On the two
groups of siblings at the heart of mid-20th century American comedy
and popular culture.
From the Booths to the
Barrymores, the Douglas’s
to the Bridges, on
down to Will
and Jada Pinkett Smith and their increasingly visible young ‘uns, multi-generational
families have long been a staple in American popular culture. Whether you read
the trend as one of many signs that American society is not nearly as
class-less as we like to believe, as
a symbol of our hankering for an equivalent to the British royal family, or
as simply a reflection that it’s easier to get ahead if you know the right
people, there’s no doubt that our cultural icons have often come as part of
family units. Yet I’m not sure that any other cultural medium or any other
historical moment have been dominated by competing families of entertainers as
were the 1930s and 40s by the
Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges.
The two
families (which is a slightly inaccurate word for the Stooges, since Moe, Shemp, and Curly were brothers
but Larry was unrelated to them) have interestingly parallel biographies: each
group of brothers was born to Jewish American immigrant families in late 19th
century New York; members of each began to perform in Vaudeville-type acts for
the first time in 1912, and achieved their first real breakthrough successes
about a decade later; and the similarly-titled films that truly launched each
group both appeared within a year of each other, the Marx’s The Cocoanuts (1929) and
the Stooges’ Soup to Nuts (1930). The families even feature individual
brothers who helped originate the act but left the group at a relatively early
point, Zeppo Marx and Shemp Howard. Yet despite these parallels, in my
experience it’s very rare to find passionate fans of both the Marx Brothers and
the Stooges—they seem today, as perhaps they did in their own era, to have
found pretty distinct fan bases.
It’d be easy to attribute
that divide to the
highbrow/lowbrow dichotomy, and certainly there’s no doubt that the two
groups tended to employ very different kinds of comedy: the Marx’s using their
scripts and wordplay first and foremost, the Stooges their physical comedy and
violence (although certainly Harpo
Marx was entirely a physical comic, and in other ways too this division
would break down upon close examination). Yet I would say that the two groups
also exemplify two very distinct directions for American comedy and popular
culture after Vaudeville, both employing developing technologies but in quite
different ways: Cocoanuts was one of the first sound films, and
throughout their career the Marx Brothers used this new medium of sound film to
great effect; whereas most of the Stooges’ classic works
were shorts, and while such pieces were often featured before or with other
films they were also tailor-made for the new medium of television as it developed
in the decades to come. Both films and television remain central media for
American comedy, of course, but they work and connect to audiences in
fundamentally different ways, and the Marx’s and Stooges can help us analyze
those trends at their earlier moments.
July recap
tomorrow, but the sibling series continues on Wednesday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Preferences between the Marx’s and the Stooges? Thoughts on other
American siblings for the crowd-sourced post?
7/30
Memory Day nominees: A tie between two
diametrically opposed
yet in their own ways equally
influential turn of the 20th century figures, Thorstein
Veblen and Henry Ford.
Another set of siblings: Alec, Daniel, William and Stephen Baldwin.
ReplyDelete