OF ALL THE comics throughout history who have created chaos to raise laughs, the Marx Brothers—Leonard “Chico” Marx (1887–1961), Adolph or Arthur “Harpo” Marx (1888–1964), Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx (1890–1977), Herbert “Zeppo” Marx (1901–1979), and the brothers’ manager, Milton “Gummo” Marx (1897–1977)—were the most dedicated, refined, and successful. And the most hardheaded. I once interviewed Groucho Marx for Associated-Rediffusion Television, in the old Studio 9 at the bottom of London’s Kingsway. Afterward we talked. I asked, “What makes comedy?” He answered, “Money.” He said, “Farce is always expensive, even on the stage. In movies it is very expensive because you need so many rehearsals to get the timing exactly right, and even then you need endless retakes. You have to shoot a hell of a lot of film to give the editors a chance. With big crews, at union rates, and perfectionist directors and editors, that means huge wage-bills. But then at the end you have a cinematic work of art which lasts for ever. It’s an investment. But the guys who control the industry now [1963] are not interested in long-term investment. Quick profit is what they want. We could not make a movie like A Night at the Opera now. Too expensive.”
Comedy is a form of physics. It is very “physical.” Chaos comedy proceeds according to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy principle. Entropy is a measure of the degree of disorder or randomness in the system. In chaos comedy human intervention accelerates entropy. You might say the Marx Brothers system is an antichaos theory: a study of complex systems whose behavior is highly sensitive to slight changes which provoke large consequences. Chaos cannot be created without order in the first place, since order, or zero entropy, begins the entire process of declension. For the Marx Brothers, order was represented by their mother, Minnie Marx, a professional showbiz booking manager, who taught her sons how to drive hard bargains, and how to force management to stick to them. They drove the hardest bargain with MGM in the history of the studio. The executive who conceded this was Irving Thalberg, but the strength of the Marx Order Principle was so powerful that L. B. Mayer, the ultimate boss, endorsed the bargain, which gave the brothers 15 percent “off the top,” that is of gross profits. This gave the brothers a degree of financial security which enabled them to argue with MGM on equal terms about the financing of particular movies. Thus the budgets enabled them to create the chaos which eventually brought top box office returns and continues to do so. That in turn meant order in the accounts. Thus Marxian entropy went: order, disorder, order. Thalberg didn’t always see it that way. Groucho told me, “He’d call us and say, ‘What do you guys think you are doing? Do you think money grows on trees?’ I’d say, ‘Yessir. Money does grow on trees—MGM trees.’ “ If necessary they could subject Thalberg to chaos theory. Being orderly themselves when not on professional duty, they expected Thalberg to keep appointments to see them on time. If he kept them waiting, being himself chaotic when busy, they would blow cigar smoke under his door, pile filing cabinets against it, or, if he was late arriving, roast potatoes in his fireplace. No scientists were more adamant in following principles to the bitter entropic end.
The brothers employed some of the wittiest scriptwriters Hollywood could provide in its golden age, including George S. Kaufman, S. J. Perelman, and Bert Kalmar. But they wrote a lot of their own lines. Chico specialized in mispronunciation. Groucho (in The Cocoanuts): “We’re going to have an auction.” Chico: “I came over here on the Atlantic Auction.” Or, from A Night at the Opera, during the contract-signing scene, Chico says, “You can’t fool me. There ain’t no sanity clause” (Santa Claus). Groucho used this device too: “If you can’t leave in a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon you can leave in a minute and a huff” (half). Other Groucho lines: “I never forget a face but I’ll make an exception in your case.” “I’ve been around so long I can remember Doris Day before she became a virgin.” “Any man who says he can see through a woman is missing a lot.” “A man is as young as the woman he feels.” “My name isn’t Groucho. I’m breaking it in for a friend.” When excluded from a California beach club: “Since my daughter is half-Jewish, can she get in up to her knees?” Part of the business of creating chaos was the generation of a feeling of unease and approaching catastrophe. The Marx Brothers did this in various ways, each peculiar to its author. Harpo oscillated between his sexual maniac persona, making sudden grabs at the chorus girls, and his ecstatic master-musician harping, “putting on his Mozart-in-Heaven face.” Chico did his peculiar piano playing which he devised and perfected himself. Both Harpo’s harping and Chico’s piano playing were peculiarly offensive and unsettling to “proper” players. Groucho’s phony moustache and his sloping walk were also disturbing and produced an initial nervousness as a prelude to chaos making.
It was of the essence of Marx Brothers humor that, while generating unease, they claimed there was a conspiracy to unsettle them. Harpo claimed noise prevented him from practicing his harp each morning, then said, “This place is so quiet you can scarcely hear an anvil drop.” He smoked cigars, then quit; he gambled, then quit; he only drank alcohol once, didn’t like it, then quit; he quit speaking during performances, but operated inanimate objects to make his point. He could not remember names, and called everyone Benson: “Miss Benson,meet Mr. Benson.” It is a sure form of humor to make big things seem trivial. The Marx Brothers’ form was to make trivial things seem huge. Thus Groucho: “The next thing is, you’ll be asking me to lend you a match.”
An important part was played in their movies by the statuesque actress Margaret Dumont. She played the society benefactress whose wealth was an engine of the plot: tall, well mannered, dignified, and immobile, she stood for the principle of order. Groucho scurried around her, accompanied by his two destructive brothers, creating chaos, which drew from the lady’s shock, horror, distress, tolerance, and forgiveness. Then the cycle could begin again. She was needed, in order to be shocked. She was also needed to reassure the audience that all the destruction was playacting—property was not really being wrecked, and nobody was getting really hurt. Chaos comedy only works if those watching it feel safe in the knowledge that it’s just a story. But the chaos has to be filmed to look as real as possible to give the story power. Chaos humor requires verisimilitude.
The person who understood this best, in the silent movie era, was Buster Keaton. He went to considerable lengths, when in charge of his own work, to achieve absolute realism in his gags, especially the life-imperiling ones. He often took frightening risks, as when he had the wall of a house collapse around him, missing him with a calculated clearance of only two inches. A lot of his destruction-shots were also real. Thus, in The General, his greatest movie, a real train crashes through a real bridge. This single shot cost $40,000, the most expensive shot in the entire silent era. The General lost money when originally released, but is now regarded as a classic and a major work of art. Keaton’s insistence on expensive realism undermined his career, and led to his break with MGM. He was glad to get work with the up-and-coming Marx Brothers, devising gags for them and writing scripts. According to Groucho, he reinforced their conviction that imaginary chaos was funniest when it was most realistic.
The brothers made superb chaos scenes in Duck Soup and A Day at the Races. But their greatest piece of chaos art was the cabin scene in A Night at the Opera. This involved getting an enormous number of people, and things, into a small cabin onboard a transatlantic ship going to New York, all of them continuing to do their work as if nothing unusual was happening. This has claims to be considered the greatest item in the entire history of the cinema. Like most of the Marx Brothers’ best gags, this was an exercise in philosophical physics: in this case, logistics. What precisely the term conveys is open to dispute. French military theory insists it consists of three parts: strategy, tactics, and logistics. The third stands for everything to do with armies which come under the quartermaster—supplies, food, barracks, transport, etc. Hence modern transport firms claim they are “experts in logistics,” a word which features prominently in their advertising and promotion. But a narrower definition insists that the etymology of the word comes from the reign of Louis XIV in France. The maître de logis was the high official charged with the task of lodging the troops, or the itinerant court. Hence it means getting the largest number of people, or goods, into the smallest possible space, without killing or damaging them. The cabin scene is thus a brilliant display of logistics and the chaos comes to a natural and indeed scientific end when the door busts open and everyone (and everything) spills into the corridor. This illustrates the point in entropy when there is no alternative in physics to the big bang which created the universe. Of course the cabin scene, as Groucho explained to me, was very expensive, in both rehearsal and shooting time, let alone editing. “L. B. Mayer shouted at me, ‘What are you guys trying to prove?’ “ The true answer, of course, was one aspect of quantum theory. But Groucho did not know this at the time. Chaplin’s The Kid made Einstein cry. But that was sentiment. The Marx Brothers made him think. That was physics.
In Groucho’s moral universe (and all great comics have one), the destructive business of creating chaos was justified by its fascinating uncertainty—what the poet Keats called “negative capability.” But Groucho also had a strong moral principle, illustrated by his assertion that “I don’t want to belong to a club which would have me as a member.” He was making an important philosophical point, which robustly adds another dimension to the Marx Brothers’ chaos theory. It is arguable that the urge to perfection is exactly balanced by the consciousness of imperfection. Belonging to the perfect club is thus impossible to the altruistic. I think this is a logical conundrum invented by Bertrand Russell, and known as “the set of sets.” I am aware that Russell liked the Marx Brothers because he told me so. But he cannot have been aware of Groucho’s club problem while writing his Principia mathematica before the First World War. Does it matter? Groucho’s dilemma is a real one. It indicates the fact that the exploration of comedy takes one up to, and into, some of the deepest mysteries of existence.