Stowaway Speakers: The Diasporic Politics of Funny English in A Night at the Opera

JESSICA WOLFE University of Toronto [email protected]

Verbal Humour and Diaspora

THIS PAPER BEGAN AS AN ATTEMPT TO RECONCILE THE LINGUISTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF WOODY ALLEN’S COMEDY WITH AN ELUSIVE AND DIASPORIC ‘JEWISH’ SENSIBILITY, a search that resulted in an investigation of the verbal dynamics of diaspora in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935). Initial investigations revealed that Allen’s language was not necessarily coded Jewish in itself, since he doesn’t use many Yiddishisms, nor is his New York accent inflected with an identifiably Jewish character. Rather it seemed that although he is known as a Jewish comic (Berger 2001, 132), the essence of his humour lay in his deployment of an ‘outsider’ voice operating within a hegemonic society. In his early films, this slant perspective becomes allied with a New-York-City cosmopolitanism and anxious intellectualism, and glamorizes a certain kind of postmodern bohemianism, or intelligentsia, perhaps more than any particular ethnic affiliation. Allen’s appeal, therefore, may derive less from ‘Jewish’ talking than ‘smart’ talking with an outsider perspective. As I shall argue, this comic stance is a form of self-defense for socially marginalized subjects, and has a history that connects not only to the earlier Jewish American comics the Marx Brothers, but also to early twentieth-century experiences of immigration to New York City. While A Night at the Opera represents this very migration, the perspective of its humour is informed by the exclusions non-English speaking or bilingual immigrants face upon arrival.

New York City and the Humour of Diasporic Perspectives

New York City as a locus for ethnic or cultural identity may be an important contributor to the construction of the identities and personas that generate humorous ‘outsider’ positions. While it is a cultural and intellectual centre and thus a key setting for the intellectualism that has often been allied with Jewish comic personas, it is also, crucially, a portal for new immigrants into America. The perspectives the idea of New York makes available are indebted to its history as a hub of immigration—a community made of outsiders. If laughter, furthermore, is a linguistic response to the exposure of the illogical, of zones of discrepancy between the real and the real Stowaway Speakers JESSICA WOLFE 2 as it is perceived, enacted, and acted upon, then it may also be a linguistic response that outsider or immigrant perspectives are better able to generate. As Walter Nash writes, ‘the language of humour dances most often on the points of some dual principle, an ambiguity, a figure and ground, an overt appearance and a covert reality’ while ‘We share our humour with those who have shared our history and who understand our way of interpreting experience’ (Nash 1985, 7, 9). While jokes come from an invocation of perspective, being unfamiliar to a social system makes its foibles and irrationalities more visible, and lowers the stakes of insult; people who are outside of a community have nothing to loose by lampooning it—but they might have something to gain. While the cultural foment of New York City contributed to its establishment as a cultural turbine, its identity as a locale of immigrant experience is probably also responsible in part for its history of fostering the ironic perspective often associated with Jewish American comedy.

The Social World of the Marx Brothers’ Verbal Humour

The social background of the Marx Brothers gave them access to precisely this second- generation immigrant’s outsider perspective. They were born to Jewish immigrant parents, and grew up very poor in Manhattan’s Upper East Side (Louvish 2000, 7-8). They were initially musical performers, and only turned to comedy after an unexpected occurrence at a performance in the southern United States: when the audience became distracted by a wayward mule, Groucho started insulting them, and instead of becoming offended, they laughed (Gardner 2009, 17). This event jumpstarted the comedic careers of the brothers, of whom three in particular, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico, appear in most of the movies. Whether or not this anecdote is apocryphal, it bespeaks the almost etymological indebtedness of the humour of the Brothers to transgressions against a dominant community, one that persists quite clearly in A Night at the Opera. Their stance as speakers and agents, especially Groucho’s character Otis B. Driftwood, is characterized by thorough irreverence, a humorous opposition to hegemonic social codes. While the brothers rely on this ‘outsider’ stance for their humour, the stock characters each one develops is differentiated from the others through language variations that themselves indicate greater or lesser variance from the mainstream through ethnic, economic, and political identifications. Groucho always plays the main comedic character, who moves in upper-class circles but retains a lower-class New-York accent (Winokur 1996, 139). His younger brother Chico early on developed an Italian accent to play Groucho’s straight man, while Harpo, the brother most characterized by slapstick comedy is named for his abilities as a Harpist, and communicates in verbal interactions by squeezing a horn. He circumnavigates spoken language through physical humour, a form of communication with its own syntax, through his proficiency as a musician and identification with abstract sound rather than words. Indeed, Chico is also an excellent musician and often plays the piano in the Brothers’ films, leaving Groucho to be the one who ‘plays’ most at language.

Language, Silence, and the Body Politic

Groucho’s emphatically verbal expression manifests in his body as well as in his words, while his accent marks his character as coming from a specific sociopolitical origin—a lower class, and Stowaway Speakers JESSICA WOLFE 3

probably Jewish place in New York City. Christopher Beach writes that ‘Groucho’s greasepaint eyebrows and mustache, cigar and glasses, oversized tuxedo, bent-over lope, and lecherous leer, are all commensurate with the verbal overabundance, the unquenchable appetite (for money, sex, power, or whatever he can hope to get), and the impulsive, antisocial, obnoxious behavior that mark him as an obvious arriviste’ (Beach 2002, 26). The excesses of his verbiage are mirrored in his body, and themselves reflect his excesses of desire as a manipulator and social climber. With language being appended to the meaning of the individual within the social world, Beach goes on to highlight what he calls the ‘status’ of language itself, which ‘appears to be constantly devalued, or at least revalued, by the linguistic creativity of the Brothers’ (Beach 2002, 26). The verbal play of their characters can be said to poke at, mess with, and generally ridicule language itself, the most powerful field legislating their lives according to hegemonic political standards. This play can be seen as obliquely aggressive, an ironic antagonism, and a form of resistance fighting. While Beach argues that ‘Harpo is the extreme example of the devaluation of language, since he manages to get along perfectly well without using it at all’ (Beach 2002, 26), this claim may be too salutary an assessment of the Brothers’ verbal antics. Harpo does struggle because he can’t speak: his inability to report or defend himself from his employer’s abuse is a plot point of A Night at the Opera, and replicates the hardships that new immigrant workers with low proficiency in the dominant language always risk. While I appreciate Beach’s suggestion that Groucho’s facial apparatus mirrors his ‘verbal overabundance’, I think the character doesn’t represent a pure arriviste so much as a hilarious and deeply original resistance fighter. Language here isn’t being devalued so much as being marked as the medium through which ethnically marginalized subjects can register their recalcitrance to hegemonic society—even if doing so means giving language up altogether, despite the doubtless costs. Rather than a joyful and exuberant eschewal of language, Harpo’s speechlessness can be read as a kind of linguistic hunger strike, a refusal to participate in an oppressive verbal system of power. His silence combats and draws attention to the social disablement that low-language skills cause.

A Night at the Opera (1935) as Immigration Narrative & Artifact of Diasporic Englishes

The humorous speaking-subject positions of the Marx Brothers’ characters are thus indebted to histories of ethnic exclusion, so the immigration narrative of their 1935 film A Night at the Opera offers a prime demonstration of the diasporic languages they deploy. The story begins in Italy, where young opera singers are being recruited for the New York Opera Company. The paltry romantic conflict of the film occurs among the singers: little-known but brilliant tenor Ricardo Baroni is in love with the diva Rosa, while the pompous and unappealing celebrity tenor Lasparri insists on his right to her hand. Groucho Marx plays Mr. Otis B. Driftwood, a hanger- on of the rich Mrs. Claypool, who is about to become a major patron of the Opera Company. When Lasparri gets picked up by the New York Opera Company, he invites Rosa to come along—so Ricardo and his henchmen, played by Chico and Harpo Marx, stow away in the boat and get caught up in endless shenanigans with Driftwood. The accents of the main characters signify the politics of language in the film, and announce the moves towards ‘verbal anarchy’ that some of the gags and puns develop. Though the beautiful romantic leads are all supposed be Italians, as the stars of the film, they all speak Stowaway Speakers JESSICA WOLFE 4

English with not only received pronunciation, but with the upper-class ‘transatlantic’ accent that the richest character in the film, Mrs. Claypool, also speaks. Being the romantic star—the implied locus of audience desire and aspiration—thus entails an upper-class position that is signified through speech. In contrast to the other Italian immigrants who speak with the transatlantic accent, Chico retains the heavy and fake Italian accent of his stock character in all the Marx Brothers’ films. He consistently adds schwas between words, and stresses penultimate syllables, as though in a case example from Robert Blumenfeld’s Accents (Blumenfeld 1999, 146- 49). In American settings, this accent merely performs an immigrant persona, but in this film, in which most of the characters are supposed to be immigrants but speak like ‘old money’, the heavy accent announces the lower-class status that his shabby clothes and illiteracy confirm. This juxtaposition of accents corresponds to what Sarah Kozloff identifies as a common speech trope of screwball comedies, in which ‘‘Western’, ‘hick’, and ‘foreign’ accents are all placed in opposition to [...] the crisp articulation of the ‘transatlantic style’ advocated by dialogue coaches of the 1930s as ‘proper’ pronunciation’ (Kozloff 2000, 173). The film thus entrenches geographic, cultural, and sociological or class categories through the accents of its characters. This spectrum of class-identifications through language is transgressed by Groucho’s character. Though he fraternizes with the upper-class characters, especially Mrs. Claypool, Mr. Otis B. Driftwood speaks with a light but nevertheless lower-class identified New York City accent. His non-rhotic style and intrusive ‘r’, along with his vowel shift, which causes him to pronounce ‘er’ as ‘ir’, and ‘or’ as ‘oy’ (i.e. ‘first’ becomes ‘foyst’), all situate his speech pattern within a lower-class Brooklyn accent (Blumenfeld 1999, 111-113). While Chico’s social movements are confined to other poor characters and he speaks with a markedly ‘foreign’ accent, as a circulating and transgressive agent, Groucho does business with everyone, from Chico to Mrs. Claypool, and speaks with an accent that ‘passes’ as American, but is still ‘foreign’ in the upper-class social sphere.

Stowaway Speakers

One way of thinking about the dynamics at play in the schema of accents that the characters in this film elaborate is through the idea of the stowaway, which itself forms a major part of the plot in A Night at the Opera. In the cases of both the Italian singers and Driftwood, the accents the characters put on make them stowaways in the social category in which they move. The bohemian singers are unlikely stowaways in the upper class transatlantic accent, while Driftwood’s lower class accent makes him a stowaway in the upper-class circles in which he moves freely. His name itself, ‘driftwood’, should be evocative here. He is not from a family with long ‘roots’, but is nevertheless able to float where he will. This stowaway status is significant for the relations to the English language the Marx- Brothers characters dramatize in the film. Being a stowaway means being an infiltrator within a larger dominant, and powerful system—someone who has managed to divert the intent of the incontrovertible by being small. Read through language ability, we can imagine the stowaway being the one who sneaks past the regular codes governing the meaning of language, so as to achieve some form of communication that exceeds what language itself would seem to permit. Recalling the relationship between humour and immigrant perspective invoked above, this subversion of dominant codes may mirror the revelation of irrationalities that erupt in laughter when verbal response fails. Puns and word games turn speakers into stowaways in language. They trip language up on itself, a gesture that can become overtly and radically political when Stowaway Speakers JESSICA WOLFE 5

language is read as a representation of a dominant political system, a social hierarchy or organization that may be unwelcoming to outsiders.

The Sociology of Diasporic Literacy in A Night at the Opera (1935)

Infiltrating this social system, this political field of language, is a matter of literacy. Being able to enact and participate in fluid exchanges with the language and its manifestations, in chats as well as documents implies a proficient ability to read, write, speak and listen in English, which may pose certain restrictions to bilingual, immigrant or marginalized subjects. In immigrant settings or whenever the language becomes diasporized, literacy can be a major block to actually becoming a fully enfranchised speaking, voting, or represented citizen of the hegemonic language community. To demonstrate in particular the stakes of the Marx Brothers’ language games and postures in this film, I will spend a substantial portion of the rest of this paper examining one scene in detail for the dynamics of diasporic literacy it illustrates. Having mistaken Fiorello for the representative of the top tenor, Driftwood attempts to persuade him to sign a contract to sing for ten dollars a night in New York. If the deal goes through, Driftwood himself will stand to exceed the singer’s own profits by an order of magnitude. When Driftwood hands him a contract to sign, however, Fiorello not only mistrusts legal language and so opposes statements about the ‘party of the first part’ on the grounds that he doesn’t ‘like’ them, but also uses banter to delay revealing that he can’t read:

Driftwood: You just put his name and you sign at the bottom. There’s no need of you reading that because these are duplicates. Fiorello: Yes they’re duplicates. Duplicates, eh. Driftwood: I say they’re duplicates. Fiorello: Alright sure these are duplicates. Driftwood: Don’t you know what duplicates are? Fiorello: Sure, there’s five kids up in Canada. Driftwood: Well, I wouldn’t know about that. I haven’t been in Canada[r] in yea[h]s.

This exchange focalizes the challenges of acquiring a functional vocabulary in a second language by fixating on one multi-syllable and fairly abstract Latinate word—’duplicate.’ While Fiorello can’t help but ultimately reveal his lack of versification in the paper-based administrative codes that give Driftwood’s version of the word ‘duplicate’ its meaning, he rescues his semblance of adequate participation in the dominant social structure by shifting the word in question and thus the playing field, as it were, from legal and written codes to pop culture. His replacement of ‘duplicate’ with ‘quintuplet’ restores his social capital, since he thus demonstrates that he is literate in pop culture if not in ‘legalese’ or the English language. Literacy here does not imply an ability to decipher visual representations of language, but rather the accumulation of knowledge and technique that enables participation in social, political, and cultural systems of organization and control. This analysis falls in line with Michael Stubbs’ call for a sociolinguistic theory of literacy, which would ‘account for the place of written language, both in relation to forms of spoken language, and also in relation to the communicative functions served by different types of language in different social settings’ (Stubbs 1980, 16). Fiorello’s use of banter to mask his illiteracy is therefore a crucial component of his diasporic literacy. Faced with the barriers to social mobility of being an accented and Stowaway Speakers JESSICA WOLFE 6

illiterate English speaker, successful banter is an act of communication that is likely to prove more lucrative than being able to read any particular contract: proficient banter, even in a diasporic English, has the potential to atone for illiteracy.

Illiteracy as Physical Disability

Even as the contract scene constructs literacy as a multi-faceted social participation through language, it markedly connects this kind of socio-political enfranchisement with being able- bodied. Being literate consists of being able to see, hear, and chatter in the right way in one’s community of choice. Becoming more and more frustrated with Fiorello’s delayed reading, Driftwood exclaims, ‘Well go ahead and read it!’

Fiorello: What does it say? Driftwood: Well go on and read it! Fiorello: Alright you read it. Driftwood: Alright I’ll read it to you. Can you hear? Fiorello: I haven’t h[oy]d anything yet. Did you say anything? Driftwood: No I haven’t said anything w[oy]th hearing. Fiorello: Well that’s why I haven’t h[oy]d anything. Driftwood: Well that’s why I didn’t say anything. Fiorello: Can you read? Driftwood: [stretching his arms out as far as possible to get the contract in focus] I can read but I can’t see it.

Driftwood’s joke, ‘Can you hear?’ implies that being illiterate is on the same order of inability as being deaf, while his subsequent admission that he himself can read, but struggles to see well enough to read fine print extends this comparison. Even as it conflates the physical disabilities of blindness and deafness with illiteracy, the exchange over the contract worries at and fetishizes the mechanics of legal interactions and language. The scene as a whole draws out the many tyrannies of ‘fine print’ over our capacities to understand. Not only is the tiny writing on the contract illegible and incomprehensible for being written in legal code, but its very smallness and written-ness are exclusionary. The scene thus draws attention to how the insistence of the dominant regulatory systems on having legal bonds be put in writing can function as an excluding force against individuals who are less versed in the community’s primary language. In the joking economy of this scene, therefore, to be illiterate is to be operating outside of the linguistic mechanisms of hegemonic society, effectively disabled, practically deaf and blind. This alignment of literacy or verbal enfranchisement with physical ability is consolidated in Driftwood’s attempt to stretch the contract far away from his torso so as to see it more clearly. That initially his arms as well as his eyes fail in this attempt to bring the contract into focus both deconstructs the value of the written text, and his own body. Both his body and the object of the contract fail within the system of value and social organization implied by the idea of the contract, while literacy becomes a problem of the body, of being, and of being in society. By aligning the failures of eyes, ears, and arm length with the difficulty of apprehending complex meaning in spoken language alone (as one must if one is illiterate)—the scene demonstrates that failures of linguistic ability obstruct individuals’ enfranchisement and Stowaway Speakers JESSICA WOLFE 7

abilities to participate in hegemonic communities in the same way that frailties of their bodies do.

Illiteracy as Social Danger

While this identification of the body as the site of a failure to participate in hegemonic society should recall racist exclusions leveled against bodies classed as ethnic by cultural majorities, this physical frailty associated with language is also reminiscent of other tropes of representing literacy on film. Indeed, in their book on literacy in popular culture, Williams and Zenger contend that ‘The misreading of texts, the misinterpretation of writing, the misplaced trust in the written word, are common paths to psychological and physical danger in the movies’ (Williams and Zenger 2007, 105). In this case, however, the danger is not overtly physical. Though the film is rife with extravagant punches and head-banging gags, and, during this scene, the two men are standing with their feet resting on the prostrate body of a man they have just knocked unconscious, none of this cartoonish and cardboard-prop violence can be said to be ‘real’. The actual threat and danger that the scenario of the film poses to the bodies of all its characters is poverty and obscurity. If he can’t succeed in some form of literacy through this contract exchange, Fiorello has little chance of ‘making it’ in America; he is in danger of falling not only in, but out of social class. As Williams and Zenger write, ‘Even in films that focus on the individual and his or her plight, the representations of literacy practices often mark and reinforce existing notions and systems of social class’ (Williams and Zenger 2007, 42). The contract scene, therefore, demonstrates the flipside of the American dream: that America shuts non-English speakers (or readers) out even before they arrive, but also that being able to manipulate language and be persuasive can get you wherever you want to go. The linguistic ability to read the situations challenging their freedom (whether operatic or legal in scope) is the real gate for new immigrants to push through, and greater in its barriers to really arriving in America than the Atlantic ocean.

Diasporic Literacy, Chatter, and the Law

It might be helpful here to consider ‘accented’ literacy as a way of describing the links between diasporic language and social enfranchisement. Being a diasporic language speaker has implications for the life of the individual as well as for the language that takes on new forms in his or her mouth. Thinking about accented, or diasporic literacy, requires solid links between speech and reading as forms of social participation, which this scene highlights in particular by contrasting the casual chatter with legalese—both of which lose meaning by being repetitious in different ways. While Groucho wears on Chico’s patience through his constant repetition of ‘the party of the first (second/third/fourth, etc) part’, much of their actual dialogue is made up of words they each use multiple times. For example, in this nine-hundred word dialogue, ‘alright’ is said nine times, ‘now’ eight times, and ‘well’ appears thirty-one times. Because these words are combined with gesture and tonal inflection, they don’t seem to be repetitive when uttered. Excess verbal meaning is likewise dispensed with as they proceed in their conversation by repeating what the other is saying, as evinced in the excerpts quoted above. The scene thus focuses on the mechanics of chatter, and reveals that verbally significant sentences are less meaningful in this social context than the give and take of timing, gestures, and tone, and the signification of the body simply being present. Stowaway Speakers JESSICA WOLFE 8

The ultimate insignificance of legal language is equally confirmed in their exchange during the final moments of the scene. After a thick layering of double entendres and misunderstandings, Driftwood hands his pen to Fiorello to sign the last scrap of the contract they have torn up together:

Fiorello: Eh, I forgot to tell you, I can’t write. Driftwood: Well that’s alright there’s no ink in the pen anyhow. But listen it’s a contract isn’t it? Fiorello: Oh sure.

This conclusion of the scene reveals that although they have torn up its paper representation, the contract has been decided through their casual interaction, as much in the actual words they say. For Fiorello as for all immigrants, language participation is a route to economic enfranchisement—but a successful conversation may simply consist of tossing almost any kind of vocal response back when it’s needed. Most importantly, this scene demonstrates the unstable and rarely tested boundaries and relationship between language as it exists among daily speakers and language as it exists in legal documents that legislate their daily actions and lives, and identifies this tension as a question of divergent forms of literacy. Reams of legal language are rarely vocalized outside of court, rarely read out loud, and exist silently in contrast to chatter. As a result, the value of this kind of language in everyday life is difficult to reconcile with the value of conversation—and poses a question about priorities to immigrant language-learners. The scene, in other words, asks which kind of language is heeded more in practice, the ‘party of the first part’, or chat over a table. Since migrants and their children are tested both by laws and state policies which restrict mobility, but also by the challenges of multilingualism, their experiences simultaneously highlight the difficulties of both these zones of verbal tension. The diasporic experience therefore itself raises the question of the relationship between practical language ability and legal language.

Tearing Up the Verbal Contract

Ultimately, the greatest radicalism of the contract-scene exchange is that these marginalized characters are literally tearing down the hegemonic language that is restrictive to them as they go. They forge the trust of the contract through the verbal play they engage in as they tear it up. Writing of the ‘dangerous aspect of all these funny jokes’, Antonin Artaud claims that the Marx Brothers’ humour indicates the exercise of a poetic spirit that ‘always leads toward a kind of boiling anarchy, an essential disintegration of the real by poetry’ (Artaud 1958, 144). In the context of sociolinguistics, this ‘disintegration of the real’ may be a secession from language itself, a gesture that explains Harpo’s problematic stance as a non-speaking conversationalist and sonic though non-verbal participant in the interactions on screen. While his abstention from speech can be read as a frailty, another verbal disability being foregrounded, it can also be interpreted as a refusal to operate within a hegemonic and repressive system. His wordlessness is a refusal to play according to the rules of the game that has positioned him as an outsider. Inarticulate, or at least non-verbal, in the figure of Harpo’s character the repressed second-generation immigrant who faces significant challenges to social mobility due to deficiencies of social, educational, and linguistic capital, becomes aligned with other silent Stowaway Speakers JESSICA WOLFE 9 subjects. Like the animals and children that the dominant political system must in some way account for and protect, and towards whom adults adopt attitudes of tender condescension, non-RP English diasporic speakers in America (and Canada) are nevertheless too often voiceless within the system that controls them. The odd gag of the opening MGM credits, in which the mug-shot faces of the Marx Brothers, Groucho, Chico, and Harpo in turn replace the roaring lion should itself announce this vexed relation to verbal expression, and connects with the Brothers’ alignment of verbal ability with physical enfranchisement. At the header of their film, as they are cast within the logo of the massive studio underwriting their antics, the Brothers announce their comedy with a roar—the utterance that that exceeds language while registering the recalcitrance of an animal, a subject that normally goes unrecognized within hegemonic and verbal social order. Figured as disability, struggles to operate in hegemonic languages thus open a representational invitation to liken ‘ethnic’ outsiders or immigrants to animals—speechless subjects. Verbal games like puns or double entendres, but also music, silence, and facial prosthetics like eye glasses (and grease paint facial hair) operate as representations, replacements, or disruptions of hegemonic language ability. By becoming wildly popular humourists, by making audiences clamour to be insulted, the Marx Brothers overcame the classic admonition to children—subjects whose voices, like animals, are perennially ignored by inheritors of hegemonic power—that they ‘speak only when spoken to’. As working class children of immigrants, this call to silence might otherwise have been effectively also leveled towards them. To return to the opening motivations of my study, which initially intended to discover some kind of ‘Jewishness’ in humorous films, it would seem that talking slant, discovering humour in pursuing an outsider perspective may not be traceable to a particular ethnic subject position that registers its identification in a diasporic English. Nevertheless, the possibility remains that the elusive quality I associated with ‘Jewishness’ in verbal cinematic wit makes its presence felt as a defining feature of the Marx Brothers’ humour by problematizing its very relation to dominant language, by articulating the possibility of eschewing language in order to register resistance, and identifying language as the very substrate of sociopolitical participation and justice. A ‘diasporic English’ speaker can signify therefore not simply a person with an accent, or an English-user who lives far from the birthplace of the language, but also a speaking subject who harbours a skeptical, self-consciously frail, and historically resistant attitude towards the politics, geographies, and social codes implied by this dominant language and its hegemonic uses.

Stowaway Speakers JESSICA WOLFE 10 References

Ethnicity and Twentieth Century American Comedy

Berger, Arthur Asa. 2001. Jewish Jesters: A Study in American Popular Comedy. Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Winokur, Mark. 1996. American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy. New York: St. Martin’s.

Language, Comedy, and Film

Beach, Christopher. 2002. Class, Language, and American Film Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Blumenfeld, Robert. 1999. Accents: A Manual for Actors. New York: Limelight. Kozloff, Sarah. 2000. Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley, CA: U of California P. Nash, Walter. 1985. The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse. London: Longman.

The Marx Brothers

Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theatre and Its Double. Tr. Mary Carolyn Richards. New York: Grove. Gardner, Martin A. 2009. The Marx Brothers as Social Critics: Satire and Comic Nihilism in their Films. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company. Louvish, Simon. 2000. Monkey Business: the Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers. New York: St. Martins. A Night at the Opera. 1935, Dir. Sam Wood. Perfs. Groucho, Chico, & Harpo Marx. MGM.

The Sociology of Literacy

Stubbs, Michael. 1980. Language and Literacy: The Sociolinguistics of Reading and Writing. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Williams, Bronwyn T. and Amy A. Zenger. 2007. Popular Culture and Representations of Literacy. New York: Routledge.