In Depth:

Four Ducks and a Bush:
The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup as Seen Through the Eyes of a 21st Century, Knee-jerk Liberal Film Critic 

Note: This essay will be peculiarly familiar to my regular readers. Last year, I was asked by an English professor to write an essay that served as a beginner's guide for understanding the genius that is Marx Brothers comedy. Instead of starting from scratch, I dusted off my review of Duck Soup, which I regard as one of my best essays, and decided to expand it into an overview of the Brothers' legacy and their enduring presense in popular culture. This essay served its academic purposes well, and I am now publishing it here due to popular demand. None of what's written here will be new information for devoted Marx Brothers aficionados, but if you've any friends wondering what the big deal is about the real Fab Four, feel free to point them in this direction. Or just show them Duck Soup, which speaks for itself.

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         A distinction must often be made between a piece of art’s original purpose and how its meanings have shifted and changed when viewed through the filter of a different culture and era. Louis Althusser, an ironically Marxist philosopher, put it this way: “It is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that men ‘represent to themselves’ in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there” (164). His point is correct, if obvious: It’s probably impossible to read a classic piece of literature or watch a great film without inadvertently placing our own cultural background and personal observations into the text. But isn’t this the way it should be? A piece of art’s ability, after all, to be interpreted and re-interpreted throughout the centuries is a test of its durability and universality. If it doesn’t reveal insight to us and to our times, then it is merely a remnant of its time, not a text alive in our own.

            This difference between the artist’s intent and the universality of an author’s work must be made, especially when we are dealing with a piece like the Marx Brother’s Duck Soup. Now seventy-three years old, it is downright remarkable how well the film has aged as a satire on war pictures and incompetent governments. Watching it today, there are moments that seem so familiar to the current state of the Union that the critically acclaimed comedy, the last film that the Brothers did for Paramount Pictures, seems more horrifically prophetic than funny. In his review ofthe film, Roger Ebert quotes the British critic Patrick McCray: “As an absurdist essay on politics and warfare, Duck Soup can stand alongside (or even above) the works of Beckett and Ionesco” (3). Yet when asked the significance of the film’s politics, Groucho only shrugged and said, “What significance? We were just four Jews trying to get a laugh” (imdb, 9). There is clearly a difference, then, between our Duck Soup and the Marx’s. Can a work of art be praised for what it has accomplished despite its artists’ intention? If the art is still breathing after decades of use, then deviations from the artists are demanded and even essential. The Marx Brothers certainly never realized that they, as surrealist Antonin Artaud wrote, “had the poetic quality of surrealism” (Duck Digest, 47) that transcended their initial motivation of simple laughs (a claim that inspired Salvatore Dali to write an unused script for the Brothers), but the universality and influence of their best films unquestionably reveal a legacy and genius beyond their evidently humble intentions to make their Depression-era audience giggle.

            Today, the Marx Brothers are arguably considered the greatest comedy team in American history. From their earliest Vaudeville days in the 1910s to their eventual leap into Broadway and subsequent Hollywood films, radio programs, theatrical agencies, game shows, and television specials that lasted until their deaths, the four brothers—“Chico” (Leonard, 1887-1961), “Harpo” (Arthur, 1888-1964), “Groucho” (Julius, 1890-1977), and “Zeppo” (Herbert, 1901-1979)—have become the epitome of unadulterated, cinematic madness that “[hurls] comic mud at the gleaming marble pillars of the American temple” (Mast, 281). Throughout their career, they would appear in assorted mediums in various combinations (sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, etc.), but it is their six earliest films for Paramount Pictures, made from 1929-1933, that represent what most film scholars consider to be their comedic genius in their purest form. Not coincidentally, the Paramount films are the only works of the Marx’s that feature all four of the brothers together.

            What distinguished the Marx Brothers in their Paramount films from all other comedians was their fearless, thumb-biting indictment of society. They were so separated from the concerns of the world that absolutely nothing shook them, in an era of American history (the Depression) in which literally every foundation of society was on the verge of being shaken to death. They didn’t scoff at danger or social patterns—they ignored them, and reduced their sets to chaos and rubble (a perfect example: An angry mafia boss aims a gun at Groucho, and Groucho exclaims, “Oh, is that what Santa brought you for Christmas? I got a fire engine!”). They were “pure loons, creatures from some other world, and this distance gave them powerful privileges” (Mast, 282). Certainly plotlines were present in their films, but they only existed to stabilize their own, lawless agenda: The Brothers moved through the six movies (five feature films and one short subject) unaware and unhinged by the plot lines, thumbing their noses at establishment and—to our delight—getting away with it. I am reminded of the famous passage from Shakespeare’s King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport” (IV.i.42-3). In the Paramount films, the Marx Brothers were the gods, and costars and storylines were their sport.

 

            Duck Soup was their last film for Paramount, released in 1933, and it is considered by many to be their last great, consistent example of their brilliance. Through the lens of a post-9/11, American society, much of it rings even more familiar today than it did for its Depression-era audience. The plot concerns the utterly ridiculous policies of the new, irreverent leader of the mystical kingdom of Freedonia, Rufus T. Firefly, and his insistence, despite all logical objections, that his country go to war with the neighboring country of Sylvania. He eschews (or, rather, loudly scoffs at) all attempts at diplomacy, and insists on a violent conflict for seemingly no other reason than he has “already paid a month’s rent of the battlefield.” Harpo and Chico are spies for Sylvania named Pinky and Baravelli, though they are secretly working for Firefly as well (whether as double-agents or as simply spies is anyone’s guess). At one point, Baravelli is on trial for treason against Freedonia, but his sentence is interrupted by Firefly’s declaration of war—and indeed, Firefly might have declared war for no other reason but to save Baravelli. Later on, when all four Marx Brothers are trapped in a besieged building, they play a variation of “Eeenie Meenie Minnie Moe” to determine which one of them will risk getting killed to go for help (“We did it wrong,” Baravelli complains when it first lands on him). Firefly eventually tells the chosen brother, “You're a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you're out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we'll be in be in here thinking what a sucker you are.” Does any of this seem familiar to an American audience who no doubt read about the further complications of an ongoing, controversial war against Iraq in their newspaper this morning?

            I’ll confess, I am revealing the knee-jerk liberal bias in me by paralleling Firefly’s administration (his brothers) and the Busheviks. But aren’t these parallels unavoidable in such a time as these? What, after all, do we make of lines like, “Until the judgment day, we’ll rally round the flag,” sung by Freedonia’s House of Representatives as the Four Marx Brothers lead them in a battle song? Can we simply stop at Groucho’s declaration that it was all just for laughs? I’m not sure that we could even if we wanted to. Or what about Groucho and Chico’s battle tactics, which are designed to be as cost-efficient as possible? Consider:

            “I think we need a standing army, because then we can save money on chairs.”

And later:

“Dig trenches, with our men being killed off like flies? There isn’t time to dig  trenches. We’ll have to buy them ready made. Run out and get some trenches. Wait a minute: [gestures to his chin] Get them this high and our soldiers won’t need any pants. Wait a minute: [gestures over his head] Get them this high, and we won’t need any soldiers.”

After watching the documentary Gunner’s Palace and reflecting on the scenes in which American soldiers in Iraq reveal the utter worthlessness of their cheaply-made battle armor, some of Groucho and Chico’s logic sounds downright Rumsfeltian. Perhaps it is a coincidence, or perhaps it is the Brothers’ own perceptiveness as great American comedians that inadvertently makes Duck Soup seem like such a prophecy of our times.

            One truth remains certain: The Marxes taking on America and declaring war on the world was inevitable. Looking circumspectly at all of their previous Paramount films, we see that they all seemed to be leading up to the Brothers’ final dismantling of global politics. Their path of destruction began with the hotel business in The Cocoanuts, continued onto summer parties, the arts, and high society in Animal Crackers, the mafia and ocean voyages in Monkey Business, Vaudeville and Broadway in The House that Shadows Built, a post-secondary educational establishment and prohibition in Horse Feathers, and, at last, the entire world in Duck Soup. If filmgoers of the 1930s didn’t see the progression coming, they probably weren’t paying attention.

            The ongoing theme throughout these early films always included the Brothers crashing high society with their anarchic gags and biting insults, but if we look carefully, we see that they really made no distinction between the rich and the poor. They lampooned both with equal fervor; the difference seems to be that the rich were more prone to take notice and get offended. The Brothers’ utter chaos and its particular effect on high society could be seen as a metaphor for the Depression itself: Tough on everyone, but particularly terrifying to those who had more to lose from its consequences. 

         As a spectator in this generation, I know but cannot relate to how the audiences of 1933 reacted to Duck Soup. At the time of its release, the First World War was over and the second one was the farthest thought from the American public’s minds, so the picture must have seemed more archaic and slapstick than reflective and prophetic. Mussolini banned the film in Italy, much to the Marx Brothers’ delight; this fact is certainly insightful to the underlining themes found in the picture, even though it was a critical and commercial flop when initially released in the States. Yet today, the film is rightfully considered the best of the Marx Brothers’ comedies. Viewed through our generation’s eyes, it also comes across as the darkest, and perhaps the bleakest of their films—on par with other war comedies like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, only slightly more unnerving in that Duck Soup doesn’t seem to seem to realize that it is anything more than innocent fluff.

            The exact success of the Marx Brothers, sans their general devil-may-care attitude that they projected on the screen, is mainly attributed to four distinct comedic personalities that stand on their own as comedians yet, when combined, result in inspired foils for one another (as proved by how unsuccessful their later films and radio shows, which split them up, were in comparison). Gerald Mast notes that with four central characters competing for screen time, the only solution was to “[capitalize] on diversity … through multiplicity and addition rather than unity” (282). He continues,

Each of the brothers had his distinct style—Groucho’s brazenly nasty double-talk, Chico’s artfully stupid malapropisms, Harpo’s startlingly physical horseplay, Zeppo as the cliché of the straight man and juvenile, the bland, wooden espouser of sentiments that seem to exist only in the world of sound stage. The Marx Brothers’ Paramounts added up these four kinds of human comedy, …  plus the central parodic idea of the films, plus the individual pieces of the of the intellectual and visual  parody. (282)

The resulting six comedies, which finally came to a head with Duck Soup as they both literally and metaphorically declared war on civilization, were successful blends of these comic personalities that generated a unique type of chaotic comedy that is often imitated yet seldom rivaled. As Roger Ebert notes, “How much more anarchic the Marx Brothers must have seemed in their time than we can understand today. They were among the first to evoke that tone; you can see who the Marx Brothers inspired, but not who they were inspired by, except indirectly by the rich traditions of music hall, vaudeville and Yiddish comedy that nurtured them” (2). If the Marx Brothers lose any of their impact for today’s audiences, it is because we live in an era that has already produced Monty Python, The Animaniacs, South Park, and the Coen Brothers (whose comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou is intended as a modern-day twist of the Marx Brothers’ personas; Groucho: George Clooney, Chico: John Turturro, Harpo: Tim Blake Nelson, Zeppo: Chris Thomas King). For as much as they are loved, these groups couldn’t exist without the Marx Brothers’ definitive precedence; nevertheless, even as their work is replicated for modern audiences, the Marxes still resonate, as the prophetic qualities of Duck Soup and their obvious influence over comedy reveal (even South Park follows the same rule of four main characters that the Brothers established; could Cartman, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny be the Marx Brothers of the Me-Generation?).

            And of course, being real-life brothers, they all shared a natural chemistry. Three key relationships between the individual Marx Brothers shape their comedic strategy, not counting when the four of them are onstage together: Groucho/Chico, Chico/Harpo, and Groucho/Zeppo (you could also make the case for Groucho/Margarent Dumont, a comic foil who appeared as Groucho’s romantic interest in seven films, but as a non-Brother, she was never in on the joke and therefore serves more as the Brothers’ ultimate victim than their collaborator). Their Paramount films follow a type of formula that is based around the above relationships: The pictures play as a series of interactions in these combinations for their first two acts, and they conclude with the four Brothers coming together and finally shattering the house of cards that they have carefully picked at in pairs throughout the previous scenes. Why these particular combinations work so well is difficult to say, except that the Brothers’ distinct comedic styles create better chemistry in certain combinations than in others. Groucho and Harpo share one of the great, silent comedic sequences in Duck Soup (the famous “mirror” sequence, an homage to silent comedy), but it is an exception to the rule—more of an island unto itself than a furtherance of the Brothers’ established anarchical rules.

            The Harpo-Chico combination is probably the most obvious: They are simply great foils for one another. One talks too little, the other talks too much. Harpo is a silent clown who is neither concerned with the films’ plots or the other characters (the other Brothers aren’t either, but they at least pretend to be concerned in order to establish their own, dysfunctional agenda), and Chico is a fast-talking, Italian swindler who likes to hear himself ramble. Like all great comedy pairs, they are the polar opposite of one another, and I suspect that Harpo ultimately sticks to Chico because he enjoys vexing the Italian by pretending that he doesn’t understand what’s going on around them. Yet Harpo is smarter than he pretends to be: The man can play a harp—certainly no small feat. Furthermore, Harpo is ultimately responsible for reducing the films’ villains to shambles by simply toying with them until their patience ends and their sanity flees. Chico is merely along for the ride, and he honestly thinks that the villains’ plight has something to do with his (worthless) instruction to Harpo. The joke, then, is ultimately on Chico, who believes that he has to keep Harpo around because the silent clown would be utterly helpless without him. Harpo knows that it’s the other way around but keeps it to himself, and their scenes together are therefore sort of touching in the way they play out.

            Groucho will always be the leader of the Brothers, or he is at least placed in that position in their films, and his interactions with Chico become an opportunity for Groucho to reach the level of exasperation that he dishes out to other people. Groucho can take it in as much as he dishes out, but then, so can Chico, and this is why their joint scenes are so brilliant. No one bites like Groucho, who insults, belittles, and downright angers everyone in equal measure (“I have a good mind to join a club so I can beat you over the head with it.”). What’s essential about Chico, as the rebel whose opportunistic tendencies rivals Groucho’s, is that he bites Groucho back. Their interactions are like battles of wits in which Groucho tries his darndest to get the upper hand over Chico, who responds by producing a pun or a tongue-twister that leaves Groucho scrambling to one-up Chico again (example from The Cocoanuts—Groucho: “Now, here is the viaduct leading over to the mainland.” Chico: “Why a duck?” The tongue-twisting lasts for a solid five minutes before Groucho gives up). We have a feeling that their conversations would last forever if Harpo or someone else didn’t run in and interrupt them.

            Zeppo, that great comic parody of the schleppy juvenile role of the 1920s/30s musicals, has a very limited role in Duck Soup as Bob Roland, Firefly’s personal secretary and advisor, but he has at least two key scenes in which he instigates perhaps the most chilling moments of any Marx Brother film. The first comes when his outwardly sappy character quietly councils a game Firefly to insult the ambassador of Sylvania and instigate war; the second features Firefly firing his machine gun out of window at incoming soldiers, and when Roland advises Firefly that he is “shooting his own men,” he is afterwards quick to passively accept Firefly’s bribe of money not to tell anyone about the tragic misunderstanding. Zeppo’s onscreen relationship with Groucho has always been tricky to ascertain; Zeppo is generally Groucho’s aloof secretary in their films, but he is seemingly capable of reducing Groucho to stunned silence with simple, plain-English rebuttals (see Animal Crackers) when Chico’s snappy comebacks only fuel Groucho’s insults all the more. Duck Soup explores their relationship in more depth than any of the other films by plainly revealing how influential the soft-spoken Zeppo is over the madcap Groucho: Bob Roland alone suggests the war, and we have the feeling that only Bob could convince Firefly to back down (I would tell you what a quiet advisor influencing a man-child prime minister reminds me of, except I don’t want to insult your intelligence). Zeppo’s parts are usually small, but he performs exactly what is required of him as an outwardly wooden fellow who is incapable of being rattled by a man whose business is to rattle.

            These relationships come to a head as, once Firefly has declared war, all four brothers find themselves trapped in a fragile shack, surrounded by the enemy. The final act of Duck Soup has rightfully been called the funniest of all of cinema and has been interpreted and analyzed by countless critics and Marx enthusiasts as thus; nevertheless, I must refer back to my previous thesis that viewed today, there is also an immense sadness to the film’s closing moments. Duck Soup is the type of film that has tapped into our collective consciousness by peering into the workings of topics that are never far from our current events—war, politics, government stupidity, and greed. It’s probably impossible to know how this film will resonate with audiences in fifty, even one hundred years from now, but we can almost certainly say that it will resonate. As for today, let me break the rules of criticism and give away just one punch-line in the film: The Brothers are trapped in a shack. The war rages outside. They are surrounded by the enemy, and everything seems lost. Zeppo comments that they are low on ammunition, and they need help fast. Harpo smiles, honks his horn, pulls a sign from his trenchcoat and hangs it outside on the front door. We read the sign: “Help Wanted.”

            For the Marx Brothers, help does come. Today, we are fighting a war in which we are surrounded by an enemy that has us helplessly trapped, and the rest of the world has notified us that help is not on the way. I cannot help but watch this scene and think of another Shakespeare tragedy, Titus Andronicus. In this play, the hero, having earlier murdered his own child, has just witnessed the slaughter of his two favorite sons, and simultaneously has learned of the banishment of another son. As this information reaches him, he cradles his weeping daughter who has just been ravaged and mutilated. He sits among the ruins of his life, and all he can do is laugh loudly, heartily. His reason: “I have not another tear to shed” (III.i.125). It seems that we chortle at Duck Soup today under similar motivations. I hope we can someday reach the point that we appreciate the film simply because it shows four Jews trying to get a laugh.

Works Cited:

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. 127-86.

Duck Digest, The. “The Marx Brothers on Horseback Salad.” 78.1 (13 Feb. 2000): 47

Duck Soup [motion picture]. Starring Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo Marx. Directed
by Leo McCarey. Paramount, 1933.

Ebert, Roger. “The Great Movies: Duck Soup.” Chicago Sun-Times. 9 Jan, 2000.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20000709/REVIEWS08/7090301/1023

Internet Movie Database (imdb.com). “Trivia for Duck Soup.”              http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023969/trivia

Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies (2nd Ed.). Chicago: University
of Chicago, 1979.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Washington: Square Press, 2004.

Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus.  New York: Pelican, 2000.

Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com