And while Margaret Dumont always played a woman of wealth, who in certain circumstances we might want to see taken down a peg, she is never anything but decent in the films, so Groucho torturing her is simply sadistic. Siegel shows, they abuse a lemonade vendor who is just trying to make a living in Duck Soup and The Cocoanuts opens with Groucho as a hotelier cheating his bellboys out of their hard-earned wages. Where Charlie Chaplin made a career of playing a quintessential little guy, the Brothers would have been his attackers had their films crossed. Groucho's nihilism is also captured in another famous line: "Whatever it is, I'm against it." The explicit failure to discern between worthwhile and worthless or even between good and evil ends up being portrayed on screen and is repellent. This is mere self-indulgence and, therefore, annoying, not funny. Groucho and his siblings are nihilist, and unsuccessful jokers, precisely because they attack the social contract and tear up the rules. Joking is a game that players only play successfully when they both understand and follow the rules. So, in listening to a joke, I am presupposing a social world that is shared, the forms of which the practice of joke-telling is going to play with. There is a tacit social contract at work here, namely some agreement about the social world in which we find ourselves as the implicit background to the joke.
Oking is a specific and meaningful practice that the audience and the joke-teller recognize as such. Critchley offers the following phenomenology of the joke: But consider that they are, in fact, communicating the idea and the "joke" is obviously on them. But often their banter just descended into nonsense, becoming an attack on the very possibility of communication, which is bad enough. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know." This brings a smile as it plays on the ambiguities inherent in our languages and our ability to communicate clearly at all times. Thus: 'One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. The one that the Marx Brothers periodically conformed to was incongruity. In his book, On Humour (which we reviewed here), the philosopher Simon Critchley sets forth the three accepted theories of comedy.
It is this nihilism, though the author does not nail it down, that provides the reason why we find the Brothers off-putting. Siegel makes the case that Groucho was generally not funny and conducted his comedy in a spirit of nihilism, in large part because he was the forgotten middle child of a failed father and a spiteful mother. This slender biography is an entry in the Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series, but is less a standard life story than an exploration of Groucho's comedy through the lens of his personality.
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