American History

The humor in Horse Feathers, a 1932 film starring the four Marx Brothers, calls into mind the physicality of The Three Stooges. But where the Stooges play rambunctious and loveable buffoons clobbering and nearly maiming each other to death, the Marx Brothers (Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo) rely more on irreverent humor spiced with witty dialogue and memorable characters to incite laughter from their audience.

The dialogue in a Marx Brothers comedy is fast, crisp and always on the dot.  You seldom go to a Marx Brothers movie hoping to see Groucho clobbered by Harpos harp or Chico slipping on a banana peel.  You go see the Marx Brothers for the brilliance of their interplay and the precision of their comic timing.  Also, there is the subversive element in their comic sketches which incites the audience to share in the fun of poking the proverbial rod at any figure of authority, be he a doctor, a teacher, or the president of a school.

Horse Feathers basically ridicules American colleges and its obsession with college football during the Prohibition era.  To improve his teams chances of winning against a rival school, Huxley College president Professor Wagstaff (Groucho) goes to a speakeasy to recruit two professional players.  He finds Chico and Harpo instead, who both moonlight as icemen or bootleggers.  When rival school Darwin signed up the pros, Wagstaff then orders his new recruits to kidnap the players during the championship game.  The victims, however, turned the table on their kidnappers by locking them in a room.  In the end, the Huxley team wins the game by driving to a homerun on a makeshift chariot.

The silliness of Horse Feathers lies in the fact that it skewers authority figures, even ladies of society.  Connie Bailey, the lone female character whom everyone calls the college widow, is romanced by Wagstaffs son Frank. But she is also carrying on a secret dalliance with the coach of the rival team, who is paying her to get the Huxley signals for the championship game.  In the comedic world of the Marx Brothers, there is no such thing as a decent woman except one with an ugly face.

Horse Feathers also showcases the Marx Brothers classic dialogue comedy.  The most famous is the dead-pan exchange between Chico and Groucho in the speakeasy scene where Chico guards the door while Groucho tries to guess the password for entry. The password is Swordfish, which is used as a title of a 2001 movie starring John Travolta and referenced by other films like The Net and Hackers.

In spirit, Horse Feathers resembles a lively and often tongue-in-cheek comic sketch from Saturday Night Live.  You can almost imagine SNL alums Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd smirking while mouthing this dialogue
Murray Tomorrow we start tearing down the college. Ackroyd   But, Professor, where will the students sleep
Murray    Where they always sleep in the classroom.

The same anarchic yet irreverent spirit is found in movies like Smokey and the Bandit and Animal House, which incidentally both end in chaos ala Horse Feathers.  Like Horse Feathers, the two films feature sardonic anti-heroes at odds with authority figures who appear either pompous or stereotypical.  Both films also celebrate an up-yours love of mayhem that is a send-off to other Marx Brothers classics like Night at the Opera and Duck Soup.