“A sentimental view of the Marx Brothers misses the

point about them even more than it does about Chaplin.

They were nervous and resourceful fighters who rose from

the bottom and never forgot it, and they deployed the

slapstick aggressions of everyday life as a coarse stimulant

and a way of gaining private ends. ” The London Review of Books casts a serious eye on Groucho, loaded with anecdotes and quotes.

One of the earliest sketches to lodge in the memory of

lifelong fans was a skit about the Emperor Napoleon called

I’ll Say She Is! Its mode is runaway farce, a pastiche

without a prayer for logic, and any sample suggests about

as much as any other: ‘Our just is cause. We cannot lose. I

am fighting for France, Liberty, and those three snakes

hiding behind the curtain. Farewell, vis-à-vis Fifi D’Orsay.

If my laundry comes, send it general delivery, care of

Russia, and count it – I was a sock short last week.’

A

memory of the three brothers all playing Napoleon in their

tricorn hats would find its way into Finnegans Wake,

according to Thornton Wilder, a formidable scholar of

Joyce. ‘This is the three lipoleum Coyne Grouching down

in the living detch.’ When told of the homage in later years,

Groucho was well pleased and only a little sceptical. ‘Did a

New York policeman, on his way back to Ireland to see his

dear old Mother Machree, encounter Joyce in some peat

bog and patiently explain to him that, at the Casino Theater

at 39th and Broadway, there were three young Jewish

fellows running around the stage shouting to an indifferent

world that they were all Napoleon?’