I
did not expect a comedy from 1933 to be this effective in 2025.
Duck
Soup is considered by some to be the quintessential Marx Brothers film, and
in the name of cultural literacy I tuned in to see what the nearly century-old
fuss was about. While some of the jokes landed flat or just didn’t translate
across the gulf of time it didn’t really matter, as there are just so many of
them per minute. Groucho and Chico rarely shut up, Harpo has barely any
screentime where he isn’t acting like the most caffeinated clown in history,
and I suppose Zippo was somewhere in there as well, at least according to the
opening credits. There is a reason Groucho is often considered to be the best
of them, as his mile-a-minute wordplay (which I imagine must be an absolute
nightmare for someone who speaks English as a second language) has undoubtedly
aged the best, whereas the physical comedy of Harpo didn’t really appeal much
to me (I guess he liked cutting stuff with scissors and bullying lemonade
salesmen and everyone thought that was funny for some reason?) and Chico
sometimes came off as a poor man’s Groucho. There is also a singular racist
joke that wouldn’t fly in the late twentieth century let alone today, but
honestly I’m just glad that it was just the one. This is the 1930s we’re
talking about, after all.
The film is truly anarchic, and I’m not just
referring to the brothers themselves. It eschews logic, it eschews plot. It is
as poorly paced as my eating schedule on Thanksgiving Day. But ultimately it
doesn’t matter, as all of that stuff is just window dressing for the jokes, and
the jokes work, even ninety-two years later.
And who can beat that just-over-an-hour runtime?
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