The Comic World of the Marx Brothers' Movies: "Anything Further Farther?"Maurice Charney
About the Author:
Maurice Charney is a Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. Although retired, he teaches both at Rutgers and the New School in New York. He is a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America and the Academy of Literary Studies. He is also a recipient of the medal of the city of Tours in France and was a Fulbright Professor in France at the universities of Bordeaux and Nancy, 1960-61. Maurice Charney has written widely on Shakespeare and the theory and practice of comedy, including Comedy High and Low (1978) and Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide (2005).
The Comic World of the Marx Brothers’ Movies: “Anything Further Farther?” is the first book to consider the Marx Brothers in the context of comic theory and practice. It includes a gag analysis of three famous scenes: the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera, the mirror scene in Duck Soup, and the “tootsie-frootsie” ice cream scene in A Day at the Races. The book considers, in detail, the verbal and nonverbal humor of all fifteen of the Marx Brothers’ movies. A final chapter looks at the Marx Brothers’ movies in the context of other movies made at the same time. The Marx Brothers were friendly with almost all of the film comedians of the golden age of comedy in the 1930s. There is a great deal of imitation and parody. For example, Duck Soup in 1933 comes right after W. C. Field’s Million Dollar Legs (1932). By careful analysis of these classic films, both individually and in their context, The Comic World of the Marx Brothers’ Movies fills an academic void in comic theory and film study. ISBN 978-0-8386-4124-8
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