Groucho Marx by Lee Siegel

Author:Lee Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

Interlude: Words

For I am a Pirate King!

And it is, it is a glorious thing

To be a Pirate King!

—Pirates of Penzance

YOU MIGHT imagine the verbal young Julius talking and talking. No one listens to him. And so, in the manner of someone whose words go ignored, he begins to speak more and more outrageously, until everyone turns toward him.

Groucho loved the long stream of doggerel patter that often closed a vaudeville act. By around 1907, Minnie had satisfied herself that all her children with the exception of the youngest, Zeppo, were finished with their formal schooling, and she took them out on the vaudeville circuit, in 1916 moving the whole family to Chicago, where she worked as a small-time booking agent, representing mostly the Brothers. The Brothers began as the Nightingales, sometimes Three Nightingales—Julius and Milton (Gummo) and two other non–family members, who alternated from performance to performance—eventually becoming Four Nightingales once Harpo joined the act.

Their first real routine was a variation on vaudeville’s venerable old schoolroom shtick. They called it Fun in Hi Skule. It was no wonder the routine was, for a time, a smashing success. School had offered these ambitious immigrant children a way up and out of their impoverished circumstances. Leaving it was a special kind of anguish—and also a special kind of liberation—and the Brothers characteristically threw themselves into mocking and obliterating the one experience that might have guaranteed them a stable life.

Fun in Hi Skule was an efficient conversion of childhood wounds into adult vengeance. As one Marxian scholar puts it, “Harpo blacked out some teeth, put on a ratty red wig, and stuck a sand bucket over his head and he was Patsy Brannigan, the standard bumpkin. Groucho put on a German accent and became Mr. Green, the customary angry teacher.” That is to say, Harpo both became and comically obliterated the pair of Irish bullies who tormented him and literally threw him out of elementary school—they tossed him out of a second-floor window again and again. Groucho turned himself into the type of learned figure he emulated, and filled that figure up with the anger he felt over, among many other things, having to end his education in the seventh grade. Mr. Green also had a German accent, which gave Julius the opportunity to mock the way Minnie’s parents—Minnie, his eternal persecutor and eternal patron—spoke.

As was true of most vaudeville acts, Fun in Hi Skule’s routines reflected its audience’s everyday experience, and gave these experiences absurd little twists that lifted them out of the realm of the mundane into surprise, and thus comedy:

GROUCHO: Why were you late?

HARPO: My mother lost the lid off the stove, and I had to sit on it to keep the smoke in.

GROUCHO: If you had ten apples and you wanted to divide them among six people, what would you do?

HARPO: Make applesauce.

It is almost inevitable that the act closed in doggerel, where words blur and melt and lose their conventional meaning. In doggerel, words are reborn into a

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