time…

George Gershwin.

Imagine being the person who, within a few days, fired both George Gershwin and Harpo Marx!