So how did these brothers, growing up poor on the streets of New York in the 1890s, become internationally known comic characters who have made all types of people laugh for almost a century now? You don't achieve that sort of popularity by being highbrow, and you certainly don't by performing scripts from Salvador Dali. They were a top vaudeville act that eventually hit it big in Hollywood. James Joyce refers to them (apparently) in Finnegans Wake.Īt the same time, the Marx Brothers were popular with a mass audience. George Bernard Shaw called them his favorite actors. Actually, artists and intellectuals have always been big fans. Called Giraffes on Horseback Salad, it was pure surrealism: mirrors with holes in them, musicians with roast chickens on their heads, Groucho ordering Harpo to round up dwarfs, Chico installing indoor rain, etc.

Salvador Dali loved the Marx Brothers so much he wrote a screenplay for them. Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers, by Simon Louvish, New York: St. Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx, by Stefan Kanfer, New York: Alfred A.

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