THE HUMOR OF THE MARX BROTHERS Unlike the "insider" humor that defines much of American comedy today, says the author, the Marx Brothers perfected in their films a madcap "outsider" humor born of the immigrant experience. hat's your most common anxiety dream? Is it the dream where you're in a college classroom, sitting . down to take an exam for a course that you never attended? Or is it the one where you find yourselfuninvited and underdressed (maybe not dressed at all) at a gala reception? Or perhaps you dream that you're in a position of some responsibility-a doctor, a college president, a head of state, a performer-but you don't have any idea how to do what everyone around expects you to; you're a rank impostor. (This is my brand- I find myself onstage in a 13-odd-piece rock group, resembling the Band, plus some sitters-in, with a guitar in my hands and no clue, none.) These dreams go on like slow torture-you bungle along, quaking with humiliation, searching vainly for the red exit light. But what ifinstead of suffering through the humiliation, you simply took the dream over? Suppose that you, maybe with the help of a couple of henchmen, shooed the imposing professor out of the exam room and began a lecture of your own bizarre devising, a loony parody of the course as you imagined it to be; or, finding yourself wearing the badge of office and surrounded by lackeys of various sorts, you set in and began to pilot the nation (hey, it's easier than you'd think) on toward sweet anarchy; or, dumbfounded at the door of an elegant party, decided to take the place by storm. What you'd be doing if you could commandeer an anxiety dream this way is turning it into a Marx Brothers movie. In their best films, the Marx Brothers find themselves in a place where they emphatically don't belong-college classroom, society bash, front office. They're the characters who have no business on the scene, the new people, the ultimate outsiders. But rather than wilting, they take the joint over. All that the other, accommodated characters have hidden beneath their bogus civility-greed, lust, desires of all sorts-the Marx Brothers suss out and parody forthwith. They grab a listless world by its expensive lapels and shake it up. The Marx Brothers made their best movies in the late' 20s and the ,30s, during the Depression, a time in America when any of a number of people were compelled to see themselves as outcasts. The
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Marxes themselves started poor, growing up on the East Side of New York. As kids they were in vaudeville, pushed on by one of the most ferocious stage moms in history, Minnie Marx. From vaudeville they went to Broadway, then on to Hollywood, big success, bundles ofloot. In the beginning there were five of them in the act: Groucho, Harpo and Chico, the great ones, and also Gummo and Zeppo. Gummo was never in a movie. Zeppo, who played straight men and romantic leads, is one of the stiffest actors ever to face a camera, a walking two-by-four. From the very beginning, Marx Brothers humor is what we might call outsider humor, the humor of the outcasts, the ones who aren't in the big plan. It's crucially American, as I see it, ours being, atleast in intention, the country where outsiders get an unprecedented and unequaled shot. We aspire to welcome unexpected wit for its powerto revitalize whatever status is quo. But if my intimations are right, the competing brand-call it insider humor, the humor of the ingroup-is our characteristic mode in America today ..Insider humor, the sort of thing that's epitomized by, say, TV host David Letterman, invites you to join a club composed of people likewise in the know, and to stop feeling like a bedraggled loner. In the mid'90s, a period of relative conformity, of other-direction (to borrow a term from sociologist David Riesman), we can probably use an extended hit of rebellious Marx Brothers humor. In The Cocoanuts, their first film, released in 1929, the Marx Brothers start small, running amok in a Florida hotel; in Monkey Business (1931) it's a classy ocean liner, then Big Joe Helton's swank party; in Horse Feathers (1932) they commandeer a college; in Duck Soup (1933), an entire nation, Freedonia. For sheer imperial nerve, though, there's little in their films to match the big entrance scene of the 1930 Animal Crackers. Groucho plays Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding, the famous African explorer (who probably has never been to Africa), and in his open-' ing sequence he's borne into Mrs. Rittenhouse's mansion on a litter; supposedly they've carried him all the way from the jungle. Groucho, in high form-frock coat, grease-painted mustache, dancing eyebrows and runaway crouch, with authentic Livingstone-I-presume pith helmet added for the role-disembarks and begins to dicker with the chieflitter bearer about the fare. "What? From Africa to here, a dollar eighty-five? I told you not to take me through Australia. It's all chopped up. You should have come right up the Lincoln Boulevard." But Groucho can't rest content with simply abusing the help. Soon he turns on the hostess, played expertly by Margaret Dumont, and on her Long Island manor. "It is indeed an honor to welcome you to my