The Marx Brothers were a prominent US comedy act from 1905 to 1949. They moved their act from vaudeville to films in 1929, going on to make 12 features, mainly surrealist parodies of popular genres. Groucho managed a solo afterlife on TV, where their films still enjoy the immortality of the rerun.
Audiences loved the films’ unprecedented wildnessas they deflated social conventions. In that sprit we suspend any moral judgment of their uniformly self-serving and larcenous conduct.
Their films grew more sophisticated and witty, especially when S.J. Perelman joined their writing team. When Martin Esslin defined the Theatre of the Absurd he included the brothers as an early exemplar. The collective could equally have served Colin Wilson’s definition of The Outsider.
The Marxes usually feel Jewish, as in Captain Spaulding’s lyric aside: “Did someone call me schnorrer”? But their Italian stage names broaden their meaning to The Immigrant. The Marx Brothers make comedy out of the immigrant’s ambivalent experience of their new America.
Their meaning can be read from several spectra. Perhaps the most telling range is their different use of language. Groucho’s fluency shows him the most assimilated. But he overflows the cliches he deploys, with his brash insults. In his asides to the audience he refuses to stay within his role, even as — or because he has — made it into the new world.
For he often plays a character of substance and station — a however shyster lawyer, a famous explorer, a college president. But he refuses to conform to that respectability, to play the game. Instead he destroys decorum with his insulting candour and unrestrained chatter. His courtship of Margaret Dumont is a verbal assault on a social monument. Hence his classic: “I would never join any club that would have someone like me as a member.”
Chico’s speech is pure immigrant, with his American/Italian English. As the scripts grew wittier his malapropisms grow insightful. His “A circus got plenty relephants” could summarize the brothers’ film canon, to which indeed the circus is plenty relevant in its three-ring mix of genre plot, romance and comedy. As kindred aliens, Chico often serves to translate Harpo to Groucho.
Harpo famously doesn’t speak (hence/contra the title of his memoir). He is thus a pre-civilized force. With the most expressive face, he shows the widest gamut of extreme emotions, from glee to rage. Instinctively dishonest, he is the most honest in his emotions. He is the least socialized.
So too the spectrum of appearance. Groucho honestly flaunts his falsehood with his shoe-polish moustache. His suit is a variation on Chaplin’s Little Tramp: the baggy pants, the incongruous dinner jacket. Both suits express social aspiration. The firmly immigrant Chico wears a constant cap and a tight jacket, always buttoned, emblems of constraint.
But Harpo is again that pre-civilized force. His clothes are the looser antithesis to Chico’s, especially his abundant overcoat with preternatural pockets. From them — and his pants — he can pull any object he happens to need — even a blowtorch in full blaze.
So too the characters’ movement. Groucho’s slinking, crouching walk is an image of subversion, of an undermining. The feral Harpo’s reflexive girl-chasing make his unbridled energy seem demonic. Harpo would be the pure, unsocialized Id — but his saving grace is his warmth and delicacy,
And his angelic harp playing. This contrasts to Groucho’s verbal music — the satiric songs he croaks — which extends his irreverence. Chico’s piano-playing is characterized by his fingering — as idiosyncratic as his language —especially when he shoots a note with his pistol finger. That encapsulates the brothers’ aggression against all convention.
Taken together, the three brothers define a range of Outsiderhood in America. This is confirmed by the brief tenure of brother Zeppo. He was reputedly the funniest brother. In their vaudeville years he would fill in for whoever couldn’t make it. But he was too clearly the successful American, too good-looking, with too good a singing voice, to suit their Outsider spectrum. He was replaced by other B-actors.
The Marx Brothers’ influence goes far beyond the sprouting of other comedy Brother acts, from the Ritz and Smothers to the Smith. From the Marx headwater flows the century of Jewish Outsider critics of America and the larger culture, especially through parody: Mickey Katz, Alan Sherman, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman — and on to Mad Magazine and SNL. Ironically, as the Marxes find comedy in the outsider perspective on America they helped America become — at least in self-aware laughter — a little Jewish.
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