Marxist Rebellion.

• Author: Kurtz, Steve
• Position: Review

Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx, by Stefan Kanfer, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 465 pages, 530

Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers, by Simon Louvish, New York: St. Martin's Press, 471 pages, $25.95

Salvador Dali loved the Marx Brothers so much he wrote a screenplay for them. Called Giraffes on Horseback Salad, it was pure surrealism: mirrors with holes in them, musicians with roast chickens on their heads, Groucho ordering Harpo to round up dwarfs, Chico installing indoor rain, etc. Actually, artists and intellectuals have always been big fans.

George Bernard Shaw called them his favorite actors. T.S. Eliot wrote gushy fan mail. James Joyce refers to them (apparently) in Finnegans Wake.

At the same time, the Marx Brothers were popular with a mass audience. They were a top vaudeville act that eventually hit it big in Hollywood. You don't achieve that sort of popularity by being highbrow, and you certainly don't by performing scripts from Salvador Dali. So how did these brothers, growing up poor on the streets of New York in the 1890s, become internationally known comic characters who have made all types of people laugh for almost a century now?

Two new books, Stefan Kanfer's Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx and Simon Louvish's Monkey Business, attempt to answer this question. In doing so, they help explain the enduring appeal of the Marx Brothers. While most comic characters just try to fit in, here was a group tapping into the deeply American strain of anti-authoritarianism, expressing contempt for prestige and privilege, living by their own lights.

It is one of the great show biz stories of the 20th century. One by one, in the early 1900s, the brothers were pushed onto the stage by their mother, Minnie. First Julius (Groucho), then Milton (Gummo, who never appeared in their movies), then Adolph (Harpo), then Leonard (Chico), and finally Herbert (Zeppo). Starting as a musical act, they began to incorporate comedy and within a decade were one of the funniest, wildest turns in vaudeville.

They did dialect humor: Groucho had a German accent, Chico an Italian one, and Harpo an Irish brogue. Harpo eventually realized he was funnier saying nothing, and Groucho ditched his character after the Lusitania was torpedoed. Bit by bit, they developed the characters for which they would become famous: Groucho, the fast-talking con man with the loping walk; Chico, the amazingly dense Italian with larceny in his heart; and Harpo, the crazed mute who'd chase blondes and steal silverware. There was no master plan--if it got a laugh, they kept it in. Ultimately, they were able to transcend the crazy comedy tradition of vaudeville they started out in.

In 1922, following years on top, the Marx Brothers' careers were suddenly in jeopardy after they toured England without the official permission of the powerful Edward Albee, the vindictive head of the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit. The Marxes were saved, however, when Chico found a backer for a Broadway show. The brothers had doubts that they were ready for this venue, but when they opened the musical comedy revue I'll Say She Is in 1924, these veterans were discovered by the top newspaper critics. For the rest of the...