Thinking of Anything Else

ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)
Starring Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo Marx, with Margaret Dumont
Directed by Victor Heerman
(97 minutes) B&W

Searching the middle for a beginning or an end…

Chico Marx noodles around on the piano during the party celebrating not only the return of Captain Geoffrey T. Spaulding (three chairs for him) but also the unveiling of Bogarde's famous painting, "After the Hunt." Chico, going here as musician Senor Ravelli (if we don't show up you can't afford us), and his fingers continue drinking in the sounds of the same bars over and over and over.

"I can't think of a finish," he finally says, though that does not stop his fingering the keys. "Funny, I can't think of anything else," says Groucho.

Butlers, ingénues, and other characters tell jokes, but the Marx Brothers live the jokes. Punch lines are not the point for them, in their repertoire they use fishing lines, instead -- casting out for bigger and better fish.

When Groucho cannot think of anything else, it is not a punch line it’s a clue to their humor: (supposedly not comedy attractive to women -- like the Three Stooges, or Abbot & Costello, it's a guy thing). And yes, there we find ourselves off on a different tangent but that is what makes the Marx Brothers to me.

Tangents, atypical roads take us unexpectedly to places for which we usually are not quite prepared; unexpected, yet also usually ingenious as is revealed upon multiple viewings of their work. You do not always know how they will finish, and often there is no satisfactory end, either because “The End” winds up a bust or because you do not want them to leave quite yet.

All of this high-faluting nonsense is to say, I find them very funny people. I hope you do, too.

Special note: Some of the Brothers' best words came from the mind of George S. Kaufman, whose website supplied the picture up top, and of whom you should read more about here.