Like a lot of people, I’m devoted to the Marx Brothers. I’ve studied their scripts, I know about the titanic fights they had over word choices and I understand how they created their routines. Their movie mayhem was deeply disciplined business and not at all the loose, jangly affairs one sees on screen. It took effort to seem so effortless. They worked with some of the greatest comedy writers of the 20th Century - Morrie Ryskind, SJ Perlman, George S Kaufman, Joseph Fields and George Seaton to name a few, but their greatest writers were the Marx Brothers themselves. They did, however, have one secret weapon, a woman Groucho called the fifth Marx Brother. Today, almost nobody knows her name, but the chemistry between her and Groucho was such that movie goers assumed they were married in real life.
© 2024 John Oliver
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