Marx Brothers Quotes

The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.

You're a great brother. You give us a heart attack worrying about your heart attack, which you didn't even have the decency to have!

There is no word that admits of more various significations, and has made more varied impressions on the human mind, than that of liberty.” (Montesquieu) In order to exist, liberty and justice in a society, there should be equality in this society before them and together with them. Only then can we speak of humanism. Only socially equal personalities are free. And only free and equal in rights personalities could “love each other like brothers.

You both love Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, Flaubert and Stendahl, but at that stage of your life you cannot stomach Henry James, while Gwyn argues that he is the giant of giants, the colossus who makes all other novelists look like pygmies. You are in complete harmony about the greatness of Kafka and Beckett, but when you tell her that Celine belongs in their company, she laughs at you and calls him a fascist maniac. Wallace Stevens yes, but next in line for you is William Carlos Williams, not T.S. Eliot, whose work Gwyn can recite from memory. You defend Keaton, she defends Chaplin, and while you both howl at the sight of the Marx Brothers, your much-adored W.C. Fields cannot coax a single smile from her. Truffaut at his best touches you both, but Gwyn finds Godard pretentious and you don't, and while she lauds Bergman and Antonioni as twin masters of the universe, you reluctantly tell her that you are bored by their films. No conflicts about classical music, with J.S. Bach at the top of the list, but you are becoming increasingly interested in jazz, while Gwyn still clings to the frenzy of rock and roll, which has stopped saying much of anything to you. She likes to dance, and you don't. She laughs more than you do and smokes less. She is a freer, happier person than you are, and whenever you are with her, the world seems brighter and more welcoming, a place where your sullen, introverted self can almost begin to feel at home.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

Naturally, I asked him what it'd been like to live through Pinochet's coup and the fall of Allende. Naturally, he regarded me with an expression of utter boredom; then he said: 'Like a Marx Brothers' movie, but with corpses. Unimaginable pandemonium.

We live in a world packed with desensitising forces, that strip the world of magic. The world is full of negativity, but we fight back with positivity. We're inspired by oceans, forests, animals, Marx Brothers films. We can't help but project uplifting vibrations, because we love each other so much and get off on playing together.

I had a hell of a time getting here, brother,” I revealed when we had finished trading insincerities.

When you figured out Sam's dead mother's name, you decided that it was fate, and from that day forward, Sam would be your brother. A name is destiny, if you think it is.

You know what you remind me of? The telegram Harpo Marx sent his brothers: No message. Harpo.” That made him grin. Sarah said, “You would think it was funny.” “Well? Isn’t it?

The truth, if it ever existed, has gone through its customary transformation into something more easily digested by the human mind.

she came to the conclusion that if Aunt Ada was mad, then she, Flora, was one of the Marx Brothers.

The Celebrated Ending-a-Sentence-with-a-Preposition Story Two women are seated side by side at a posh dinner party, one a matron of the sort played in the old Marx Brothers movies by Margaret Dumont, except frostier, the other an easygoing southern gal, let’s say, for the sake of the visuals, wearing a very pink and very ruffled evening gown. Southern Gal, amiably, to Frosty Matron: So where y’all from? Frosty Matron, no doubt giving Southern Gal a once-over through a lorgnette: I’m from a place where people don’t end their sentences with prepositions. Southern Gal, sweetly, after a moment’s consideration: OK. So where y’all from, bitch?

Sure I like Grossinger’s,” it was saying, “but let me warn you—if you go up there, be sure and wear sunglasses. You can get snow blindness from the sour cream.” It

Lox vobiscum, and give my regards to Broadway.” His

The manager of the enterprise, a foxy-nose with a serried gray marcel that mounted like a linotype keyboard, was the soul of courtesy.

immortality is a chancy matter, subject to the caprice of the unborn. Not

It was grudgingly conceded by the traffic wizards that in abolishing so-called normal hazards like sharp curves, intersections, traffic signals, and pedestrian and railroad crossings they had substituted the peril of deadly monotony. The

By this same post, I am delegating a close friend of mine, Irving Wiesel, to visit your place of business and ferret out the truth. You can lay your cards on the table with Wiesel or not, as you see fit. When he finishes with you, you will have neither cards nor table.

Look, Grover Cleveland,” one of them finally snapped at me after my third approach. “Harmoniums and water wings, diavolos and pungs we got, but Victorian easy chairs—nyet. And now, excuse me, will you? I have another nudnick here wants a round table like King Arthur’s.

Hitler had been in power for six months. Duck Soup, said Harpo, was his most difficult movie, and the only one in which he worried about his performance. Not because of the director or the script. “The trouble was Adolph Hitler.” American radio was broadcasting Hitler’s speeches, and “twice we suspended shooting to listen to him scream.

Look at this shirt!” exclaimed Schrift, with sudden irrelevant fury. “Specially made for me by Thresher & Glenny in London—it cost more than you probably spent on coal last winter. If I told ’em once, I told ’em a hundred times—I want the monogram in Old English, not roman type! What do they think I am—a letterhead? No wonder the British Empire’s falling apart.

A moment later, Schrift reappeared in a striking pair of undershorts, with vertical stripes like French wallpaper. “Now, for openers,” he began, extracting the trees from a pair of suède chukker boots, “did you read this new best seller Valuta, by Waldemar Knobnose!” “Only the first eighteen pages,” I admitted. “The woman whose copy it was got off the bus at Altman’s.

I remind him of his old wino father but the fantastic thing is that HE reminds ME of MY father so that we have this strange eternal father-image relationship that goes on and on sometimes with tears, it’s easy for me to think of Cody and almost cry, sometimes I can see the same tearful expression in his eyes when he sometimes looks at me—He reminds me of my father because he too blusters and hurries and fills all his pockets with Racing Forms and papers and pencils and we’re all ready to go on some mission in the night he takes with ultimate seriousness as tho we were going on the last trip of them all but it always ends up being a hilarious meaningless Marx Brothers adventure which gives me even more reason to love him (and my father too)

An inexpressible radiance suffused me. The chair was so much more beautiful than my cinematic memory that speech was inadequate. It was a haven, a refuge; I saw myself lolling in it, churchwarden poised, evolving new cosmogonies, quoting abstruse references to Occam’s razor and Paley’s watch. “Oh, God,” I choked, extracting a fistful of bills. “I—You’ve made me so happy! How much?

Blood typing had a second, unanticipated benefit: establishing parenthood. In a famous case in Chicago in 1930, two sets of parents, the Bambergers and the Watkinses, had babies in the same hospital at the same time. After returning home, they discovered to their dismay that their babies were wearing labels with the other family’s name on them. The question became whether the mothers had been sent home with the wrong babies or with the right babies mislabeled. Weeks of uncertainty followed, and in the meantime both sets of parents did what parents naturally do: they fell in love with the babies in their care. Finally, an authority from Northwestern University with a name that might have come out of a Marx Brothers movie, Professor Hamilton Fishback, was called in, and he administered blood tests to all four parents, which at the time seemed the very height of technical sophistication. Fishback’s tests showed that both Mr. and Mrs. Watkins had type O blood and therefore could produce only a type O baby, whereas the child in their nursery was type AB. So, thanks to medical science, the babies were swapped back to the right parents, though not without a lot of heartache. —

MENDOZA (hoarsely): I tell you the blood is boiling in my veins! You are a candy store filled with luscious nougats, a henhouse from which the pullets have yet to be stolen! MAVIS: Promise me one thing. Whatever happens— whatever they should tell you about me—we’ll always have this moment together. MENDOZA: Parbleu! Do you think I am a milk-sap, that you can put me off with your bobbery? What stands between us—this man’s foot sticking out from behind the davenport? MAVIS: Of course not. It’s—well—it’s that you’re not the man I thought you were. Who are you, anyway? MENDOZA: (simply): The exterminator.

But interviews with [Margaret Dumont] reveal her to have been a perceptive and talented comic actress. “Many a comedian’s lines have been lost on the screen because the laughter overlapped,” she said in the 1940s. “Script writers build up to a laugh, but they don’t allow any pause for it. That’s where I come in. I ad lib—it doesn’t matter what I say—just to kill a few seconds so you can enjoy the gag. I have to sense when the big laughs will come and fill in, or the audience will drown out the next gag with its own laughter.” A much harder job, it must be stressed, onscreen than onstage. Margaret Dumont objected to the term “stooge,” with her usual dignity. “I’m a straight lady,” she insisted, “the best straight woman in Hollywood. There’s an art to playing straight. You must build up your man, but never top him, never steal the laughs from him.” She showed great insight into the Marx Brothers’ brand of humor: “The comedy method which [they] employ is carefully worked out and concrete. They never laugh during a story conference. Like most other expert comedians, they involve themselves so seriously in the study of how jokes can be converted to their own style that they don’t ever titter while approaching their material.

According to that book, only one Marx contributed an unforgotten pun to the Round Tablers’ vaunted word games. It wasn’t Groucho, who must have been furious. Nor was it Harpo, who for all we know sat at the table naked. Nor was it Chico, who had more dangerous games elsewhere. It was Gummo. Evidently Gummo had a seat at that table at least once, and he made it count. Everybody knows that Dorothy Parker, challenged to make a sentence with the word horticulture, quipped as follows: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” But who knew that Gummo, taking on euphoria, came up with this: LEFT TO RIGHT: Harpo, Zeppo, Chico, Groucho, and Gummo, 1957. “Go outside and play,” Minnie told the brothers. “Which ones?” they asked. And she said: “Euphoria.”*

MAVIS (coming up close to him): Robin, don’t you notice anything different about me? ROBIN (sniffing): Hm-m-m. Why, yes, you’ve got a funny smell. MAVIS: Don’t you find me heady, sultry, confusing? ROBIN: No. (critically) But you’ve put on a lot of weight lately. MAVIS: Have I? ROBIN: You certainly have. You’re as big as a house. And your slip is showing. MAVIS: I’m not wearing a slip. ROBIN: Well, it would show if you were. MAVIS: Anything else? ROBIN: Maybe I shouldn’t call attention to it. MAVIS: No, no, darling. By all means call attention to it. ROBIN: You’re getting wrinkles under the eyes. And a scraggly neck, like a turkey. MAVIS: Not much gets past you, does it? ROBIN (comfortably): I guess I’m just about as wide awake as anybody in the hardware business.

Dogmatic belief in the central axioms of Christianity (that Christ’s crucifixion redeemed the world; that salvation was reserved for the hereafter; that salvation could not be achieved through works) had three mutually reinforcing consequences: First, devaluation of the significance of earthly life, as only the hereafter mattered. This also meant that it had become acceptable to overlook and shirk responsibility for the suffering that existed in the here-and-now; Second, passive acceptance of the status quo, because salvation could not be earned in any case through effort in this life (a consequence that Marx also derided, with his proposition that religion was the opiate of the masses); and, finally, third, the right of the believer to reject any real moral burden (outside of the stated belief in salvation through Christ), because the Son of God had already done all the important work. It was for such reasons that Dostoevsky, who was a great influence on Nietzsche, also criticized institutional Christianity (although he arguably managed it in a more ambiguous but also more sophisticated manner). In his masterwork, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has his atheist superman, Ivan, tell a little story, “The Grand Inquisitor.”145 A brief review is in order.

Dat's a some joke, Hey Boss.

The black man was expected to follow the dictates of Sol and the white masters. Good Negro communists were to be unquestioning Negro communists, who sat quietly and did as they were told. A good black communist listened to the white communist—his comradely master. For all their bluster about elevating blacks, this was how communists treated their African-American brothers.

The fourth concept Rousseau popularized was in some ways the most pervasive of all. When society evolves from its primitive state of nature to urban sophistication, he argued, man is corrupted: his natural selfishness, which he calls amour de soi, is transformed into a far more pernicious instinct, amour-propre, which combines vanity and self-esteem, each man rating himself by what others think of him and thus seeking to impress them by his money, strength, brains and moral superiority. His natural selfishness becomes competitive and acquisitive, and so he becomes alienated not only from other men, whom he sees as competitors and not brothers, but from himself.5 Alienation induces a psychological sickness in man, characterized by a tragic divergence between appearance and reality.

Karl Marx had said, ‘Give me twenty-six lead soldiers and I will conquer the world,’ meaning of course the twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

March 2: Johnny Hyde has Marilyn sign with the William Morris agency. Johnny Hyde secures a walk-on part for Marilyn in Love Happy, a Marx Brothers movie. To her line, “Men keep following me,” Groucho, rolling his eyes, says, “Really? I can’t understand why.

Tussy’s announcement that she was double-brained was coincident with the time of her first conscious memory:   My earliest recollection . . . is when I was about three years old and Mohr . . . was carrying me on his shoulders round our small garden in Grafton Terrace, and putting convolvulus flowers in my brown curls. Mohr was admittedly a splendid horse.29   Putting Marx in harness was a family tradition. Tussy ‘heard tell’ that at Dean Street, Jenny, Laura and her dead brother Edgar would yoke Mohr to chairs which the three of them mounted as their carriage, and make him pull. As the youngest and a later arrival, Tussy got her own mount and his dedicated attention:   Personally – perhaps because I had no sisters of my own age – I preferred Mohr as a riding-horse. Seated on his shoulder holding tight by his great mane of hair, then black, but with a hint of grey, I have had magnificent rides round our little garden and over the fields . . . that surrounded our house at Grafton Terrace.30   Severe whooping cough in the winter of 1858 gave Tussy opportunity to assume dominion of the household: ‘The whole family became my bond slaves and I have heard that as usual in slavery there was general demoralisation.

Karl Marx had said, “Give me twenty-six lead soldiers and I will conquer the world,

I always preferred Harpo to Groucho Marx.

Back for the summer, eh?” he inquired. “Say, you certainly look awful. What are those big circles under your eyes?” “Glasses,” I said evenly. “What the hell do you think they are?

PUDOVKIN: Kind of pooped, eh? You’ll lose that bay window before we’re through with you. BESSEMER (panting): Say, bud, bring me a glass of water, will you? MRS. BESSEMER: I’ll take some plain ginger ale. PUDOVKIN: Wouldn’t you rather have a tall, cool rum collins with mint and lots of ice? MRS. BESSEMER: Why, that sounds delicious. PUDOVKIN (comfortably) : Doesn’t it? I’ll hop down the mountain and get one. It’s only four miles—the exercise’ll do me good. BESSEMER: Look, if it’s any trouble, I’d just as soon— PUDOVKIN: Nonsense, that’s what I’m paid for, to run down every time some lush wants a snort. Or if you prefer, I can carry you down on my back.

MRS. BESSEMER: Yes, sir? PUDOVKIN: If this is chicken consommé, so is Lake Louise. And you can tell the manager I said so. MRS. BESSEMER: But you’re the manager, Mr. Pudovkin. PUDOVKIN (to the others): Well, I’ve heard all the excuses, but that’s a new one.

At first they were pitched in a low, rasping hum devoid of vowels, somewhat like Icelandic but more bestial. As

She was accompanied by a vital, leathery taxpayer with protuberant eyes, opulently clad in a black astrakhan coat sporting a mink collar. His face was screwed around an unlit Partagas which he was savagely chewing into submission.

In reading them, it is well to remember that many portions are in anapaestic pentameter, as they were intended to be sung through tissue paper stretched over a comb. No

Take one thing with another, there are few places I know better than the heart of Africa. Set me down in Bechuanaland or the Cameroons and I will find my way home with less difficulty than I would from Rittenhouse Square or Boylston Street. My

To adduce proof that the husky, straw-hatted young man in gabardine who tailed me the whole next month was an F.B.I. operative is impossible, nor can I swear that my mail was fluoroscoped during that period. I do know that for a while I underwent all the tremors of a Graham Greene character on the run, even if it had no purificatory effect on my religious views. When

True, it was a difficult chair to slumber in; at the beginning, its magnificence overawed me and I sat gingerly in it, holding at eye level a copy of Sir Samuel Baker’s The Albert Nyanza in crushed levant. I then tried browsing through the latest English review, but somehow couldn’t get past the pictures of Ovomalt and thermal underwear. At last, I found the key in Max Lerner’s windy periods, and, lapped in his peristaltic rhetoric, slept like a baby. Once inside that chair, Lerner in hand, I was as remote from hypertension as from the Asiatic capitals where he bombinated.

The other occupants of my car were a pair of tall, willowy thoroughbreds apparently checking in from Oshkosh, for they were flanked by luggage, the color of a weathered skull, of every conceivable size. From the scorn they evinced, I sensed that they were unaccustomed to persons bearing packages, so I receded as far as I was able into the costly woodwork. The coryphee who opened the door of Schrift’s antechamber, a Dresden-china shepherdess with scallops of blue-black hair framing her face, looked like the secretaries he generally used on his lightning visits from the Coast—more adept at disengaging a zipper at the Copa than at shorthand. She

I mean, he didn’t get in till four. He hosted a party at Neuralgio’s for our new French author, Claude Nasal-Passages, and then everybody went on to the Twelve Apostles.

Two young ladies, in toreador pants and mohair sweaters, whose swirling coiffures looked as though they had been squeezed from an icing gun, had ranged themselves at the fountain. They

Well—er—you see, my face never changes,” I replied evasively, “but there’s this portrait of me that ages instead.

LEO MCCAREY: Over at Paramount, I found myself directing the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup. The amazing thing about that movie was that I succeeded in not going crazy. They were completely mad.

The Golden Age of Radio was an era of pre-television radio entertainment from the 1930s- 1950s. The shows crossed many genres. Showcasing stories about hard-boiled detectives, Westerns, comedies, horror, etc. I LOVED to listen to those stories. The shows conjured up lush scenes of vibrant color, painful heartbreak and suspense in my young mind. Some of my favorite shows that I still listen to as an adult include: The Adventures Sam Spade, Pat Novak for Hire, Gunsmoke, Hopalong Cassidy, Have Gun Will Travel, Nero Wolfe, Richard Diamond, The Adventures of Rocky Jordan, The Marx Brothers, The Green Hornet and The Whistler, to name a few.

In Animal Crackers, Groucho’s Jeffrey Spaulding is obviously an absurd figure, but what millions of Americans knew about sub–Saharan Africa came through tales as exaggerated and exoticized as Groucho’s gibberish.

Convinced that a persistent negative emotional state had contributed to his illness, he decided it was equally possible that a more positive emotional state could reverse the damage. While continuing to consult with his doctor, Cousins started a regimen of massive doses of vitamin C and Marx Brothers movies (as well as other humorous films and comedy shows). He found that ten minutes of hearty laughter gave him two hours of pain-free sleep. Eventually, he made a complete recovery. Cousins, quite simply, laughed himself to health. How? Although scientists at the time didn’t have a way to understand or explain such a miraculous recovery, research now tells us it’s likely that epigenetic processes were at work. Cousins’s shift of attitude changed his body chemistry, which altered his internal state, enabling him to program new genes in new ways; he simply downregulated (or turned off) the genes that were causing his illness and upregulated (or turned on) the genes responsible for his recovery.

It was fucking awful,” I profess, the words spilling out of me like I’m an overfull levee. Rogan’s quiet as he runs a hand soothingly down my back while holding me tightly to him. “I tried so hard to keep her away from him, to focus on me, but…” “I know,” Rogan comforts, placing light kisses on the back of my hands. “Elon told me what happened. How you…” Emotion bleeds out of his words, and he pauses to try and rein it in. The vehemence leaking to me through the tether has me cracking my fingers so I can look at his face through them. “I fucked up so bad, Lennox. I thought I had to choose, that after everything Elon had been through, he needed to come first no matter what. I didn’t want to admit how I was feeling about you. If I did, it felt like I was betraying Elon. I mean, what kind of person finds happiness and hope when his brother is suffering?” he asks, anguish etched in his features. He shakes his head, ashamed, an indignant scoff sneaking out of his full lips. “I didn’t want to make room for you,” he admits, bringing his hand to his chest and placing it over his heart. “I didn’t want to see that you’d already sunk inside of me so deeply that there wasn’t a me without you anymore. It was the wrong time, too fast, too uncertain, but there you were all the same,” he tells me, gesturing to his heart. His last words coax a small smile to one corner of his mouth, but it’s gone in a blink. “That night when you were torn away from me. It was like I was back in that room with my uncle as he tortured Elon and tried to steal his birthright. I lost it completely. I probably would have taken out half the order if Marx hadn’t been there to stop me. They brought that Saxon fucker in to search your room for who could have planted the trap, and it hit me like a punch to the gut. You were gone. You were gone, and you didn’t know how I felt. I never let you see what you were starting to mean to me. “I knew wherever that portal was leading, it was going to be bad, and I hated myself for not giving you something to fight for, for failing to show you that we were worth fighting for. I’m never going to do that again, Lennox. Never.” Slowly, he pulls my hands from my face, lifting up a corner of the quilt to wipe the tears and snot away. “I love you, Lennox,” he tells me evenly with absolutely no hesitation. “I love you in the way that grows as we grow together. The kind of love worth fighting for, that has me waking up every day grateful and willing to do whatever it takes. I know what you did for Elon, because it’s the same thing you did for me. You’re the light in the darkness. The stars that guide you home when you’re lost. You carry the broken from battle and lift the drowning from the clawing cold that’s trying to claim them. You slay the demons.

All hell breaks loose because they are doing what the Marx Brothers do, jamming a hundred people into a ship’s tiny stateroom. They are crazy and anarchic, but they still have charm and warmth. They married intellectuality and a brushstroke of wit with their great physical comedy. The Three Stooges were a brilliant combination of timing and earnestness. They are very serious. Their physical timing was impeccable. They never laugh, or break up, or seem to enjoy the violence they inflict upon one another. They left that for the audience. They showed me that comedy is a juxtaposition of textures. Later in my career I got to do a Stooges-like routine with Rudy De Luca in Life Stinks when we slap each other silly. I

It appears obvious that, within this framework, the "essence" of the bread can "be" anything, or can "be" asserted to "be" anything. It could "be" the essence of the Easter Bunny, or it could "be" Jesus and the Easter Bunny both, or it could "be" the Five Original Marx Brothers, or it could "be" a million other spooks happily co-existing in the realm outside space-time where such metaphysical entities appear to reside.

He’d watch Saturday Night Live, record the episodes on a video cassette recorder, transcribe the tapes by hand, and study the jokes. He scoured TV Guide every week to see which comedians were going to be on the talk shows. He wrote a thirty-page paper on the Marx brothers when he was in the fifth grade.

Never in my life have I seen fate play such a strong and clear hand. Not the band-career thing necessarily, but the universal powers deciding we would be brothers/partners. We have no choice. Maybe it is past life influences, maybe an interlocking neurosis of some Jungian, Freudian, or Marx Brotherian vari- ety, maybe each of us looking for the promise of a fulfillment that exists in the other. I just knew in my heart that we would always be close, and that neither of us belonged in that society circle that I saw from afar, pretend as we might.

Never in my life have I seen fate play such a strong and clear hand. Not the band-career thing necessarily, but the universal powers deciding we would be brothers/partners. We have no choice. Maybe it is past life influences, maybe an interlocking neurosis of some Jungian, Freudian, or Marx Brotherian variety, maybe each of us looking for the promise of a fulfillment that exists in the other. I just knew in my heart that we would always be close, and that neither of us belonged in that society circle that I saw from afar, pretend as we might.

Beneath a common banner of classically liberal ideals, countless tastes and traditions may mingle and mutate into ever new and exciting flavors. Thus would be born a homeland where the Sufi dances with the Breslover round the neon jungle of Times Square, where the Baptist of Alabama nods along to the merry melodies of Klezmer, where the secular humanist combs the Christian gospels and poems of Rumi for their many pearls of wisdom, where the Guatemalan college student learns to read Marx and Luxemburg in their original German, where the Russian refugee freely markets her own art painted in the style of Van Gogh and Monet, where the Italian chef tosses up a Lambi stew for his Haitian wife’s birthday while the operas of Verdi and Puccini play on his radio, where two brothers in exile share the wine of the Galilee and Golan while listening to the oud music of Nablus and Nazareth, where the Buddhist and the stoner hike through redwood trails and swap thoughts of life and death beneath a star-spangled sky. In this America, only the polyglot sets the lingua franca, the bully pulpit yields to the poets café, decent discourse finds favor over any cocksure shouting match, no library is so uniform as to betray to a tee its owner’s beliefs, no citizen is so selfish as to live for only themself nor so weak of will as to live only for others, and such a land—as yet a dream deferred, but still a dream we may seize—such a land would truly be worthy of you and me.

The show would bring together “the elect of the entertainment world” to discuss in a heavily scripted but spontaneous-sounding hour “anything under the radio sun: poetry, music, drama, death, taxes, fur coats”—all the topics that might be expected to “come up” naturally at a social gathering of such luminaries. Colman and Grant were obviously cerebral talents; Lombard and the Marx Brothers, though popularly known as madcaps, were keenly respected intelligences among the Hollywood elite. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, the unlikely sponsor, would budget more than $2 million for the first year, with the stars each earning $2,000-$2,500 a week. There would also be at least one major guest on each show, who might be a singer or a musician able to fit into the dialogue as well as perform.

Word arrived of an uprising in the Prussian region of Silesia. For the likes of Marx and the workers in Paris this was electrifying as a portent of what was to come. On June 4th 1844, driven mad by their misery, a group of weavers marched on the home of a pair of Prussian industrialist brothers, demanding higher pay, and singing, “You villains all, You hellish drones / You knaves in Satan’s raiment!/ You gobble all the poor man owns / Our curses be your payment!” The protestors were beyond desperate, beyond furious. Men, women and children had been subjected to such low wages that some of the workers had starved. Their demands denied, the enraged weavers stormed the house and destroyed it….

As a result there are many descriptions, mainly hostile, of the furious Marx in action. Bauer’s brother even wrote a poem about him: ‘Dark fellow from Trier in fury raging, / His evil fist is clenched, he roars interminably, / As though ten thousand devils had him by the hair.