Marx Brothers

You're a movie watcher.

I've seen you talk about the Marx Brothers.

Sure.

Worst sports movie ever made.

It's true in comedy, too, where you can say, well, you know, I saw this with the students I taught, you know, to them, you know, comedy started with Adam Sandler.

You know, and when I say, you know, and if you started to talk about something like the Marx Brothers, which was a rite of passage for a comedy fan generation after generation, you might as well have been talking about leaders of the Russian Revolution.

You know, they had no idea who you were talking about.

Or W.C. Fields.

And again, I think that's the wonderful thing about the horror realm.

I have been, you know, more, much more heartbroken about stuff that has slipped off the, the, the pop culture scale in other genres, comedy changes so fast that, you know, comedy tastes change so fast.

I understand it, but it does break my heart that people don't know Laurel and Hardy anymore, or, you know, um, or the Marx brothers or Buster Keaton, you know, um, you know, and other genres, you know, I, I think that, that, that's also true.

Um, I you and I would I would always use my classes as sort of, you know, what do you know and what are you watching or what haven't you watched? And I realized very, very quickly that, you know, there's some things they would recognize iconically, like they recognize the name Marilyn Monroe.

I don't know.

The guy for the Marx Brothers.

The Marx Brothers.

Is it not Karl Marx? It's not Karl Marx.

I don't know what his first name is.

So I suppose it could have gone on being fun off and on, or it could have gone worse, I don't know.

It's just that when you grow up, you know, we don't want to be the crazy gang, which they might know over here, which is British, or the Marx Brothers, which is sort of being dragged on stage, playing She Loves You, when we've got, you know, asthma and tuberculosis, and when we're 50, you know.

Here they are again, yesterday, oh my God.

All right.

And at the same time, all I'm devouring creatively really is rap music, indie music, and sitcoms and comic movies.

It's all I ever loved, you know? My dad had me watching Harold Lloyd and the Marx Brothers when I was little.

I was raised right.

As I got older, you know, by the time I was 10, 11, I was watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, Rise and Fall of Reginald Perry, which I didn't understand at all.

I should have sent

it to the Marx Brothers.

Or something to that effect.

But that was also very funny.

It's sort of like...

I love the Marx Brothers.

I was influenced by watching Marx Brothers.

And they're sort of like half and half.

There's topical humor, and if you understand the time, it's funnier than if you don't understand the time.

Well, it certainly didn't influence my comedy, but To Kill a Mockingbird is a real favorite of mine.

I just really love that film.

As a genre, the films of Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen before he started doing serious films, when he did Take the Money and Run and Bananas and Sleeper, the absurdist comedy of those films had a big influence on me.

Although, you know, they do crop up.

I mean, there's a famous one is Mel Brooks and the Producers, which was based on a script that was written for the Marx Brothers that Mel Brooks found when he and Woody Allen were working on Show of Shows for Sid Caesar.

Apparently, it was just lying in a drawer.

And that's how the whole thing started.