Some of the things that I found most interesting in watching the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup were the ways in which the style of humor was similar to and different from more modern works. The first scenes were fairly straightforward, and unfortunately timeless, political satire. An entirely unfit, crude man named Firefly becomes the president of Freedonia by happenstance, and immediately sets about offending people and breaking his own decrees. Soon though, the movie began heavily emphasizing a slapstick style of comedy that I can’t say I entirely understood at first. The spies Pinky and Chicolini are hired by a rival country’s ambassador to help bring down Firefly, and their hopeless inefficiency and irreverence accounts for a large amount of the comedy in the movie. However, the first time I watched Pinky quietly take a pair of scissors to his boss’s cigar and spread glue on the back of his pants, I thought to myself, “What an odd movie. I understand that this is intended to be funny. Is this what people thought was funny in the 30’s?”
Somehow, though, by the seventh time I watched Pinky cut somebody’s cigar/hat/pockets in half, it had become hilarious. By the time the two spies have infiltrated the house Firefly is staying in, I was dying laughing. At this point there are two imposters and the real president all wandering around dressed in exactly the same nightgown and hat, just barely avoiding one another, and the spies’ attempts to avoid detection are incredibly entertaining.
There was a point, I suppose, when wordless physical humor had to be the dominant form of comedy in movies because movies were silent. Hence the immense popularity of people like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The inclusion of Pinky (the mute nuisance) seems to be a nod to this history, and wonderfully demonstrates how even if a movie has words, humor can be achieved entirely without them.
On the other hand, the kind of humor I’m most accustomed to is based almost entirely in words. Something like Douglas Adams or A Christmas Story comes to mind: though the situation may be absurd, the humor come across primarily through detailed and witty description of that situation. That’s the entire premise of standup, too. A “comedian”, today, is a person who stands up on a stage and makes people laugh just by speaking — like the opposite of a Charlie Chaplin, or in this case a Pinky.
Slapstick is something I associate with the likes of Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry. I honestly can’t say that I’ve seen a whole lot of slapstick outside of cartoons. Specifically, old cartoons. Is slapstick something that has simply declined in popularity with time? Or is it still around, but declines in popularity with the age of the audience? I suppose this could be answered by examining the style of humor in kids’ cartoons being produced today, which unfortunately I don’t know much about.
Even the verbal humor that was present in Duck Soup struck me as a bit unfamiliar, in that it was based almost entirely in puns. Some of these came across well, but I suspect that many others may have gone over my head because I lack the cultural knowledge of a person in the 30’s. In fact, some of the physical jokes have lost necessary context over the past 85 years as well. For instance, there’s a scene in which the camera pans across a pair of women’s shoes at the foot of a bed, then a pair of men’s…and then four horseshoes. The camera then cuts to a man asleep next to a horse while the woman is in a different bed. I laughed, because it was absurd.
Apparently though, at the time this wasn’t an absurd joke. It was deliberate and pointed mockery of the Hays Code: a set of rules established by the organization that became the MPAA, governing the content of movies to ensure that they were not morally offensive or crude. The Hays Code was in place from 1930 to 1968, and one of its decrees was that a man and a woman could not be shown in a bed together. Hence, the man, the horse, and the woman in another bed. I did actually know about the Hays Code, but as someone who isn’t living in the 1930’s, it didn’t come to mind at all.
Overall, Duck Soup was an entertaining film that provides an interesting snapshot of comedy in the 1930’s.
(An additional note with no connection to the above, but which I found entertaining: There is a scene in which Chicolini and Pinky taunt a lemonade seller by stealing his hat, which turns into an increasingly ridiculous game of hat-swapping between them. Immediately, I felt like I’d seen this scene before. Three men haphazardly swapping hats… This bothered me for days, until I remembered that I have seen it — in Waiting for Godot, published 1953. Was it a deliberate reference to Duck Soup? Wikipedia’s footnotes tell me that indeed it was!)