A few years ago, while browsing through a local bookstore, I came across what I now regard as a minor treasure of my home library, a book called By George. Compiled by someone named Donald Oliver, this is a collection of some of the lesser-known writings of George S. Kaufman, the man once widely known as “the gloomy dean of American comedy.” Kaufman was one of the greatest wits of the golden age of the American humorous essay, the era of James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, and the like. Kaufman wrote primarily for the stage, most famously now in collaboration with others–Beggar on Horseback (with Marc Connelly), You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner (with Moss Hart), Of Thee I Sing (with Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin), The Royal Family and Dinner at Eight (with Edna Ferber), and so on. He was also a noted director, and was greatly in demand as a play doctor, that now vanished breed that used to be called in for round-the-clock rewrites of Broadway-bound plays stalled in Philadelphia, Boston, or Hartford.
GROUCHO: Oh. Welcome to Cocoanut Manor. (Business) What do you boys want? Garage and bath?
CHICO: We want room and no bath.
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And so it goes: “Business with register,” “Business with bellboys,” “Quote business,” “Badge business”–all through the script. All this business business is a holdover from vaudeville, the medium in which the Marxes first made their marks. Each “business” notation indicates a space for some of the brothers’ unique shtick–some of it most likely cannibalized from their earlier routines. Whatever names appeared on their scripts and screenplays, the Marxes really did make up a lot of their best gags as they went along–which The Cocoanuts script makes clear. Three of the four brothers who moved from vaudeville to Broadway (Gummo had dropped out by this time) were famous (fellow actors would say notorious) for jettisoning script and direction whenever they felt like it and launching into wild, sometimes extended improvisations. The “Why a duck?” routine–one of Groucho and Chico’s most famous interchanges (“Here is a viaduct leading to the mainland.” “Awright. Why a duck?” And on into terminal confusion)–doesn’t appear in Kaufman’s script. It was added during the Broadway run, and remains a high point of the movie.
The filmed versions of The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers are probably the closest we can come to experiencing the Marxes onstage, given that they’re virtually cinematic recordings of the Broadway shows (filmed by Paramount at its Long Island studios). But, of course, the routines remain set in stone there. In a sense, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup–both reportedly largely improvised in the making and drawing heavily on the brothers’ vaudeville shtick–are true records of Marxist humor in the medium they were to work in for most of their careers. As for their brief, 26-episode contribution to the golden age of radio comedy, nothing remains but the scripts.
Three episodes later, after the sponsors had heard from a litigious lawyer whose name really was Beagle, the name of the show and one of its leads underwent an almost unannounced change; Groucho became Waldorf T. (for Tecumseh) Flywheel (“the boss got a divorce and changed his name back to Flywheel”)–prefiguring Groucho’s private eye in The Big Store (1941), Wolf J. Flywheel (with Chico as Ravelli).
I didn’t actually stumble upon Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel in a bookstore. I heard it, appropriately enough, on the radio, on an NPR program (All Things Considered, I believe) whose producers had hired actors to impersonate the Marxes. The quality of the impersonations was enough to convince me that I’m really not all that anxious to see one of those Cocoanuts or Animal Crackers stage revivals, but the quality of the material they were reading was enough to make me rush to get the book. The next best thing to hearing Groucho and Chico deliver the lines in reality is probably hearing them deliver them in your head.
