Comedy's First Steps

While Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton devoted their lives to the construction of an insightful and intelligent critic to the society through comedy, the Marx Brothers were faithful to the comedy as an entertainment through their cartoon like ways.
The Marx Brothers comedy even tough it was performed for film; it had the mark of their earlier work in vaudeville, which is a style of multi-act theater where the characters could run from music to comedy, to athleticism, to magic, to animal acts, to opera, to Shakespeare, to banjo, to acrobatics and gymnastics. Their comedy was fast and explosive, it consisted in short jokes to make people go from laugh to laugh; it also consisted in very cartoon like recourses such as the movie “Horse Feathers” in which Harpo pulls out of his coat: a wooden mallet, a fish, a coiled rope, a tie, a poster of a woman in her underwear, a cup of hot coffee, a sword, and a candle burning at both ends, or the fake mirror scene wearing pajamas in “Duck Soup”; also to bring out this quick laugh, Marx Brothers comedy relied in acrobatics, such as the film “A Night at the Opera” in which the famous Opera “Il Trovatore” is deflated. The Marx Brothers comedy was in deed very ingenious and brilliant, which in comparison with today’s comedy which is based on stupidity, which is not fun at all; Marx Brothers comedy was mastermind. Nevertheless, it did not reach the superb insightful comedy of other authors.

Very few people have been able to take master the art of comedy in an intelligent way, that critiques fundamental things of humanity and society; the best examples of these genius are Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Buster Keaton was the only one that “could rival Chaplin in his insight into human relationships, into the conflict between the individual and the society. The character that Keaton fashioned compensated its apparent lack of emotion with the terrific range of his resourcefulness and imagination.” (A Short History of the Film, 2006, 158). Even tough Keaton was brilliant, the only and true genius of all time comedy was Charlie Chaplin who thought of the comic world as an opportunity that “provided the means to examine the serious world of human needs and societal structures. Chaplin was mature enough as an artist to show the ambivalence of power and wealth, its attractiveness and its emptiness. The comedies treat controversial themes such as drug addiction, poverty, hunger, crime on the streets, homosexuality, religious hypocrisy; but most importantly, the enduring qualities of the heart and the cruelty and complacency of institutions.” (A Short History of the Film, 2006, 110, 111, 112).
It is easy to figure out then, that while Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton devoted their lives to the construction of an insightful and intelligent critic to the society through comedy, the Marx Brothers were faithful to the comedy as an entertainment through their cartoon like ways. And that if someone compares the actual comedy in films to these conceptions, that person should know that with all the respect, the only critical comedy about society that is left, is seen in the world of TV animation in programs such as Family Guy, The Simpsons, American Dad, The Boondocks and/or Futurama; Its shameful, but true. Even worse film comedy nowadays is doomed and is sinking into nonsense stupidity.