What got me were the soliloquies. At least he alluded to Strange Interludes before he launched into the first one so I wasn't totally confused. And the gags are so thick and fast throughout the scene you don't get a break from laughing.
"Anything I retain now is velvet, except the coat that's Prince Albert." (to the audience) "Well all the jokes can't be good, you've got to expect that once in a while."
[In a hilarious, mock-serious parody of Eugene O'Neil] "Hideous, stumbling footsteps creeping along the corridors of time. And in those corridors I see figures. Strange figures. Weird figures. Steel 84. Anaconda 138. American Can 186."
One of my all time favourite Groucho and the magnificent Margaret Dumont scenes. I laughed when I first saw it over 60 years ago and I'm still laughing at it today. Not one comic around nowadays comes even close.
" My favourite Comedy sketch, the sarcasm, the irony, the eccentricity, Groucho demeanour, his disposition, sardonic manner, everything combined, oh the heck wit it just watch, he's the master and a natural one at that " ~ 'Neville'
@foster21 He's satirizing Eugene O'Neill's use of soliloquies and asides used by characters in his plays to reveal their inner thoughts. He had just mentioned O'Neill earlier in this scene.
Indeed, when he says "Pardon me while I have a strange interlude", it's a direct reference to O'Neill's 1928 play Strange Interlude. Pop culture references from so long ago. Neat stuff.
@@averat84 You were doing so well, averat, and then you demonstrated your historical ignorance, and entirely fucked it up. You wound up half-right. America was far more literate and better educated in the twentieth century, before Republican propagandists succeeded in making us increasingly privatize our once-great public school system, and disinvest in our public schools. Exactly CONTRARY to your polemical nonsense, this film is from 1929-30 -- the HIGH POINT of Marxist thought and theory, its popularity in serious intellectual circles, and of its credibilty in American and world political thought. And the movie is adapted directly from George S. Kaufman's musical farce: those hilarious asides Groucho delivers directly to the camera in that pompous, mock-serious voice are a parody of Eugene O'Neil -- a playwright with whose style, at least, the better-educated contemporary audience would've been familiar. The whole scene is a hilarious, pre-code hoot!
As a lifelong Marx Brothers fan, can I just point out that this film was written by George S Kaufman, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby? Groucho did not write his own lines, although he delivers them brilliantly. He's not ad-libbing here.
Kaufman once stopped someone talking to him and remarked that heard one of the brothers use one of the lines he wrote. He stopped writing for them because they rarely, if ever stuck to the script he wrote.
@@markhardwick8379 I would take that famous anecdote with a very large grain of salt. It's the kind of witty remark Kaufman might have made, but quite obviously not literally the case. Anyway, my comment has to do with their films, not their stage work (which no doubt the Kaufman anecdote relates to). I'm sure Groucho did a lot of ad-libbing on stage, but this is a film and there was a script for it. By the time they were filming, Groucho was not just making it all up on the fly. Kaufman did come back to work on A Night At The Opera. Groucho considered Kaufman to basically be God. He had tremendous respect for him.
Pre-code Hollywood. This would not have been possible a few years later, once the studios started enforcing the Production Code. (BTW, I say Hollywood, but the film was shot in Astoria, Queens. They would perform the show on Broadway, and shoot the film on days without matinees.)
"That leaves you one up." "He shot her glance....as a smile played around his lips." "If I were Eugene O'Neill I could tell you what I really think of you two. You know your very lucky the theater gild isn't putting this on.....and so is the gild. Pardon me while I have a strange interlude."
oh god, THIS is real comedy!!! i hate how much they've dumbed down movies and tv shows today. . . Groucho made it so if you werent clever enough to catch his jokes the first time around, you were just out of luck.
My argument for not having to eat spinach ever again:Grouch is against it! Of course only my dad would find it funny. My mom would just continue arguing
The entire film is like that, but that is why I like it. I believe this was one of their plays that was converted to a movie in the early days of "Talkies": Maybe 1930. Most films of the late 20s and early 30s have that awkward feel to them, in my opinion.
"Animal Crackers" was originally a Broadway play. Groucho, Margaret Irving and Margaret Dumont performed this scene on stage literally hundreds of times before it was ever filmed.
badluckcity same here! I think he’s hilarious along with the rest of his brothers, The Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr), Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton.
LOL wut dude I'm a feminist and I thought this was funny. It's old-fashioned, Groucho is playing a character, and Margaret Dumont was always playing herself, a foolish narcissist. I don't mind seeing somebody like that getting tweaked.
