This afternoon I watched the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup. I knew it was considered a classic, I'd seen it name-dropped a thousand times. It was time to find out what all the fuss was about.
Now the truth can be revealed.
The movie was made in 1933 and what was considered funny then is clearly not funny today. Example: On the back of the box cover, there is mention of the "famous sequences", like the lemonade stand. In this damn near interminable scene, two of the Brothers (Harpo and idiot Chico) torment a lemonade stand guy by taking his hat and switching it back and forth using some yawn-inducing sleight of hand. During these hat-swapping shenanigans, idiot Chico keeps lifting his leg so that the lemonade guy would unintentionally grab it. Funny? Sure, if you still think somebody making like they're gonna pass you something, only to snatch it away at the last moment, and repeating this 20 times, is funny.
Another "famous scene" was the mirror scene, where Groucho thinks he is looking in a mirror but really it is just another guy in the next room dressed the same and imitating his movements. I probably would have found this pure comedic genius when I was five years old, but watching it today, I groaned and checked the dvd display to see how much of this torture remained.
And idiot Chico, the mute Brother with the constant idiot grin and the bicycle horns jammed in his pants? Don't get me started. Too late. When the man was eating popcorn - are you ready for the comedic genius? - Chico slaps it out of his hands! And he sneakily cuts everything, like a guy is smoking a cigar and when he's not looking Chico snips half of it off. That's funny! No, it's not. But the guy turns around and Chico whips out his scissors and snips off the bottom of the guy's coat. That's gotta be funny! No, it's not, really, not if you watch it yourself and after it happens you find yourself not laughing. That must mean it was not funny. See, if something is funny, you laugh at it. But if it's not, you don't. You know how it works.
Maybe Duck Soup was funny in 1933. Maybe it was funny in 1953. Maybe some people still find it funny today. I scratch my head at that possibilty, and it is completely beyond my comprehension.
Duck Soup is the unfunniest comedy I have ever seen. A 66-minute torture session.
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4 comments:
I think you missed the point with Duck Soup. It was a classic in irreverence. Chaos of thought as a a way to criticize and minimize over-blown self importance.
Groucho said what we would hyave liked to have said. Harpo (the mute, not Chico) pulled the straw out of the stuff shirts.
The stunts were over long and childish. The process behind them was a tribute to to those that couldn't do what they wanted to anyone. It was a time of worldwide depression. The haves and have nots were miles apart and the Marx Brothers were great levellers.
The movie had relevance within the context of the times and it was a stinging condemnation of the mistreatment of those that suffered most.
Try to watch it without looking for the humour by 21st century definition. Try to understand millions out of work and soup kitchens and death by starvation in a land of plenty. Poverty, homelessness, abuse of systems and so on.
A 1933 version of today without the jaundiced eye with which we spear everything.
I hated the Marx Brothers but I loved what the movie had to say.
I didn't laugh either
What the ealier commentator said is true, but I don't think *that's* what makes "Duck Soup" funny, or even relevant. A similar, yet more obscure work from that year, "Diplomaniacs" is far more funny and piercing than "Duck Soup".
I'll admit, as the years go by, that a little bit of Chico and Harpo go an increasingly long way. But Groucho Marx . . . there's almost nothing i can say bad about him. He was such a brilliant, caustic, irreverent presence in film; a verbal gymnast the like of which is altogether rare in cinema or anywhere else. And his scenes with Margaret Dumont are some of the most sublime interplay betwen an actor and an actress there has ever been.
So I gues what I'm saying is, "Duck Soup" is a great film; just not the way everyone thinks it is.
Thanks for the comment. I have been schooled. You're right, I surely did miss the point. All I saw were the clumsy gags and slapstick. This is especially embarassing since I recently read Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which deals with the very themes you mention. Do I feel like an idiot? Yes.
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