Adapted from a talk given at the New York Public Library on May 29, 2014 and published in the May 2014 edition of Zelda.
This May marked the 100th anniversary of Julius, Leonard, Adolphe and Milton Marx adopting the handles Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Gummo. That’s over a century of the Marx Brothers. Quite a benchmark. While it’s tempting to think so, the world’s most popular comedy team didn’t emerge in a vacuum nor were they one of a kind. Groucho’s brand of verbal nonsense humor, Harpo’s kind of pantomime, and Chico’s dialect comedy were all highly popular, familiar specialties in their day. What made the Marx Brothers original was that they packed it all into the same explosive, anarchistic act. And they were so funny, of course.
But who were their precursors?
The mother of all vaudeville comedy teams was Weber and Fields. Joe Weber and Lew Fields were Polish-Jewish immigrants who grew up in New…
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