The Marx Brothers: when comedy was REALLY comedy!

[Navy Chief]

Everyone has their favorite comics. The Marx Brothers were geniuses at it. Here is one of the best scenes from their movie, "Love Happy", featuring Chico Marx. The entire movie is filled with the usual Marx Bros. comedy. NC

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[HouseHobbit]

I enjoy seeing the Marx Brothers, in ALL the movies and comedy shorts they did..

And The Groucho Marx show during the 50's-60's was was really fun too..
I miss this type of fun comedy with a touch of "intelligence" that made one always say.
WOW!!
:applause: :applause: :applause:

[TARPSBird]

Groucho was a master of ad-lib comedy, much like Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams. If you watch clips of him as a guest of Dick Cavett or Johnny Carson, you stay cracked up through the whole interview. Bob Hope was another great ad-libber, as any of us vets who've seen his USO shows "un-edited" will confirm. :icon_lol:

[AndyG43]

I guess the one thing all the truly great early movie comedians shared was a backrgound in vaudeville (or music hall, as we know it over here); Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers. W.C. Fields ...... well, the list goes on. It gave them all the chance to hone their talent, and the very nature of the audiences would have made them great ad-libbers; if you couldn't think on your feet you were dead!! The criticism people make now when they see films by Chaplin, or the Marx Brothers, is that the humour is so corny, the jokes so old; the thing they are forgetting is that these jokes were invented by Chaplin et al, and have been endlessly imitated since, which shows the sheer power, genius and inventiveness of these first comics.

Bob Hope also came from vaudeville; personally, while I admire his craft & ability I never found him funny - but then we didn't have as much exposure to his live stuff, Carson, Cavett etc were never shown here.

Interesting that Robin Williams gets a mention. We have a whole new generation of comics now who have also had that solid training, via the comedy clubs (the successor to vaudeville?) and, in the States, SNL; so the likes of Richard Pryor, Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Mike Myers, Eddie Izzard etc already had that solid grounding before they made it onto film. Sadly their talent is often wasted, with the films being a lot less inventive than the classics; but that is probably more down to the studio executives playing safe than to the comedians themselves - Williams especially has been associated with some real dogs (Patch Adams!!!!), but his appearance on "In The Actors Studio" remains one of the funniest things I have ever seen (check it on Youtube, but be prepared to hurt yourself by laughinh so much). But look at something like the first Ghostbusters film, a true original, inventive, intelligent - it can still be done. At the moment some of the most innovative & intelligent comedy is coming from the small screen and from radio, on both sides of the Atlantic; over here we have had a succession of programmes over the years from Channel 4 (Desmonds, Father Ted, Spaced etc) and from the BBC (The Office, League of Gentlemen (initially on radio), Goodness Gracious Me (also radio first), The Mighty Boosh (ditto) - in the US you have an equally good track record, my particular favourite at the moment is Big Bang Theory, comedy really does get more intelligent than that!!

So comedy still is REALLY comedy; there is a lot of dross, but then there always was (Keystone Cops anyone?). But the comics of today are every bit as capable, intelligent, innovative and (potentially) dangerous; who knows, 50 years from now people may be looking back on this as a golden age?

[SSI01]

I don't know how up-to-date everyone is on classic comedy, but I would bet one of the most difficult comedy films to have ever made would have been "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" starring just about everyone who had been in comedy for the last 50 years (up to that point which was 1962). Can you imagine how difficult it would have been to keep a straight face while filming was going on? It wasn't that big a world in the comedy sphere in 1962 and these people all knew each other (many coming from vaudeville), which means the conversations that had to have occurred between takes must have been enlightening and revealing, besides being funny. There were a number of styles of delivery on display in the film, and to have a director get them all to mesh into something coherent must have been a difficult job; a whole cast full of "live wires." Silent star Buster Keaton starred in it, toward the end as the garage attendant. You even had an actor who could move comfortably between drama and comedy - Spencer Tracy. It was his last film - he was dying while he was making the film. Aviation was represented by Paul Mantz, who flew the Jenny as well as the Beech 18 that "crashed" the airport lounge at "Santa Rosita."

Can anyone find the Groucho clip that would be so appropriate right now here in the states, what with the budget battles and the presidential primaries - the professor saying "I'm Against It!"?

[SSI01]

I wanted to add this to the thread but didn't want to make the last post too long. My dad told me years ago that Milton Berle was so popular a comedian in television's early days he used to interfere with the running of the water supply around Detroit. I thought he was pulling my leg until I checked this out and found it was true, not just around Detroit but in cities across the country. He had such an audience draw that during show time, about a half-hour, no one would visit their kitchens for water for cooking or any other purpose; also folks put off their bathroom breaks until the show was over (remember, you couldn't take commercial potty breaks back then because the stars of the show did the commercials on-air, as part of the show itself - and sometimes ad-libbed the commercial for laughs). That meant the water works could count on a sudden spike in water usage precisely at the end of his show. Can you think of anyone who can do that today?

[Dain Arns]

Yep. I own just about every one of their movies on DVD.
The early stuff is the best work.

"A Night At The Opera" is probably the finest early movie Marx Bros. comedy of all time.

My two favorite scenes...

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