Considering History: The Stooges, the Marx Brothers, and Comedy in Tough Times

This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.

Lately, it’s been virtually impossible to distinguish real news headlines from those found on satirical sites like The Onion. Humor and comedy certainly don’t hit the same when we’ve suffered painful losses.

But it’s in tough times that we need laughter most of all, as humor in such periods can offer a vital alternative (indeed, even a challenge) to the bleakest and hardest parts of life. We have a pair of excellent examples in the Stooges and the Marx Brothers: two family comedy troupes who emerged out of early 20^th century vaudeville, released their debut films in the first year of the Great Depression, and became, in their distinct yet complementary ways, indispensable parts of American society throughout the 1930s and ’40s.

The Marx Brothers were a group of five biological brothers who began their professional careers together, at the insistence of their showbiz mother. Minnie Schönberg (1864-1929) had been part of a performing family in her childhood in Germany, and after she immigrated to the United States at the age of 20 and married a tailor named Sam Marx, she continued to pursue a career in the business, alongside her brother, the vaudeville comedian who performed as Al Shean. As they gained a following in the early 20^th century, she and Shean were joined by Minnie’s five teenage sons: Leonard “Chico” Marx (1887-1961), Adolph “Harpo” Marx (1888-1964), Julius “Groucho” Marx (1890-1977), Milton “Gummo” Marx (1892-1977), and Herbert “Zeppo” Marx (1901-1979). The elder four brothers in particular became well known in the 1910s and ’20s for their own comedy act, “The Four Marx Brothers.”

Over the course of their professional history, The Stooges did feature a trio of biological brothers, but the group was formed and developed as part of a larger, multi-character vaudeville act. That act originated in 1922 with comedian Ted Healy (1896-1937), whose show “Ted Healy and His Stooges” featured in supporting roles the brothers Moe Howard (born Moses Horwitz, 1897-1975) and Shemp Howard (born Samuel Horwitz, 1895-1955). An unrelated comedian, Larry Fine (1902-1975), soon joined as the third Stooge, and the foursome performed together for a number of years. When Fox Film Corporation offered the Stooges a contract without Healy, they chose to separate and form their own comedic trio, “Howard, Fine, & Howard” (also known as “Three Lost Souls”). And when Shemp quit the group to tour with his own comedy revue, Moe and Larry decided to bring on Moe’s younger brother Jerry Howard (born Jerome Horwitz and known professionally as Curly, 1903-1952).

Those respective vaudeville starting points put all these performers and their comedic acts on the map, but it was a pair of films released during the first year of the Great Depression that really brought them to national prominence. For the Marx Brothers, that debut film was The Cocoanuts (1929), an adaptation of their 1925 musical comedy Broadway show (written for them by none other than Broadway legends Irving Berlin and George S. Kaufman) that featured a minimalist plot designed to maximize the brothers’ comedic stylings as well as their elaborate musical numbers (shot live for the film with an off-camera orchestra, a necessity in the early days of sound films).

The Cocoanuts (Uploaded to YouTube by Public Domain Diary)

For the Stooges, their film debut was in Soup to Nuts (1930), written by the famous cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg and featuring a pair of attractive young actors (Stanley Smith and Lucile Browne) in a cliched romantic plot that largely serves as an excuse for the Stooges (playing a trio of firefighters) to showcase their slapstick physical comedy, such as in the bravura closing sequence in which they (eventually) put out a blaze using a variety of wacky inventions.

A scene from Soup to Nuts (Uploaded to YouTube by Michael Bradley)

Neither of these films were destined to sit atop best-of lists, but both were quite influential in putting their comic stars on the cultural map. Certainly that’s due to the prodigious talents of the Marx Brothers and Stooges, talents on display in each case — from the witty wordplay and musical performances of the Marxes to the slapstick violence of the Stooges. But I have to believe that it’s also due to the historical moment in which they were released: Cocoanuts premiered in August 1929, just two months before the “Black Thursday” stock market crash, and was still in theaters when the crash occurred; and Soup to Nuts was released just over a year later, in September 1930, with the Great Depression deepening every day. In a period when it must have felt that things were getting worse and crazier every day, it seems logical enough that over-the-top silly comedies with “nuts” in their title would offer a much-needed counterpoint and escape from such realities.

The Marx Brothers and Stooges would continue to provide hugely successful comedic counterpoints for the next couple decades. After Cocoanuts the Marxes would star in eleven popular feature films between 1930 and 1941, with 1932’s Horse Feathers (a satire of both college life and Prohibition) earning them a cover story in Time magazine. After Soup to Nuts the Stooges appeared in well over 100 short films over the next decade and half: 13 more with Ted Healy in 1933 and 1934 before the Stooges fully went their own way; and then 97 starring Moe, Curly, and Larry as the Three Stooges between 1934 and 1946 (each of the three also appeared in his own shorts during these years). There was almost never a moment during the entirety of the Great Depression, nor the early wartime years that followed it, when American audiences couldn’t find one or both of these comedic groups on screen, offering their silliness and the laughter it produced as a vital antidote to some of our toughest times.