The Humor of the Marx Brothers

THE HUMOR OF THE MARX BROTHERS Unlike the "insider" humor that defines much of American comedy today, says the author, the Marx Brothers perfected in their films a madcap "outsider" humor born of the immigrant experience. hat's your most common anxiety dream? Is it the dream where you're in a college classroom, sitting . down to take an exam for a course that you never attended? Or is it the one where you find yourselfuninvited and underdressed (maybe not dressed at all) at a gala reception? Or perhaps you dream that you're in a position of some responsibility-a doctor, a college president, a head of state, a performer-but you don't have any idea how to do what everyone around expects you to; you're a rank impostor. (This is my brand- I find myself onstage in a 13-odd-piece rock group, resembling the Band, plus some sitters-in, with a guitar in my hands and no clue, none.) These dreams go on like slow torture-you bungle along, quaking with humiliation, searching vainly for the red exit light.

But what ifinstead of suffering through the humiliation, you simply took the dream over? Suppose that you, maybe with the help of a couple of henchmen, shooed the imposing professor out of the exam room and began a lecture of your own bizarre devising, a loony parody of the course as you imagined it to be; or, finding yourself wearing the badge of office and surrounded by lackeys of various sorts, you set in and began to pilot the nation (hey, it's easier than you'd think) on toward sweet anarchy; or, dumbfounded at the door of an elegant party, decided to take the place by storm.

What you'd be doing if you could commandeer an anxiety dream this way is turning it into a Marx Brothers movie. In their best films, the Marx Brothers find themselves in a place where they emphatically don't belong-college classroom, society bash, front office.

They're the characters who have no business on the scene, the new people, the ultimate outsiders. But rather than wilting, they take the joint over. All that the other, accommodated characters have hidden beneath their bogus civility-greed, lust, desires of all sorts-the Marx Brothers suss out and parody forthwith. They grab a listless world by its expensive lapels and shake it up.

The Marx Brothers made their best movies in the late' 20s and the ,30s, during the Depression, a time in America when any of a number of people were compelled to see themselves as outcasts. The

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Marxes themselves started poor, growing up on the East Side of New York. As kids they were in vaudeville, pushed on by one of the most ferocious stage moms in history, Minnie Marx. From vaudeville they went to Broadway, then on to Hollywood, big success, bundles ofloot. In the beginning there were five of them in the act: Groucho, Harpo and Chico, the great ones, and also Gummo and Zeppo. Gummo was never in a movie. Zeppo, who played straight men and romantic leads, is one of the stiffest actors ever to face a camera, a walking two-by-four.

From the very beginning, Marx Brothers humor is what we might call outsider humor, the humor of the outcasts, the ones who aren't in the big plan. It's crucially American, as I see it, ours being, atleast in intention, the country where outsiders get an unprecedented and unequaled shot. We aspire to welcome unexpected wit for its powerto revitalize whatever status is quo. But if my intimations are right, the competing brand-call it insider humor, the humor of the ingroup-is our characteristic mode in America today ..Insider humor, the sort of thing that's epitomized by, say, TV host David Letterman, invites you to join a club composed of people likewise in the know, and to stop feeling like a bedraggled loner. In the mid'90s, a period of relative conformity, of other-direction (to borrow a term from sociologist David Riesman), we can probably use an extended hit of rebellious Marx Brothers humor.

In The Cocoanuts, their first film, released in 1929, the Marx Brothers start small, running amok in a Florida hotel; in Monkey Business (1931) it's a classy ocean liner, then Big Joe Helton's swank party; in Horse Feathers (1932) they commandeer a college; in Duck Soup (1933), an entire nation, Freedonia.

For sheer imperial nerve, though, there's little in their films to match the big entrance scene of the 1930 Animal Crackers.

Groucho plays Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding, the famous African explorer (who probably has never been to Africa), and in his open-' ing sequence he's borne into Mrs. Rittenhouse's mansion on a litter; supposedly they've carried him all the way from the jungle.

Groucho, in high form-frock coat, grease-painted mustache, dancing eyebrows and runaway crouch, with authentic Livingstone-I-presume pith helmet added for the role-disembarks and begins to dicker with the chieflitter bearer about the fare.

"What? From Africa to here, a dollar eighty-five? I told you not to take me through Australia. It's all chopped up. You should have come right up the Lincoln Boulevard."

But Groucho can't rest content with simply abusing the help. Soon he turns on the hostess, played expertly by Margaret Dumont, and on her Long Island manor. "It is indeed an honor to welcome you to my

poor home," says Mrs. Rittenhouse. "Oh, it isn't so bad," says Groucho. But he can't bear the amenities for 10ng-ifGroucho tried to blend in, he'd be quickly recognized for the fraud he is. The only defense is offense. "Wait a minute. I think you're right. It is pretty bad.

As a matter offact, it's one ofthe frowziest-looking joints I've ever seen ....you letthis place run down, and what's the result? You're not getting the class of people you used to." A possible slip-maybe Mrs. Rittenhouse will apply the remark to him. So attack! "Why, you've got people here that look like you. Now I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll put up a sign outside: Placed Under New Management. We'll set up a 75-cent meal that will knock their eyes out. After we knock their eyes out, wecan charge anything we want."

Then, having the enemy on the run, Groucho flourishes paper: "Now sign here and give me a check for 1,500 dollars." roucho keeps addressing the company as though they're like him-shysters interested in money, sex and getting on in the world. And aren't they? By the time he goes into his marvelous song and dance-"Hooray for Captain Spaulding the African explorer," runs the chorus-he's got everyone so cowed and entertained that he can call himself a "schnorrer" (Yiddish for sponger-hustler) and no one has the wherewithal to catch the affront and toss him back onto the street.

Groucho shows that the most satisfying way to take over the social anxiety dream is not only to run amok through it but to tell the assembly exactly what you're doing to them.

Then on come Harpo and Chico, and Mrs. Rittenhouse's problems compound. Chico arrives first, announced as Signor Emanuel Ravelli, musician. Chico's a clown, with peaked cloth

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In one of the most hilarious scenes in American cinema, hordes of people including the Marx Brothers crowd into a ship s tiny stateroom in the 1935 film A Night at the Opera.

cap, the sort of thing that, decked with flowers, appears on cartpulling donkeys; h~'s got bristly hair, blunt features, a suspicious peasant's kisser. Chico is aggressively, militantly ignorant. He knows nothing but that he's right. Whatever he wants, he should have it, now. His persona is bullish, self-interested, obtuse; he's the archetypal low- Taurus from offthe astrology charts. He's perpetually vehement, surging on, head forward, arms in action, as though hauling the weight of his own dense spirit. And yet, strangely enough, Chico is remarkably appealing. He can't be daunted; slammed again and again to the mat, he pops up grinning, ready for another go.

Groucho serves. "What do you fellows get an hour?" "For playing," Chico replies, "we get 10 dollars an hour." "I see. What do you get for not playing?" "Twelve dollars an hour," Chico says. Then the conversation goes down the rabbit hole. Chico continues: "Now for rehearsing we make special rates. That's-a 15 dollars an hour."

"And what do you get," Groucho asks, "for not rehearsing?" "You couldn't afford it. You see, if we don't rehearse, we don't-a play.

And if we don't -a play, that runs into money."

A minute later, Harpo comes in. ("The gate swung open and a fig newton entered," says Groucho.) He's announced as "the Professor." Harpo is part baby, part raw anarchist; he's a sweet satyr with his smooth, guileless face, curly wig (red) and popped eyes. He's an infant: etymologically, one who never speaks. His honking horn is a baby's toy, akin to a rattle, but also sometimes a

squawking phallus. Harpo is an accomplished klepto: the trickster, Hermes, come to earth; shake him and the house silver falls out. He steals wallets, ties, handkerchiefs. When he's playing a wacko bridge game with Chico and two polished ladies, the camera pans back to reveal him wearing one of the women's high heels. From Abie the fish man, Harpo steals a birthmark.

Harpo loves to relax. He has a charming habit of smoothly hoisting his leg up onto any unsuspecting arm; he naps with the serene righteousness of a cat. Adoring blondes and sleep, he reaches apotheosis at the end of Animal Crackers, spritzing himself with a soporific and falling off into dreamland in the arms of a beautiful woman. nall the Marx Brothers' films, Harpo represents sweet anarchy-an angel stroking his harp with thick hands, and a demon at war with all civilization. When he angrily balls up a telegram, Chico explains, "He gets mad because he can't read." Harpo tears up mail, eats a thermometer like a candy cane, burns books, drinks ink, uses pens for darts-perpetrates aggression against all culture. Signs of complexity can bring on his most sublimely disgusted expression, the Gookie: bulging cheeks, bared teeth, outraged eyes. He speaks to everyone's urge for regression to infantile bliss (and infantile furor), just as Chico speaks to our rancor against every baffling social form.

Chico and Harpo are a ferocious tag team; their greatest moment of collaborative mayhem perhaps comes in Duck Soup. The boys are spies, reporting to Trentino, leading statesman of Sylvania. (Groucho, as Rufus T. Firefly, is Trentino's opposite number in Freedonia.) Trentino, tall, elegant, with a whisper of a mustache and fine- fitting clothes, is the perfect social antithesis to everything Marxian. Harpo and Chico hit him like a couple of daffy sharks. By the time the encounter is over, Trentino's coat-

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Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo gave yet another memorable performance of their madcap humor in Duck Soup. In the 1933 movie, the Marx Brothers commandeered a mythical kingdom, Freedonia.

tails have been cut off, his hair has been snipped, newspaper is glued to the seat of his pants, and his fingers are jammed in a mousetrap. The moment of greatest beauty transpires when Trentino asks his spies to give him Groucho's record. Harpo pulls out a phonograph r.ecording and hands it to Trentino, who hollers, "No, no!" and sends it flying over his shoulder. From nowhere Harpo flourishes a pistol and fires, breaking the record as though it were skeet; in a blink, Chico hits a bell ("And the boy gets-a cigar") on the desk and hands Harpo the promised stogy. Then Chico slams the humidor closed on Trentino 's fingers.

Trentino is a male version of flustered, Junoesque Mrs. Rittenhouse. Tall and rather stately, both are waxwork monarchs of propriety. But of course when the Marx Brothers attack in every sense from below, there's very little that the sort of person who relies on the well-timed, cutting remark and the dismissive glance. can do. The Marxes just don't accept those signals; they barel y register them. Trentino and Mrs. Rittenhouse hate pleasure; they're Puritans in H.L. Mencken's sense, always beset by the fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time. Harpo and Chico, outsiders in love with ease and rough bliss, have no mercy on them.

But of course, the Marxes aren't just generic outsiders-they're outsiders of a certain sort. They're immigrants; they're just off the boat. Groucho is the grand Jewish schnorrer, fast-talking, greedy, exuberant. Chico is the dumb Italian. (Harpo is from Mars.)

Rather than trying to disguise their immigrant status, rather than trying to pass, Groucho and Chico crank the volume way up.

They're immigrants to the nth degree. Message:- Even at our stereotypical worst, as you in-group types imagine it to be, we're

still more vital and amusing than anyone else around.

At one point in The Cocoanuts, the "quality," as Mark Twain called them, are getting down on Harpo. He's been a bad boy.

Someone says he's a bum. Harpo bobs his head and mouths the word bum, then bum, bum, bum, bum; Chico joins in. A melody begins to form. Harpo whips out a flute; Chico begins to solo on a nonexistent drum; then Groucho flourishes his handkerchief and wraps it across his forehead like a bandage and turns his cigar likewise to a flute. In a second they're marching off, playing a fife-and-drum ditty out of the American Revolution, three brave colonials on the march. Bums indeed. Witty and exuberant, the newcomer Marx Brothers are, in the best sense, original Americans.

The brothers aren't al ways kind in reminding all and sundry that America is, or ought to be, an immigrant nation. In Animal Crackers, Chico and Harpo recognize one of the invited plutocrats, now going under the name Mr. Roscoe W. Chandler, as a former fish peddler from Czechoslovakia, one of their own. "Hey, you're Abie the fish man." They tell him that unless he pays up, they're going to expose him. Abie equivocates, hems and haws, and there follows a vintage schoolyard teasing, with the two brothers marching around the victim, Chico chanting "Abie the fish man, Abie the fish man, Abie the fish man," Harpo whistling insanely, all to the poor man's raw consternation. The egalitarian wars aren't always cleanly fought. Outsiders, immigrants, parvenus, the Marxes speak up for the ones on the other side of the door, but the ones who, they insist, need to be inside if the party is going to be worth attending, if collective life is going to be something more appealing than a protracted anxiety dream.

What does it mean to say that the scene the Marxes intervene on is usually an anxiety dream? The setup in Trentino's office is familiar enough: The boys have been called on the carpet. The boss is going to give them hell. Such things happen to us all, of course, but when events like this begin to dominate our dreams and daylight fantasies, it probably means that we've invested too much authority in society, not enough in ourselves. We feel inadequate before the gaze of the social collective, the Big Other (Big Brother's younger, less overtly potent sibling) out there.

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utsider humor comes along with the intent oflifting our anxiety, at least for a while. It reminds us that society can get too strong, too imperial in its sway over its members. Outsider humor reasseits the right to individual happiness; it comes out for simple good times, for play. And it shows us that social fqrms can be rejuvenated, made more conducive to real satisfaction. Outsider humor can also remind us that those who apparently live to promote conformity are sometimes victimized by it; it asks us to feel a little compassion for them, too.

Perhaps we can get a clearer view of outsider humor by comparingittoits opposite form, the humor of the in-group.

The insider joke asks the audience to join in a consensus, to get with a community that's in the know. Sometimes insider humor asks us to form that community by laughing at another person or group. Take the example of the man who, heading up the gallows steps on Monday morning, says, "This is a fine way to begin the

week." What the man is doing is seeing himselffrom the perspective of the world at large, with all its teeming affairs. From that vantage, the life of an individual-especially a criminal-doesn't look very important. If you see things from the position of society overall, one life more or less, one more tragedy or farce in the midst of millions of other stories, doesn't add up to a whole lot.

In the execution joke, the speaker is asking us to laugh at him, but most of the time insider humor points outward, getting the audience to laugh at someone or something else. Every Polish, Jewish, woman or whatever joke is an attempt at insider humor.

Insider humor can have broadly humanizing effects. In his blackly funny Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift asks his readers to form a community of revulsion against the way that England is treating the Irish. It's a community that's open to any thoughtful English person, as well as to Swift's Irish countrymen.

Outsider humor can turn into sheer anarchic malice, a rage against all that exists, just because it exists. In African-American comics like Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, for example, there's a rancor against the world, and especially the white world,

that could never, one feels, be appeased. Murphy and Lawrence are both strong talents, but unlike their great predecessor Richard Pryor (and unlike Groucho), their humor is almost purely aggressive; they fire out against the world, but rarely if ever turn their eyes back on themselves. So Roseanne (in her recent manifestations) and Andrew Dice Clay turn vehemently against their top opponents-men (for Roseanne), gays and women (for Clay)-as though their simple existence were an affront to nature. There's nothing they could ever do to reform.

But if our outsider humor often devolves into antagonistic rancor, much of our insider humor has become smug, reflexive jeering at anything that's new or that threatens stability. David Letterman, gifted comic that he is, seems to me often to illustrate some of the less appealing sides of the insider sensibility.

Letterman is knowingness incarnate. Nothing surprises him. He presides over his show as though he were watching and commenting

on a rerun rather than experiencing it in the present tense.

Whatever comes along, he's seen it before.

In general, two kinds of guests appear on Letterman's show: the celebrities who banter with Dave in equally ironic, equally empty terms, and the plebes, who are the objects of ridicule. First the plebes were featured accompanying their pets in the Stupid Pet Trick sequences: Dog attacks vacuum cleaner, owner cheers absurdly, etc. But then the show took a sophisticated step forwardand found its essence-when Stupid Pet Tricks morphed into Stupid Human Tricks.

On comes Scott from West Chester, Pennsylvania. A hotdog salesman by day and bartender by night, Scott has brought an electric fan with him. What will he do with it? What else? He'll stop its rotation with his tongue. Scott has a big tongue, a potent one too, as we see when he sticks it way out and forces it against a whizzing fan blade. Fan freezes, Scott's tongue pressed grotesquely against it, looking like fresh beef liver. Letterman gives his boyish hateful look, part gap-toothed Tom Sawyer, part Ranthar King of the Fire Lizards: "Nice of Scott to drop by and make us all sick." Poor Scott.

But there's no escape. Of the top 10 reasons proffered for watching Letterman on one of the show's Top 10 Lists, number 10 is this: "When you're not watching the show, we're making fun of you. " Much of the show's interest revolves around testing Dave's cool. Madonna hit him with a few dirty words, and succeeded, it seemed, in startling the guru into full wakefulness for a moment or two. The show went to England, which is to low-key hip what India is to spirituality, and it brought on Dave's mom. Can Dave continue to be laid back even as his mother reveals childhood secrets? (Tune in.)

So, too, the inveterate Letterman viewer can learn to survive all sorts of encounters without doing the one thing likely to sink you in current professional culture, the sort of culture the Marxes would assault forthwith: showing naked emotion, making Dave ashamed of you. Like Dave, you can learn to greet any expression of enthusiasm, excitement for a new idea, a fresh way of doing things, a new vision, with the laid-back contempt that it surely deserves. Johnny Carson, Letterman's predecessor, somehow combined an in-group temperament with generous curiosity. "Is that right? I did not know that," he liked to say, sometimes ironically, often not. Letterman knows everything; Letterman is never curious.

Letterman partakes of the spirit that presides over that distinctly insider form, the TV sitcom. As the Olympian gods looked down on the doings of puny mortals, so we're invited to look down on the players on sitcom TV. They have so many problems. And they're always so agitated. They're obsessives. Why can't they relax and see that it's all no big deal? Why can 'tthey be cool, like us? The sitcom teaches detachment, superiority. It's an insider humor that lets us feel in control ofthe world. Oh, what fools these mortals be.

And in America now, insider humor seems to be ascendant. To read American newspapers and magazines, there are only two important comics currently at work, Len.o and Letterman. Letterman is the ultimate insider; Leno the lovable, sloppy St. Bernard, always looking for a reassuring pat from his audience. In return he provides his predictable run of jokes. Nightly, he turns the political

Ultimate outsiders: the Marx Brothers shake it up in Animal Crackers, a 1930film.

complexities of the day into waggish tales about inept, venal officials to whom we can all condescend. .

In a time of widespread social anxiety, when every value seems, to some, to be up for grabs, it's not surprising that we gravitate to Leno's and Letterman's assurances-not surprising, but not gratifying, either. A great insider humorist like Swift demanded of his audience that they rise to join a group that could see the world in more enlightened terms. Our insider humor, as exemplified by Leno and Letterman, reassures us that we're fine just as we are, no need to change, no need to grow.

Is a cigar ever just a cigar? I doubt it. Surely David Letterman's and Groucho's cigars transcend all literal meanings. Dave wields his ironically; he grins at himself for being the sort of person who would end up holding such a thing, the scepter of lord high gangsters and big businessmen. But wield it he does, and the grin of self-knowingness only enhances the power effect. Rank him out about the cigar; he's got a dozen comebacks in the mental files.

Groucho smokes twofers (as in two for a nickel) and bums them whenever possible. Groucho's cigar, which doubles occasionally as sword trumpet, often as mock phallus, is the mark ofGroucho's status as ambivalent enemy of the world as it is. Groucho is attracted to power; he wants to wield the magic wand. But at the same time he righteously detests all authority and status, detests what he also, in some measure, wants. Groucho, to get to his most famous line, doesn;t wish to join the sort of club that would accept the likes of him as a member-but he does want to be invited to join. (When he was rejected from a California swim club for being Jewish, Groucho asked if his daughter Miriam, who was halfJewish, could go in the water up to her knees.)

Of the three brothers, Groucho is by far the most complex. And it is his presence that makes the Marx Brothers more than just outsider humorists, more than Letterman's simple antitheses. Sometimes Groucho is like Harpo and Chico, a proponent of joyful disorder, pure and simple. My fav6rite surreal Groucho line comes in a scene with Chico inA Night at the Opera where he's trying to read the fine print of a contract and can't quite get it into focus. "Hmm," Groucho stretches his arms out, "if my arms were a little longer, I could read it. You haven't got a baboon in your pocket, have you?"

But bizarre as his humor can be, Groucho also sometimes represents the forces of relative cogency and order against his brothers.

Take the famous scene from The Cocoanuts where Chico, looking with Groucho at a map, adamantly refuses to come to terms with the arcane notion of the viaduct. Groucho: "Now, here is a little peninsula, and here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland."

Chico: "Why aduckT' Groucho: ''I'm all right. How are you? I say here is a little peninsula, and here's a viaduct leading over to the mainland." Chico: "All right. Why a duck?" Soon things have de-

generated to an abysmal state: "All right. Why a duck? Why awhy a duck? Why-a-no-chicken?" By the end ofthe riff, Groucho, steam rushing invisibly from his ears, promises to build a tunnel in the morning so as to clear everything up. On another occasion, Chico's obtuseness pushes him so far that the great immigrant/outsider points at his brother and cries, "There's my argument: Restrict immigration." roucho is often divided about his outsider status. He loves the puns that send him flying high over all the timid literalists; he loves to pull the covers off conventions.

He's allergic to the word "gentleman"; he hates to pick up a check (one of the most plangent scenes in all the movies comes inA Day at the Races when, gulled by Chico, Groucho hands over dollar after dollar); he loves to flail away after beautiful women.

But in some part of his being, he also wants to be accepted. He wants Mrs. Rittenhouse to love him, and Trentino to recognize him as a fellow statesman, a man among men. He wants to be rich; he wants to be a celebrity. But he won't give up anything to achieve these ends. He wants to insult everyone at Mrs. Rittenhouse's reception and make the professors sitting in session look like a parliament of chimps, and to be beloved still.

Yet Groucho's great integrity as a character comes from the fact that whenever it's time to choose between being accepted and letting go with the joke that will destroy the peace, he chooses the joke. Whenever Margaret Dumont is just about to take his sui t a IittIe bit seriously, he says something so surpassingly nasty that she leaps away as if bitten.

We might compare Groucho with his fidelity to the joke (at whatever cost) to Woody Allen. Woody is Groucho's heir, something he warmly affirms in Mighty Aphrodite when he suggests to his wife that they name their adopted child after the great man.

(You'll also recall that Annie Hall begins with a disquisition on Groucho's line about the sort of country club he could never join.)

Woody, like Groucho, is in love with the antiestablishment joke.

He takes rich pleasure in shooting down macho pretensions, social snobbery and cultural affectations. (Especially the latter: remem-

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ber his splendid line about Commentary magazine merging with Dissent to produce Dysentery.) Yet unlike Groucho, Woody isn't prone to record the nearly inevitable cost of being a brilliant misanthrope. Woody simply can't resist putting his film persona in positions where he tells all the antiestablishment jokes and gets the girl too. He carries on like Groucho, and gets to sleep with Diane Keaton. This need to have it both ways is part of what makes Woody's movies, splendid as they are, often seem like genial wish fulfillment next to Groucho's.

Groucho always rebels against his own success. When it seems that Trentino might treat with him on equal terms, as a gentleman, Groucho stages an imagined encounter between himself and the Sylvanian ambassador that ends in disaster. "I'll be only too happy," Groucho pledges in most statesmanlike tones, "to meet Ambassador Trentino and offer him, on behalf of my country, the right hand of good fellowship." But then, Groucho worries, maybe the ambassador will snub him (stranger things have happened). "A fine thing that'll be! I hold out my hand and he refuses to acceptit! That'll add a lotto my prestige, won'tit?Me, the head of a country, snubbed by a foreign ambassador! Who does he think he is that he can come here and make a sap out of me in front of all my people?" Then, rising to a boil, "Think of it! I hold out my hand and that hyena refuses to accept it!. ..He'll never get away with it, I tell you!. ..He'll never get away with it."

Enter Trentino, looking haughty. Groucho, raging now, "So! You refuse to shake hands with me, eh?" Groucho slaps Trentino with his gloves. This means war!

It's Groucho's contempt for his own high-mindedness and posing-"I'll be happy to meet Ambassador Trentino and offer him the right hand," blah, blah, blah-that sends him into a spin.

Groucho was about ~oact decorously, something for which he cannot forgive himself. As his predecessor Thoreau put it, "What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?"

The richness of Groucho's antiestablishment comedy is that it compels us not only to challenge social hypocrisy but to consider our own. And it's that double vision, it seems to me, that helps make Groucho and the Marx Brothers as indispensable now as they were in the 1930s.

For maybe we all dream of cutting our own kind of deal with society in which we're saint and thief at once. To be perfectly rebellious, perfectly true to one's most refractory impulses, and yet to be loved-that is Groucho's wish, as it is, perhaps, everyone's.

What Groucho learns and learns again, and also teaches, is that you've got to choose-you can't have your cake and cream Trentino with it, too. Groucho speaks to all of us who are both rebels and conformists, and tells us that wecan'thave it both ways.

Finally (though not without second thoughts), he endorses a life in which, though the anxiety dream generally reigns, you can, if you're daring enough and witty enough, take over for a while, launch the joke and exult-then pay for it.

0 About the Author: Mark Edmundson, a contributing editor of Civilization magazine, is professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses onfUm, Freud and visionary poetry.