Abstract
Negotiating a middle register between physical and verbal humour (slapstick and wordplay), the Marx Brothers relied on music at every phase of their long careers. This chapter draws upon scenes from their films of the 1930s–1940s to demonstrate that their madcap musicality depends on the careful pacing of punchlines and a purposeful mishmash of genre and style. Many have interpreted the Marx Brothers’s mockery of societal norms, polyglot accents, and affectionate disrespect for the English language as a brand of immigrant anarchy. In counterpoint with these views, this chapter shows how their multivalent musical humour united the Marx Brothers as an ensemble act and drew listeners into the rhythm of their jokes, either implicating the audience in the delivery of the punchline or rendering it viscerally surprising when the joke hits home.
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Notes
- 1.
Groucho appeared as Ko-Ko in The Mikado, directed and adapted for television by Martyn Green (Pleasantville, NY: Video Artists International DVD-4554, 2012). Biographies, memoirs, and reminiscences of the Marx Brothers are legion and entertaining, if sometimes incongruent in anecdotal details. Most of the biographical information in this essay comes from Gehring (1987), Kanfer (2000), and Mitchell (2011). An indispensable resource is Yahn (2007). Koestenbaum’s provocative analysis of Harpo’s physical gestures (2012) will be discussed below.
- 2.
In Table 29.1, the timings indicated represent my best attempts at a consistent tally. Ambiguities in timing arise from several factors: the presence of silent dancing, the slippage between ‘speech’ and ‘music’ in Harpo’s noise-making, and (particularly in A Night at the Opera) the presence of unseen yet diegetic music making. More particularly, in relation to Duck Soup, the original screenings opened with approximately two additional minutes of scene setting, which were later cut and are not accounted for here. I have counted only those moments where musicking seems to be the centre of attention and have rounded total timings to the nearest half-minute. Total timings correspond to the films as commercially available on DVD.
- 3.
I take my expansive definition of ‘musicking,’ encompassing all music-performative activity, from Small (1998).
- 4.
A related point appears on page 132: ‘while critics routinely remark that the milieux the lower-class Brothers inhabit are most often the haunts of the wealthy, they do not at the same time notice that these milieux are always representations of centre and margin, and always represent the Brothers as immigrants,’ for example as stowaways in Monkey Business and A Night at the Opera (or, I would add, as deadbeats in Room Service). They also appear as unlikely characters in exotic locations (Go West, A Night in Casablanca), in addition to their obvious interloper status in high society and academia (Animal Crackers, Horse Feathers).
- 5.
Linking puns to the immigrant experience, Leonard M. Helfgott (2011, p. 111) writes: ‘Being caught between two languages encourages a kind of wordplay that seeks double meanings by distorting words, phrases, or sentences, especially in the language of public expression, English.’
- 6.
These include the rendition of ‘Sweet Adeline’ from inside their stowaway barrels in Monkey Business, an inexplicable snippet of ‘Oh, Susanna’ that pops into the final scene of Animal Crackers, and ‘Down by the Old Mill Stream,’ in the famous hand-washing scene from A Day at the Races.
- 7.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGwSGD-d52Y. Accessed 9 September 2021. I’ll Say She Is was recreated in 2016; for details, see Diamond (2016).
- 8.
In its original form, as part of the vaudeville revue ‘On the Mezzanine Floor’ (later ‘On the Balcony’) the audition material varied, but Chevalier was switched in here as a plug for the Brothers’s newest film Monkey Business, in which Chevalier’s stolen passport aids them in disembarking from the ocean liner.
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Levy, B.E. (2023). The Joke’s on You: Puns and Punchlines in the Music of the Marx Brothers. In: Audissino, E., Wennekes, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33422-1_29
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