Monkey Business

Plot of a Marx Brothers movie: The brothers turn up in polite society and fuck with everyone. The End.

Admire the purity of that. It is different from simply wanting to make you laugh...at once more primitive and more shrewd. The Marx Brothers want anarchy.

The Three Stooges go for laughs. Buster Keaton and the Keystone Cops go for laughs and thrills. Chaplin goes for laughs and pathos. Each is lovable in their own way, for their buffoonery, daring, earnestness or innocence. The Marx Brothers are not lovable. They are loud, rude, mocking, aggressive, lecherous, and without any redeeming intentions except to steal your food and ruin your day. Harpo in particular is a real asshole.

A Marx Brothers comedy blitz entails a battery of sight gags, pun-infested wordplay and the inevitable perplexing harp interlude. Groucho has an inexplicable greasepaint mustache, Harpo is inexplicably mute, Chico is inexplicably Italian and Zeppo is inexplicably ordinary. It is utter chaos, neither consistently funny nor consistently nasty, building toward nothing but more chaos. All the brothers are rascals but only Harpo regularly crosses the line between being funny and being a dick. You sense a certain mean-spiritedness behind the clownish pantomime, the way children are cruel. Harpo's antics might at first seem excessive, but in fact he is the essential ingredient in the Marx cocktail of playfulness and hostility. Without him there is merely comedy, but with him the Brothers are a subversive, amoral hedonistic threat. Funny-be-damned.

Consider the fact that Rob Zombie's family of degenerate mass murderers in House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects take as aliases the various names of Groucho Marx characters.