Monkey Business
The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers.

Faber & Faber, London, 1999.
St Martins Press, New York, 2000, paperback 2001.

Aside from all its other conveniences as a writer's bolt-hole in the heart of Soho, the Groucho Club enjoys an association with the blackest joke about clubs and membership ever made. "Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." The second blackest ever joke about clubs was also made by Groucho Marx, after the Sands Point Bath and Sun Club in Long Island turned him away for being Jewish: "What about my son? He's only half Jewish. Would it be all right if he went into the water up to his knees?" But it is the first joke that is the inspiration for the Groucho Club, the second being too ethnically specific, and therefore less existentially profound. "Up to his knees" is fuelled by minority grievance, plays upon the frustrations of trying to belong; whereas "Please accept my resignation" amounts to a refusal to take up membership of the human race itself. It is a classic reworking of the strategies of masochism, among other things, transforming self-contempt into choosiness and turning the loser into the victor. Something those of us who frequent the Groucho Club do whenever we order a drink.

But a joke is a joke and woe betide anyone who dares to unpick its seriousness. Myself, I have a passion for the philosophy of comedy and fail to understand why analysis of its workings is any more an act of butchery than cutting into the human body to take a look at how the heart functions. Koesder's diagrams illustrating the geometry of jokes may fail of writerly tact, but it is blatant philistinism to complain that Freud and Bergson aren't funny whN, without recourse to any of Koestler's scientism, they engage with the subject of laughter. In fact, each is, in his own way, funny some of the time, but that is incidental since their inquiries no more oblige them to be funny than military strategy obliges the war historian to take up arms.

Queer, this fear that comedy cannot look after itself in the company of philosophers, as though some magic attaches to mirth which will vanish with comprehension. But then primitivism is in the air. "If I could say it I wouldn't need to do it" is a statement of conviction favoured by many of those who believe they are making art. Comedians, when pressed, are wont to seek the same asylum in reticence. Articulacy kills. And since that's the prevailing dogma, it wouldn't be fair to complain that Simon Louvish adheres to it rather too slavishly in this book. An author has a right to want to be read.
But Louvish does tie himself in knots rather, trying too hard not to be too serious. Whatever else you should or shouldn't do in a biography of funny men, you shouldn't play the comedian yourself. Louvish's deployment of Marx Brothers tomfoolery, such as giving Chapter Thirteen the title “There is No Chapter 13 in This Book", in homage to a joke of Groucho's own, is no more than passingly irritating. Ditto his exclamatory puns on the name Marx - "But Marxism cannot, for long, reside in politics!" - which serve only to remind us that he doesn't have Groucho's instinct for the one-liner. More of a trouble is Louvish's embarrassment around anything which may look like intellection. "Mon dieu!" he comically explodes, after quoting Antonin Artaud's provocative observation that "Animal Crackers would fit the definition of humour if this word had not long since lost its sense of essential liberation, of destruction of all reality in the mind." Given the collapse of the American intelligence in the presence of comedy that weighs life in the balance with death, denuding it of all vocabulary except “nutty” and “goofy” – words which Louvish himself is not above employing – I would have thought we could do with more surrealist speculation, not less. And what’s mon dieuable about the idea that humour was once held to be a disordering force and no longer is?

"The last thing on the Marx Brothers' minds", Louvish insists, by way of extricating them from the pretensions of surrealist programs, "was any notion of changing society." Less than a dozen lines later he is crediting them with having "stripped away the veneer of hierarchy to show that we are all idiots under the skin". How you are able to strip away a veneer without thereby changing the look of the thing veneered I do not know. But the comedian as veneer stripper is an acceptable clichd of our times, as of course is the idea that we are all lunatics under that veneer. What regular patron of comedy clubs would demur from the proposition that he is a bit of an idiot when you get to know him? Artaud's "destruction of the reality of the mind" strikes me as a more rewarding trail to follow, if only because it attributes a wilful violence to comedy, and imagines the mind as being in danger from it. Dray nicht mein kopf, we say in Yiddish, meaning "don't twist my head around". Jewish comedy, in particular, revels in making the head spin and the mind ache. And there was nothing the Marx Brothers loved to do more. The famous Tutsi-Frutsi encounter between Chico and Groucho in A Day at the Races is pure mind danger. You might say that that was one of their distinctive achievements - to graft the mental draykopf of Jewish comedy on to the slapstick of vaudeville. But Louvish does not want to go this way: sounds too serious, mon dieu.

Or rather, "But hey!" - Louvish's remonstrance to himself when he catches his prose becoming too fanciful. Just as too much explication of the jokes is to be eschewed, so is too much explication of the jokers. "Honk, honk", he interjects Harpo-like in brackets, pulling himself up short in the middle of a cultural exegesis extravagant only by virtue of its ordinariness. Psychology sticks its nose in only to have it punched:

Hector Arce theorized on Groucho's sexual inadequacy, speculating that his early rejection by his mother caused a later problem of premature ejaculation ... The above diagnosis seems to me a case of premature psychoanalysis. All I can conclude, at this distance from the events, is that for Groucho, there appeared to be no middle ground: adoration or derision seemed to be the poles between which his temperament veered.

No middle ground, eh, honk, honk, mon dieu? Is that really the best Louvish can make of the spiritual and erotic complexities of the Marx Brother who had more to say about himself spiritually and erotically than all his brothers put together? I am not sure whether Louvish cannot or will not take the measure of his material, but throughout this book one is conscious of more cruelty - cruelty felt and cruelty given - more extremity of feeling, more harshness of behaviour and more pain, than Louvish ever seems to register. Quoting an anguished account by the forgotten Marx Brother, Gummo, of what it was like to be the fifth spoke of the wheel, to be overshadowed, eclipsed, all but extinguished by his raucous brothers, Louvish notes that it "shows him somewhat injured". Zeppo's explosion - "I am sick and tired of being a stooge" - passes without comment, as does the observation of almost every writer and producer who came in contact with the Marx Brothers that they were "unbearable" to work with. Again and again that's the word - not antic, not crazy, not incorrigibly and lovably lunatic, but unbearable.

As a group they were fiends to be near, like the bunched fingers of one hand, Gummo's son recalls - which Louvish interprets as a sort of musketeering family loyalty, forgetting that the bunched fingers of one hand make a fist. Individually - though of course as individuals their fiendishness found individual expression - they were no better. Testimony by one after another of Groucho's wives that they never found his jokes funny, that he insulted, demeaned, belittled, abused and sometimes resorted to striking them, might be taken with a pinch of salt, given that wives never find their husbands funny after the event, and given the adversarial rhetoric of divorce; but witnesses to Groucho's marriages paint no rosier a picture. He was a brutally contemptuous man. Chico the twilight gambler had a less savage tongue but was no better at exuding moderation. If Chico didn't fall in with mobsters, he fell in with friends of mobsters. He lost money compulsively and womanized without discretion. Even in their bunched-fist relations with one another the brothers were rough, thinking nothing, for example, of making passes at one another's wives or at the friends of their own children. "Callous and insensitive", Chico's daughter Maxine called her father and his brothers.

It is not because I wish Louvish to be censorious that I regret his jauntiness in the face of so much deformity. On the contrary, I would have him consider the lives of the Marx Brothers as more tragically disarranged than he paints them. It is no small thing to be the huddled children of immigrants, struggling to make it in a new and often hostile country, succeeding in making it against the odds, for ever frightened of being unmasked. "I always think that one day someone is going to point the finger at me", A. J. Ayer is reported as telling Anthony Grayling in Ben Rogers's recent biography of Ayer: “You are a fraud. You got into Eton and to Christ Church, you were an officer in the Welsh Guards, you became Wykeham Professor at oxford and you secured a knighthood. But underneath you are just a dirty little Jew-boy.” Try being a nice person when you're carrying a psychological baggage as burdensome as that.

Vaudeville to Hollywood may have been a less conspicuous route than Eton to Oxford, but it was just as fraught. Louvish notes how the Brothers gradually excised Jewish material from their routine, though he doesn't give that excision the fatal drum roll it perhaps deserves. That his Jewishness was a sore travail to Groucho is apparent from those two infamous jokes with which we began. But there is a ferocious, demoniacal quality to Marx Brothers clowning even before it has reached its overtly sardonic and literary phase. It is not joyously antic. It is not "sheer anarchic craziness". It is, as the surrealists noted, violent and vengefully destructive, performed as though by brilliant imps of malevolence, damaging because damaged.
We are back, whether we like it or not, to the nature of comedy and to uncomfortable questions about the impulses which fuel it. If Louvish had been a little less worried about showing as an intellectual around jokes, he might have given us a more gripping and more terrible picture of the sort of people who are cursed with the need to make them. Perhaps that isn’t fair: for it is not the picture that fails of vividness but the interpretation that fails of gravity. And since I used not to be very interested in the Marx Brothers at all, but now feel gloomily ensorcelled by them, Louvish might have done something right.

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