The Best of the Marx Brothers - Criterion Channel Teaser

Having honed their whirlwind brand of anarchic absurdity on the vaudeville stage, the Marx Brothers exploded onto the screen in the late 1920s and proceeded to wreak mayhem bordering on the surreal for the next two decades. The quip-spouting eyebrow-waggler Groucho, skirt-chasing silent clown (and harp virtuoso) Harpo, and ivory-tickling swindler Chico—joined in their earliest films by resident straight man Zeppo—combined genius wordplay, antic slapstick, and outlandish musical numbers to create barely controlled comic chaos that blew any semblance of narrative logic to smithereens. Poking irreverent fun at the pomposities of politics, academia, and high society in classics like Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, and A Night at the Opera, the Marx Brothers brought an improvisatory, anything-goes invention to screen comedy that remains as close to pure Dada as mainstream entertainment has ever come.