What's So Funny?

Having read everything on the Marx Brothers I could get my hands on, I was excited to see Lee Siegel's Groucho Marx: The Comedy Of Existence in my local library.  It's part of an ongoing series on Jewish lives that's gone from Einstein to Kafka, from Leonard Bernstein to Leon Trotsky.

Unfortunately, the book--at 150 pages more an extended essay--falls short.  Lee Siegel is a cultural critic whose work I've sometimes enjoyed, but his excursion into the meaning of Groucho doesn't add up to much.

He doesn't seem to have done any original research, unless you count watching Marx Brothers movies.  He also makes a number of mistakes, such as listing the wrong year for certain films.  But then, this isn't a biography, it's a lengthy think piece.  Unfortunately, on that level it fails.

One of his central ideas is that just as Julius H. Marx became known as Groucho, so does the Groucho character reflect much of the actual Julius. There may be something to this, but it's not too deep an observation, and is not developed well.

Instead, Siegel makes many highbrow references, even if they have little to tell us about Groucho or his comedy.  He also quotes from some of the Brothers' famous routines and then goes on intellectual flights of fancy as to their meaning. On top of which, it often seems Siegel doesn't find the Marx Brothers particularly funny.  That seems a serious problem if you're trying to understand Groucho.

Anyway, a disappointment.