Kin Hubbard? Abe Martin? Beatrice Kaufman? Anonymous?
Question for Quote Investigator: Poverty can cause unhappiness and despair. Yet, there is no easy solution to this human predicament because wealth does not guarantee joy and happiness. A popular humorist once stated:
It’s hard to tell what brings happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed.
A remark of this type has been attributed to Kin Hubbard. Would you please help me to find the correct phrasing and a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: The full name of Kin Hubbard was Frank McKinney Hubbard. For more than three decades Hubbard published a widely syndicated one-panel comic strip featuring an everyman character named Abe Martin. In 1930 Hubbard published a panel containing the following line. The word “purty” was an informal version of “pretty”. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
It’s purty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty an’ wealth have both failed.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In 1935 “The Chillicothe Scioto Gazette” of Ohio published a collection of quotations which included the following instance in which “purty” was replaced with “pretty”:2
“It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty an’ wealth have both failed.”
—Kin Hubbard.
It is true that neither poverty nor wealth guarantees happiness, but the two conditions are dramatically different. In 1937 a gossip columnist credited the writer Beatrice Kaufman with the following pertinent saying:3
At the Tavern Mrs. George S. Kaufman urges a noted theatrical figure to accept the movie offers being tendered him. “Listen, and take my advice,” she urges. “Don’t overlook the money part of it. I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich. Rich is better!”
A separate Quote Investigator article about the saying immediately above is available here.
In 1948 “The Macmillan Book Of Proverbs, Maxims, And Famous Phrases” contained the following entry:4
It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty an’ wealth have both failed.
Kin Hubbard, Abe Martin’s Broadcast, p. 191. (1930)
In 1957 “The Book of Unusual Quotations” compiled by Rudolf Flesch contained an instance:5
It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed. Kin Hubbard
In 2012 the saying appeared in “The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said” compiled by Robert Byrne:6
It’s hard to tell what brings happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed.
—Frank McKinney Hubbard (1868-1930)
In conclusion, Kin Hubbard (Frank McKinney Hubbard) deserves credit for the statement he published in 1930. During subsequent years the common phrasing has evolved.
Image Notes: Picture of gold bars from Scottsdale Mint at Unsplash. The image has been cropped and resized.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Mardy Grothe whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration. . Grothe created the wonderful website “Great Opening Lines in World Literature”.
- 1930 February 26, The Richmond Item, Abe Martin (text accompanying illustration), Quote Page 1, Column 1, Richmond, Indiana. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
- 1935 July 10, The Chillicothe Scioto Gazette, Quotations, Quote Page 6, Column 2, Chillicothe, Ohio. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
- 1937 May 12, The Washington Post, The Post’s New Yorker by Leonard Lyons, Quote Page 13, Washington, D.C. (ProQuest) ↩︎
- 1948, The Macmillan Book Of Proverbs, Maxims, And Famous Phrases, Selected and Arranged by Burton Stevenson, Topic: Happiness, Quote Page 1070, Column 2, The Macmillan Company, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1957, The Book of Unusual Quotations, Compiled by Rudolf Flesch, Topic: Happiness, Quote Page 114, Harper & Brothers, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 2012, The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said, Compiled by Robert Byrne, Quote Number 957, Touchstone: A Division of Simon & Schuster, New York. (Verified on paper) ↩︎