Not you, Zeppo. Not you, Gummo.

September 22, 2015 9:52 AM

"In the Marx Brothers films, [Margaret] Dumont often played a society matron, usually a wealthy widow. During the Depression, this was a type of character that the audience loved to see humiliated, and it happened. At the same time, Dumont played the type sympathetically, because no matter how Groucho treated her, her characters obviously found him attractive, funny, and even sexy. Whereas the perfectly stereotyped society matron character would be constantly offended at the Marx Brothers antics, Dumont’s characters wavered between perfectly-timed embarrassment and full-on collaboration. Groucho simultaneously courted Dumont’s characters out of greed and opportunity and genuine attraction." The Fifth Marx Brother (Miss Cellania)

Another snippet: "But Dumont did much more than Marx Brothers movies. She played opposite W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, and other comedians in a total of 57 films."

Direct pointer to an article linked within the piece: It’s the Only Woman We Got: Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup (1933) (Stacia for She Blogged by Night)

posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (42 comments total)

The Marx Brothers are rightly regarded as immortal, but Dumont was also a comedic genius in her own way. Playing a straight man -- person, rather -- well takes a unique talent, and that she was.
posted by Gelatin at 9:57 AM on September 22, 2015 [20 favorites]

I just love watching Margaret Dumont. She really knew how to deliver maximum punch to a line like "Oh, Your Excellency."
posted by bakerina at 10:01 AM on September 22, 2015 [21 favorites]

The article refutes the claim that Dumont lacked a sense of humor by pointing out some times she barely stifles laughter on camera. I'd add that maintaining a straight face at the Marx Brothers antics -- known for naming the trope Harpo does something funny -- also took talent.
posted by Gelatin at 10:05 AM on September 22, 2015 [8 favorites]

Super under-appreciated (not least, at least in public, by the Marx Brothers themselves). None of the Marx Brothers movies in which she appears would work even a fraction as well without her. Can anyone imagine Duck Soup without Mrs. Gloria Teasdale? As she herself said, "I'm not a stooge. I'm the best straight woman in Hollywood."
posted by blucevalo at 10:06 AM on September 22, 2015 [11 favorites]

I've never overlooked Margaret Dumont; she was one of the greatest straight men (for lack of a better term) ever to grace the screen, and to be perfectly honest she contributed a whole lot more to the Marxes' comedy than Zeppo ever did. Her comic timing and reactions were flawless.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:08 AM on September 22, 2015 [7 favorites]

I adored Duck Soup when I was little (and now). When I was learning to sing in the classical style, my mother discouraged me from that use of voice -- "You sound like Margaret Dumont," she said. I had always taken it as a sharp observation and a warning. But I never asked myself: why shouldn't I sound like Margaret Dumont?

Raquel Torres was great, too, although not on the same level, and she decided to retire from acting early anyway. I keep thinking it was Lupe Velez in Duck Soup instead.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:10 AM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

My 15yo son loves the Marx brothers, and Margaret Dumont is such a stand-out in those movies. She's got an unflagging warmth and depth of humour that makes her one of the most human film personae I've seen.

Thanks for this post!
posted by sneebler at 10:21 AM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Fifth? Pfft. She was the fourth Marx Brother. Zeppo doesn't even count -- the only Marx Brothers movies he was in that she wasn't were Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, which are the third tier of Marx efforts, and he wasn't in A Night at the Opera, which is their pinnacle, or A Day at the Races.
posted by Etrigan at 10:25 AM on September 22, 2015 [5 favorites]

I've never overlooked Margaret Dumont; she was one of the greatest straight men (for lack of a better term) ever to grace the screen, and to be perfectly honest she contributed a whole lot more to the Marxes' comedy than Zeppo ever did.

Zeppo left the group as a performer after the first six feature films. He appears in Animal Crackers and Duck Soup but not in the MGM films -- the first film after he left was A Night at the Opera, which was the film that truly established the Marx Brothers as stars. They had been well known as stage performers, and the Paramount Pictures releases certainly were not flops, but it was A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races that turned the Marx Brothers into household names across the country.

The Paramount films are much more highly regarded today than they were at release -- they were basically skits strung together. Irving Thalberg, their first producer at MGM, insisted they have a more continuous plot and a "low point" where all the Marx Brothers appeared to have failed. He also made them act as more helpful characters, because he felt they appeared unsympathetic to the audience.

Zeppo? He didn't do badly at all. Not only did his agency become one of the bigger talent agency in Hollywood, his engineering firm (yes, he was a mechanical engineer) made him millions as well. His leaving, since he played the straight guy, left that hole, and Dumont was well placed and well able to step forward and take on more of the role, having worked with the brothers in earlier movies and the stage shows.

And it truly takes someone special to be able to hold the straight act when Groucho is going at you full bore.

When Groucho accepted an honorary academy award in 1974, he thank Chico and Harpo, of course, wishing they could have been there with him. He thanked his companion, Erin Fleming.

And then he thanked Margaret Dumont.

They knew.
posted by eriko at 10:29 AM on September 22, 2015 [42 favorites]

I really need to see more of these
posted by grobstein at 10:31 AM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

When Groucho accepted an honorary academy award in 1974, he thank Chico and Harpo, of course, wishing they could have been there with him. He thanked his companion, Erin Fleming.

And then he thanked Margaret Dumont.

He thanked Dumont before Fleming, while still taking a shot at Dumont:

Thank you. I want to thank those who voted for me to get this award. I wish that Harpo and Chico could be here to share it with me, this great honor. I wish Margaret Dumont could be here, too. She was a great straight woman for me, even though she never understood any of my jokes. She used to say, "Julie, what are they laughing at?" But most of all I want to thank my mother, because without her we never would have been anything. And last of all I'd like to thank Erin Fleming who makes my life worth living and who understands all my jokes.

posted by Etrigan at 10:34 AM on September 22, 2015 [7 favorites]

I can't imagine the Marx Brothers without her. She was integral to the troupe.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:36 AM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

“Remember men, we're fighting for this woman's honor; which is probably more than she ever did.” -- Duck Soup
posted by jim in austin at 10:37 AM on September 22, 2015 [8 favorites]

(Stands corrected. Well, sits)
posted by eriko at 10:41 AM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

This post needs more Gummo.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:49 AM on September 22, 2015

She was a great straight woman for me, even though she never understood any of my jokes.

The delightful resource of the Marx Brothers Encyclopedia has as Margaret Dumont's greatest achievement convincing Groucho that she didn't get the jokes. I'm not certain that Groucho really believed that -- as said above, she barely holds it together in a number of scenes. Then again, he could just have been too busy/maniacal/self-absorbed to notice her laughter at the time. If she did convince Groucho that she didn't get the jokes, she was the best joker out of all of them.

And while we're naming and ranking all Marx Brothers, we can't forget poor Manfred.
posted by Capt. Renault at 10:50 AM on September 22, 2015 [9 favorites]

I grew up watching the Marx Brothers films; I reckon I've seen 'A night at the opera' at least 15 times. Margaret Dumont elevated every scene she was in. Even as a child I recognized her as the secret sauce, as films without her just weren't as funny. As an adult, I appreciate her sexually-available-yet-respectable society matron character(s) all the more.
posted by Lisitasan at 10:55 AM on September 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

Zeppo doesn't even count

Quaintly enough, it was widely held by those close to the Marxes that in real life, Zeppo was by far the funniest of all of them. And he was also a great straight man. My husband and I can still crack each other up by saying, "You said a lot of things I didn't think were very important, so I just omitted them" or "Hungadunga."
posted by holborne at 10:57 AM on September 22, 2015 [9 favorites]

I'm not certain that Groucho really believed that -- as said above, she barely holds it together in a number of scenes. Then again, he could just have been too busy/maniacal/self-absorbed to notice her laughter at the time.

I would find it difficult to believe that Groucho -- who made his bones in vaudeville, where a performer had to be very aware of what jokes were working in real time -- didn't know to a single person who laughed at anything he ever did in his life. I suspect it started as a rib on her and he just kept it going for decades because it was funnier than "She was an excellent straight man."

If she did convince Groucho that she didn't get the jokes, she was the best joker out of all of them.

I also suspect he would let her think she'd gotten one over on him -- might as well keep your best co-star happy.
posted by Etrigan at 10:59 AM on September 22, 2015

Quaintly enough, it was widely held by those close to the Marxes that in real life, Zeppo was by far the funniest of all of them.

Quite possibly: "Zeppo never made [his second wife] convert to Judaism. Blakeley was of Methodist faith and claims that Zeppo told her she became Jewish by "injection"."
posted by Capt. Renault at 11:05 AM on September 22, 2015 [9 favorites]

I often get a Marx Brothers feeling when watching Spongebob Squarepants. The way they just milk and milk a character like Mr Krabs.
posted by colie at 11:05 AM on September 22, 2015

From her Wikipedia article:

In a 1940 interview with the World Wide Features press syndicate, Dumont said, "Scriptwriters build up to a laugh, but they don't allow any pause for it. That's where I come in. I ad lib—it doesn't matter what I say—just to kill a few seconds so you can enjoy the gag. I have to sense when the big laughs will come and fill in, or the audience will drown out the next gag with its own laughter... There's auhn art to playing straight. You must build up your man, but never top him, never steal the laughs from him."

I swear I've read a quote from Groucho where he acknowledges this. Man was a comedian and he was making a joke at the Oscars I think.

Dumont was a seasoned and gifted comic actress. Half the jokes don't work without her. Groucho and the boys wanted hey in their films because they were also seasoned professionals and knew that she made them better.
posted by Joey Michaels at 11:08 AM on September 22, 2015 [9 favorites]

So glad to see so much love for Miss Dumont! As others have pointed out, being the straight man to someone like the Marx Brothers is a thankless job, and it took a woman to do it!

She was also the only person outside the family who routinely called the brothers by their real names.

Groucho Marx was often unkind in remarks about Dumont, insulting her offscreen as if he were continuing a story line. That may seem strange since they had so much onscreen chemistry, but there are several explanations offered by Stacia at She Blogged by Night: Groucho may have been jealous of her popularity. He may have internalised the oft-repeated idea that Dumont was only playing herself, a clueless society matron, in the movies. After all, Dumont never publicly refuted the idea, even though she was obviously a gifted actress and comedian. Or Groucho might have just been entrenched in his role as an insult comedian.

Groucho didn't get the name "Groucho" for no reason. (And I personally don't buy the grouch bag story - everybody in the business wore them.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:19 AM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Zeppo doesn't even count

Quaintly enough, it was widely held by those close to the Marxes that in real life, Zeppo was by far the funniest of all of them.

Zeppo understudied the other three onstage, and could do perfect impressions. Groucho tells the story that when he was out having an appendectomy, he rushed himself out of the hospital earlier than he was supposed to because Zeppo was getting more laughs as Groucho than Groucho had.

I also saw an interview with (I think?) Chico's daughter, where she said that the only time she ever saw Groucho laugh was at one of Zeppo's stories, and he was literally rolling on the floor.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:24 AM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Or Groucho might have just been entrenched in his role as an insult comedian.

I always read this as proto-reality television persona styling-- they were adversarial onscreen, and so he kept up the act offscreen too, because it was part of his brand.

Before the Real Housewives of [Various Cities], there was Groucho and Miss Dumont. Performing the act offscreen was like a DVD extra before DVDs existed.

(I mean, I'm pretty sure he could have stopped casting her if he actually thought she was terrible.)
posted by a fiendish thingy at 11:26 AM on September 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

his engineering firm (yes, he was a mechanical engineer) made him millions as well.

He invented the clamp that held the bombs on the Enola Gay. Yep, Zeppo Marx won WWII.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:29 AM on September 22, 2015 [10 favorites]

I love that this post is about Margaret Dumont -- whom I briefly used as my Twitter icon -- and I would recommend that anyone who is interested in the dynamics of the Marx Brothers at all read George Howe Colt's book Brothers, which intersperses his memoir chapters of growing with three brothers against famous fraternal dynamics. The chapter he writes on the Marx Brothers is eye-opening. A sample:

Although they considered every woman fair game for pinches, kisses, and lascivious remarks, the brothers’ favorite target was Dumont, the majestic, grand dame of an actress who, as J. B. Priestley noted, could be shot out of a cannon without disturbing her dignity.

Onstage, the brothers subjected her to constant physical assault, clutching, grabbing, and pawing at her with the determination of piglets rooting for position at their mother’s flank.

Offstage, the brothers were no less determined to upset her equilibrium. On the train for the road tour of Animal Crackers, after Dumont had retired to her berth, the brothers ganged up on the conductor, pulled off his pants, and threw him on the sleeping Dumont, who woke up screaming. In Indianapolis, Groucho convinced the hotel detective that Dumont was a notorious prostitute. When the unsuspecting actress took the detective to her rooms to demonstrate that nothing could be further from the truth, Groucho emerged carrying a douche bag (“ You sneak,” he hissed at Dumont, eyeing her companion, “I don’t know why I put up with this”); whereupon Dumont and the detective walked into her room to find Chico lying on the bed in his underwear reading the Daily Racing Form (“ Oh, you got another guy— well, I’ll be back in half an hour”); whereupon bare-chested Zeppo emerged from the closet, a hotel towel around his waist (“ Just because I’m the youngest, you take my money, but you never get around to me”); whereupon Dumont, in tears, entered the bathroom to find a naked, grinning Harpo in the tub, a four-in-hand Windsor knot around his penis.

posted by sobell at 12:06 PM on September 22, 2015 [13 favorites]

Jesus H. Christ. OK, fuck the Marx Brothers.
posted by Cookiebastard at 12:13 PM on September 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

Yeah, I don't think that's funny.
posted by Gelatin at 12:20 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, I didn't even excerpt the paragraphs where Chico explained to his first wife how he and his brothers were used to sharing women, but if she had an issue with being communal property, he guessed he could say something.

(Chico was also notorious for having sex with a woman, then turning down the lights and letting his brothers have a go too -- they all wore the same silk shirts and so were under the impression they were deceiving the woman. Colt alleges in the book that this swap-the-brother gambit in the bed inspired the nightshirt sequence in Duck Soup.)
posted by sobell at 12:21 PM on September 22, 2015

Capt. Renault: The delightful resource of the Marx Brothers Encyclopedia has as Margaret Dumont's greatest achievement convincing Groucho that she didn't get the jokes.

In college, there was a running inside joke that one of our friends didn't understand sarcasm. It was really a joke on another friend, who would make a point of being sarcastic around the first friend. This ended in the ultimate tit-for-tat response in a household dispute: "Oh yeah, John understands sarcasm!"
posted by filthy light thief at 12:46 PM on September 22, 2015

An interesting use of a time machine would be to get Margaret Dumont and Carol Cleveland to swap roles...
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:51 PM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Groucho had a lot of insecurities. I'm sure Margaret Dumont was one of them.
posted by blob at 3:32 PM on September 22, 2015

OK, fuck the Marx Brothers.

I'm assuming they were convinced that Dumont would be amused rather than hurt. She knew them well and worked with them for many years after that. The anecdote does sound horrifying to those of us decades on and outside their circle of friends, but I'd like to think Dumont was such a good sport that the Bros. knew she wouldn't be harmed by their pranks.

There is a line dividing what is funny in a movie or story told later, and what's funny in real life as you're living it. Terry Gilliam has talked about his frustrations with Graham Chapman, that Chapman tried to make life like a Monty Python sketch, and he would be crawling around under the table biting people's ankles and stuff. (Chapman was also a legendary drunk, which may have had something to do with that.) Again, it makes a funny story, it could be a funny movie scene, but can you imagine having a friend who was biting people on the freaking ankles?

Tom Green doesn't get a lot of love these days, but I thought he was genuinely brilliant back in the 90s and one of his most impressive bits was about the divide between what's funny on TV and what's funny in real life. He got on a bus with a bunch of his fans and followed them home, then he wouldn't leave and he kept doing absurdist, rude Tom Green comedy at them until they were begging him to go away. It was exactly the stuff that had made them fans, but now it was real and in their lives and it was gross and annoying and kind of scary.

I don't think there's any denying that Groucho was a bit of a misogynist (as part of his general misanthropy), both onscreen and off. He said truly awful things about Dumont, awful things about women, and awful things about everybody. But it was a different time, and Groucho was Groucho. He had serious issues and a mean streak. He was also a brilliant comedian, one of the funniest men who ever silly walked. Dumont seemed to like him fine. She was the grownup target of the little boy antics in their movies, and she may have been the grownup in their friendship too.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:56 PM on September 22, 2015 [7 favorites]

Wait, we have to hate the Marx Brothers now?
posted by jeff-o-matic at 4:05 PM on September 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm assuming they were convinced that Dumont would be amused rather than hurt.

I'm also assuming they never bothered to ask if they were right, or really even really cared. Given how he later talked about her, why on earth would you think that Groucho had enough respect for her as a human being to find out if she wanted to be part of this super-duper-over-the-top-sexually-harassing-and-creepy pranks they played on someone that relied on them for her paychecks?
posted by Gygesringtone at 4:46 PM on September 22, 2015

I'm no expert, but I've read every book I can about the Marx brothers. The general conclusions one draws are that Groucho was a brilliant asshole, Chico was charming but driven entirely by his id, and Harpo was generally a genuinely sweet and funny man. Zeppo comes across as bitter and Gummo as resigned to his fate (as the brother who had to go to war and make an actual living).

The only biography/autobiography where Groucho comes across well is the autobiographical "Harpo Speaks" and you get the feeling that Harpo was just incapable of speaking ill of his brothers. Harpo, on the other hand, was just loved by everyone he ever met. Indeed, just read some of the correspondence between Harpo and notorious curmudgeon Alexander Woollcott and you get the sense that just being around Harpo made Woollcott a better, happier person.

But, yeah, Chico and especially Groucho weren't great human beings. They were great comedians, Chico was a great musician, and they were very progressive politically for their time, but they were awful to their wives (in both cases) and children (in Groucho's case - Chico was apparently a decent father, at least according to his daughter in "Growing Up With Chico").

One thing all of the Marx Brothers agreed on, though. The real power behind the group was their mother, Minnie Marx. She's a fascinating character and one deserving of a fully developed biography. She made them in every sense of that word.

So, I love the Marx Brother's work and think their first seven or eight movies are great, but I also recognize that they were all complicated human beings and that the "fuck the Marx Brothers" sentiment is not without merit.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:09 PM on September 22, 2015 [10 favorites]

someone that relied on them for her paychecks

Her late husband was heir to the founder of the American Sugar Refining Company (later Domino Sugar, now Domino Foods), which was one of the original Dow Jones companies. They may have been responsible for her paychecks, but she didn't rely on them.
posted by Etrigan at 5:23 PM on September 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

The original linked article makes the point Etrigan makes:

Dumont gave it all up in 1910 when she married sugar heir John Moller Jr. Apart from a small uncredited role in the silent movie A Tale of Two Cities in 1917, she did no acting during her marriage. Then Moller died in 1918. Dumont returned to the New York stage, where she rebuilt her reputation as a talented performer. She did not need the money; it was the love of her profession that had taken second place only to her husband in Dumont’s heart. She never remarried, but kept acting for the rest of her life.

This, of course, does not mean that the pranks they pulled on her were any less wrong and creepy. Nor does it change the power imbalance inherent in the relationship - Dumont wanted to act and surely wouldn't want to get kicked off the most successful show she'd yet been a part of, need of money or no.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:45 PM on September 22, 2015 [5 favorites]

Thank Yo!
posted by persona au gratin at 6:18 PM on September 22, 2015

If we're gonna be feminist about this, I think we have to consider Dumont's autonomy. I don't think she saw herself as a victim. Apparently she was independently wealthy, and she did act outside of the Marx movies. She worked with them for decades and seems to have had some fondness for them. Reading between the lines, I think they liked and respected her too... in their own weird Marx Brothers way. I can be horrified reading about that prank in 2015, but I wasn't Margaret Dumont in 19-whatever. We have reason to believe that, at the least, she didn't hold a grudge about it.

She was Margaret Dumont. Dealing with the shocking behavior of the Marx Brothers was her claim to fame. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd prefer to think she got a laugh out of that incident, after the (quite understandable) outrage passed. I wish we had her on the record about it. We don't.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:28 PM on September 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

Well, here's something she did in the last week of her life that might peripherally address her opinion on the matter. She performed with Groucho on Hollywood Palace.
posted by Joey Michaels at 6:59 PM on September 22, 2015