Zeppo Marx

Herbert Marx (February 25, 1901–November 29, 1979) is best known as Zeppo Marx, the name he used when he performed with his brothers, The Marx Brothers.

Zeppo defended

In recent years, a surge of adamant Zeppo supporters have risen to challenge the notion that he did not develop a comic persona in his films. Gerald Mast, in his book The Comic Mind: Comedy and Movies (University of Chicago Press: 1979), notes that Zeppo's comedic persona, while certainly more subtle than his brothers', is certainly present: :" added a fourth dimension as the cliché of the juvenile, the bland wooden espouser of sentiments that seem to exist only in the world of the sound stage. too schleppy, too nasal, and too wooden to be taken seriously" (282, 285).

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Danél Griffin, film critic for the University of Alaska Southeast, elaborates on Mast's theory:

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:"Zeppo?s parts were always intended to be a parody of the juvenile role often found in sappy musicals of the 1920s-30s era. Sometimes, he would just have a few lines, and he would otherwise be reduced to standing in the background with a big smile on his face. In these roles, he was a lampoon of the infamous extra, always grinning widely as a needless decoration, and always stiff and wooden. In other films, Zeppo would have a more significant role as the romantic lead, but he would still always be stiff, wooden, and, yes, with a big smile on his face. Either way, he could never be considered a real straight man. He was a sappy distortion of the real thing, and sort of the gateway through which we connected with the other Brothers. We perceived him as the ?normal, good-looking? one of the bunch, but was he really? Wasn?t there something about that line from The Cocoanuts, 'You can depend upon me, Mr. Hammer,' that was a little too...happy? Roger Ebert called Zeppo 'superfluous,' and that is the point of his character in the six Paramount films. He was the straight man only in pure Marxian sense?while his Brothers spat on movie clichés, he imitated them, proving in his own way to be quite a brilliant comedian." (Link)

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In her book Hello, I Must be Going: Groucho & His Friends, Charlotte Chandler defends Zeppo as being "the Marx Brothers' interpreter in the worlds they invade. He is neither totally a straight man nor totally a comedian, but combines elements of both, as did Margaret Dumont. Zeppo's importance to the Marx Brothers' initial success was as a Marx Brother who could 'pass' as a normal person. None of Zeppo's replacements (Allan Jones, Kenny Baker, and others) could assume this character as convincingly as Zeppo, because they were actors, and Zeppo was the real thing, cast to type" (562).

Related Topics:
Charlotte Chandler - Margaret Dumont

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Allen W. Ellis writes in his article Yes, Sir: The Legacy of Zeppo Marx (The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2003):

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:"Indeed, Zeppo is a link between the audience and Groucho, Harpo and Chico. In a sense, he is us on the screen. He knows who those guys are and what they are capable of. As he ambles out of a scene, perhaps it is to watch them do their business, to come back in as necessary to move the film along, and again to join in the celebration of the finish. Further, Zeppo is crucial to the absurdity of the Paramount films. The humor is in his incongruity. Typically he dresses like a normal person, in stark contrast to Groucho's greasepaint and 'formal' attire, Harpo's rags, and Chico's immigrant hand-me-downs. By most accounts, he is the handsomest of the brothers, yet that handsomeness is distorted by his familial resemblance to the others—sure, he's handsome, but it is a decidedly peculiar, Marxian handsomeness. By making the group four, Zeppo adds symmetry, and in the surrealistic worlds of the Paramount films, this symmetry upsets rather than confirms balance: it is chaos born of symmetry. That he is a plank in a maelstrom, along with the very concept of 'this guy' who is there for no real reason, who joins in and is accepted by these other three wildmen while the narrative offers no explanation, are wonderful in their pure absurdity. 'To string things together in a seemingly purposeless way,' said Mark Twain, 'and to be seemingly unaware that they are absurd, is the mark of American humor.' The 'sense' injected into the nonsense only compounds the nonsense" (21-22).

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