The Marx Brothers’ a Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935)

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.

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