[A few years
ago, I had a lot of fun writing an
April Fools series. Foolishly, I haven’t done so since, but this year have
decided I won’t get fooled again. So this week I’ll be highlighting and
AmericanStudying a series of funny figures and texts. Share your own funny
favorites in comments and I’ll add ‘em to the crowd-sourced weekend post—no foolin’!]
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.
Next fools
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Funny favorites you’d share?
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