There Ain't No Sanity Clause

If you've been attending the Comedy Palace with any regularity -- or if you've met me once -- you know that while I love classic comedy in general, my heart especially belongs to the Marx Brothers. Words like genius and brilliant get thrown around so casually that they tend to lose their meanings. I consider it part of my life's work to draw a distinction between artists who were merely talented -- Shakespeare, for instance -- and the true brilliant geniuses, like Groucho, Harpo, and Chico.

Today's clip is as classic as any comedy scene in history: The contract scene from A Night at the Opera. For more than seventy years, there has been a widely-held opinion that A Night at the Opera was the best and funniest movie the Brothers ever made. It's simply not true, and in recent years, its stature has finally weakened a bit, making room for the acknowledgment of Duck Soup as their true masterpiece. Opera was the first film the Brothers made for MGM, under the auspices of wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg. They had just finished their trilogy of original films for Paramount -- Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup, which captured their essential anarchic genius better than any of their preceding or subsequent efforts. But those films, with their relentless avalanches of surreal comedy, had limited appeal in middle America, and after Duck Soup, the Brothers' association with Paramount ended. They feared that their career had ended too.

Enter Thalberg -- who argued that if the Brothers' comedy could be confined to a series of "block comedy scenes," in the context of a luscious and lavish MGM musical production, with elegant sets, pretty costumes, a compelling love story, and even pathos, then even people who didn't care for the Brothers' maniacal humor would enjoy the film. This approach paid off at the box office, but today, the romantic conventions of 1935 seem stilted and tiresome, and the comedy scenes are too tame and too few.

That having been said, the comedic high points of A Night at the Opera are dazzling. Thalberg and Groucho hit upon the idea of testing the material on the road, in a vaudeville tabloid called Scenes from A Night at the Opera, to perfect the material and to get the timing just right. As a result, the sections of the film which are unadulterated Marx Brothers comedy have a level of polish and surefootedness not seen since Animal Crackers (1930), which had been based on their third hit Broadway show, and therefore had been tested in front of hundreds of audiences before it ever went before the cameras.

The contract scene is one of those high points. Significantly, it feels more like the Paramount period than the MGM period, because although it is supposed to advance the plot, it actually accomplishes nothing but destruction. In his magnificent book Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo: A History of the Marx Brothers and a Satire of the Rest of the World -- not only the best book about the Brothers, but one of the best books ever written about comedy -- Joe Adamson explains:

The contract routine is one of the few great scenes in the history of film in which two people do nothing but stand and talk. The longer they stand and talk, the more hopeless becomes the idea of standing and talking, and the more hopeless becomes the idea of standing and talking, the longer they stand and talk. The scene consists of a pointless pyramid of perplexities, in which a lot of time and effort are involved in getting nothing accomplished. Five or six comic personalities have converged upon the confusion and rendered it fathomless, and countless rounds of experiments and experience have calculated laughs like compound interest. The scene proceeds merrily along a carefully established thread, and every time it departs from the thread it gets merrier and merrier.

The following clip omits the first section of the scene -- which, although it's really a preamble, is necessary in establishing the routine's momentum. Courtesy of Why a Duck?, here is the missing introductory dialogue (screenplay by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Al Boasberg):

GROUCHO: Say, I just remembered, I came back here looking for somebody. You don't know who it is, do you?

CHICO: It's a funny thing. It's-a just slip my mind.

GROUCHO: Oh, I know, I know -- the greatest tenor in the world. That's what I'm after.

CHICO: Why, I'm his manager!

GROUCHO: Whose manager?

CHICO: The greatest tenor in the world!

GROUCHO: The fella that sings at the opera here?

CHICO: Sure.

GROUCHO: What's his name?

CHICO: What-a you care? I can't pronounce it. What-a you want with him?

GROUCHO: I wanted to sign him up for the New York Opera Company. Don't you know America is waiting to hear him sing?

CHICO: Well, he can sing loud, but he can't sing that loud.

GROUCHO: Well, I think I can get America to meet him half way. Could he sail tomorrow?

CHICO: You pay him enough money, he could sail yesterday. How much you pay him?

GROUCHO: Well, I don't know. Let's see...a thousand dollars a night...I'm entitled to a small profit. How about ten dollars a night?

CHICO: Ten dollar? Ha ha ha ha ha ha! I'll take it.