I Would Not Exist Without the Marx Brothers

In early nineties Toronto, my parents went on their first date. My dad absentmindedly sung a tune: “it’s better to run to Toronta, than to live in a place you don’t wanta…”

My mom recognizes it instantly. Groucho Marx. From there, it was love at first sight.

Thirty years earlier, in Winnipeg, my father had stayed up late to watch Marx Brothers movies on TV with his siblings. In 70’s Toronto, my mom had done the exact same thing.

Her family was newly arrived in Canada after fleeing a dictatorship in Chile. My mother and her younger siblings would go to sleep immediately after arriving home from school. At midnight, their parents would wake them up to watch the late night Marx Brothers movie.

The family still credits these movies with helping them learn English. This strikes me as hard to believe. The films are so dense with complex wordplay and incomprehensible references that you'd think they’d be a tough entry point into a new language. And yet, even now, you can hear hints of Groucho in my grandfather’s sharp comic timing.

At the turn of the twentieth century, The Marx Brothers were successful vaudeville entertainers. Shortly after the advent of sound, they made the jump to films. Their first movie, The Cocoanuts, was released in 1929. Their last, Love Happy, was released in 1949. In the twenty years between, they made a series of classic comedies, including Duck Soup, Monkey Business, and Horse Feathers.

I was born in 1997, and like most kids my age, I had a series of VHS's in constant rotation. Among more evergreen titles like The Princess Bride, and era-appropriate kids movies like Shrek and Monster’s Inc, my dad snuck in some more idiosyncratic fare. There were Disney movies from his own childhood (The Jungle Book & The Aristocats), the psychedelic Beatles musical Yellow Submarine, and The Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business.

Other than animation, which was timeless, my dad struggled to get me to watch old stuff. Except for Monkey Business. My theory? The Marxes thought old movies were as stuffy and boring as I did. Allow me to explain.

With the Marx Brothers, you got three distinct flavours of comedy:

Groucho was a quick and witty insult comic. Chico played an immigrant whose shaky English fueled endless puns and wordplay. Harpo was entirely silent, a master of facial expressions and slapstick. What united the brothers was an anarchist streak. Every non-Marx character in their films was a bland straight man, moving the plot along. These characters often urge the brothers to get involved in the stakes of the movie, but they simply do not give a shit. It feels like a regular movie was being shot, and then three assholes wandered onto set and started messing with everybody.

Often placed in high society contexts, the brothers ignore all sense of decorum and attack other characters with insults, robbery, and humiliation. They are selfish, mean-spirited, and ignorant. Bugs Bunny (whom Chuck Jones has said was influenced by Groucho), had a similar demeanor, but needed to be provoked. A bully would pick on him, and Bugs would declare:

“Of course you know, this means war.”

This was not necessary for the Marx Brothers. As soon as they stepped on screen, the war had begun.

In one of my favourite Letterboxd reviews, the great Will Sloan bluntly summed up the Marx philosophy. Writing about Go West, a later, softer entry in the Marx Bros oeuvre, he said this:

“This is a pretty lame and corny movie that envisions the Brothers as pixieish do-gooders instead of what they really are: agents of chaos who will destroy your high-society party and fuck your girlfriend.”

I should also mention at this point that there is a fourth onscreen brother: Zeppo. Zeppo is interesting because he is the one brother who would actually participate in the movie’s story. He wasn’t as funny as his older siblings, but he was more handsome, and he would often get a romantic b-plot. A lot of the time, he’d be the one urging the brothers to save the orphanage or whatever.

I’d never heard this before, but I recently stumbled on the great Filipe Furtado’s theory that Zeppo’s boring scenes are actually part of the Marx's formal deconstructionism:

“I'm even convinced now that the brothers had genuine perverse pleasure stopping the film dead for those Zeppo romantic interludes. Horse Feathers is all about destroying the medium. True anarchy.”

If I had to track the effects the Marx’s movies had on my developing brain, I’d pick out three major threads:

First, my taste in comedy. As Filipe pointed out, the Marxes seemed determined to break down the structure of what a comedy movie was, and I’ve always gravitated towards films that do the same thing.

The ending of Blazing Saddles has the characters spill out of their old-west setting into a Marx-like set piece where they destroy the Warner Bros studio. Wet Hot American Summer has that Marxian quality where it feels like a normal movie until you listen to what the characters are actually saying. And in my mind you can draw a clear line from Harpo’s prop-heavy antics to Eric Andre literally taking a chainsaw to the late night talk show desk.

Second, the brothers brought me closer to my own family. Not only would I literally not exist without them, they also helped me understand the upbringings of my mother and grandmother. The Marxes grew up poor, and their hustler personas reflected that. I did not grow up poor, but the Marx movies prompted knowing laughs and stories from my family, both from my grandmother’s childhood and the family’s experience as new arrivals in Canada.

Chico’s Italian immigrant character, and his limited grasp of English, were clearly relatable as well. To this day, my grandmother calls the Marxes “the Hermanos Brothers.”

Finally, the brothers influenced my political consciousness.

To be clear, I don’t know or care to learn the politics of the real men behind the personas. And even the personas themselves were simply agents of comic chaos. But for the most part, the Marxes inflicted that chaos on the rich and powerful.

Chico and Harpo typically played tramps, hustlers and stowaways. Groucho usually had a higher status job, but you always got the feeling that he conned his way into it. In The Big Store, Groucho plays a world famous detective, but his office is in shambles. When we first see it, He passes a small cabinet labeled “assets” and sits under a massive one labeled “liabilities.”

To go a little further, I’m convinced the Marxes gave me a repressed hatred of decorum in high society spaces. It’s why Trump’s vulgarity doesn’t bother me as much as the faux-civility of the establishment Republicans around him. People just as vile and hateful who know how to disguise their intentions with softened language and mannered appearances. Ditto the Democrats who solemnly feign compassion for civilians while signing bills to drop more bombs on them.

It’s pathetic to quote him twice in one piece, but I think often of this Will Sloan quote, from his review of Borat 2. Speaking about Rudy Giuliani's infamous appearance in that film:

“What do you do if you are granted access to an evil man who has ascended to the highest echelons of government, and who will never face justice for his crimes? For [Sacha Baron] Cohen and his collaborators, the answer is to mock and humiliate him.“

Whenever Adam Friedland, Eric Andre, or Ben Palmer tricks a politician into an interview, I think of this quote. I also think of Groucho. Maybe the most powerful thing you can do to a powerful person is break the respectable image that they project outward, because it’s usually the image they project inwards as well. To make an extremely topical example: even if Zohran loses in November, we still got that clip of him humiliating Cuomo. The Marxes never did this in real life, but I think they planted the seed for the rush this gives me.

In the opening scene of Duck Soup, Groucho develops an adversarial relationship with a foreign ambassador for basically no reason. He provokes him at a fancy garden party, and they have this exchange:

Ambassador: “I didn’t come here to be insulted.”

Groucho: “That’s what you think.”

All of the brothers passed decades before I was born. I’m now the third generation of my family, on both sides, to love them. As much as images and sounds on film can be, they are in my blood.

For that, I am grateful.