The True Value of a Seven-Cent Nickle

Oh, Kim.

It’s one thing to like Funny Farm; it’s quite another not to like the Marx Brothers. That’s beyond my comprehension. I can understand going to bed early. I can see why people get married and listen to country music and vote Republican and eat vegetables and go to church. I can get my head around not smoking and not drinking and not sleeping around. I can even concede that not everyone is capable of smoking and drinking while they’re sleeping around. But I will never in a thousand years understand how someone could not love Groucho, Chico, and Harpo (Zeppo you can feel free not to love).

In our dreary age of ossified political opinion, lifeless pabulum gussied up to pass for social commentary, moribund TV moralists spouting off all the time about God and country and evolution, and “humorists” who mistake cultural references for wit and impersonation for satire, we could all learn a lesson from the Marx Brothers and George S. Kaufman.

See, the problem is that you, like so many others, think the Marx Brothers (and their scribe Mr. Kaufman) were only indulging in “clever wordplay” when they were twisting the English language into pretzels. But the truth is that they were, through the conscious and willful manipulation of language – and all the assumptions, prejudices, comforts, and delusions born out of language – thumbing their noses at every institution, authority figure, blowhard, convention, rule of logic, and bit of morality society hangs its hat on, that society depends on to keep everything, and everyone, in its proper place. When Groucho courts the wealthy dowager Mrs. Rittenhouse with the line “Every since I met you, I’ve swept you off my feet” or wraps up pompous art-dealer Mr. Chandler in a web of increasingly sticky lines of intellectually faulty, but elegantly constructed, logic, he’s not engaging in verbal trickery for verbal trickery’s sake; he’s using the tools of the upper class – small talk, courtship, pleasantries, hypocrisies, bureaucracies, plutocracies, various other –ocracies - as weapons against the upper class, not just to get revenge on them for the fact that they keep him and his kind out of their rarefied world, but to prove that in a universe where nothing is inherently sacred, where all our notions of value and worth are merely agreed upon, where authority is a complete illusion, the best way a man can gain his freedom is by roasting the standards and morals of society over an open fire.

Rules and expectations can only hold power over you as long as you grant them power. (Who said that? Immanuel Kant? Or was it Dean Martin?) And the doorway to freedom can only be opened once you’ve pulled down all the statues, questioned all the laws, denied every truism, flushed out all your inherited gobbledygook, and put dirty lyrics to all your favorite tunes. Mark Twain knew this; Lenny Bruce knew this; Socrates knew this; H.L. Mencken knew this; Dorothy Parker knew this; Friedrich Nietzsche knew this; and, sure as you’re born, George S. Kaufman knew it.

Kaufman was looking for freedom through language. And he found his mouthpieces in the Marx Brothers.

What more could any writer possibly want?

I’ll be back to talk Charlie in a while. In the meantime: