The Comic World of the Marx Brothers' Movies: "Anything Further Father?"
Maurice Charney

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In the words of Groucho Marx's Professor Wagstaff, Charney's "proposition may be good, but let's have one thing understood...I'm against it." How else can one review this Shakespearean scholar's descriptive tour of the wacky movies of an anarchic, zany group of brothers? An affectionate, devoted, chatty and somewhat repetitive host, Charney (English, Rutgers Univ.) takes the reader on a personal tour de farce in visiting the topsy-turvy comic bits in about a dozen Marx Brothers movies and recounts the most hilarious moments in the corpus delicti of these former vaudevillians. This is truly pleasant recitation of the old jokes and sight gags of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, with a merry (Bergsonian even) comic analysis of celebrated sketches such as the stateroom #58 in A Night at the Opera and the mirror scene in Duck Soup. Charney reflects the comedy so well that one often laughs out loud in recollection. He not only catalogues puns and contemporaneous allusions but also records various curious moments of the brothers engaging cultural celebrities (e.g. T.S. Eliot, Salvador Dali). Reading this delightfully accessible book one wonders, "Why not a duck?" But now, I must be going. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-/upper-division undergraduates; general readers. --T. Lindvall, Virginia Wesleyan College, Choice, January 2008




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