The Anatomy of Harpo Marx. Wayne Koestenbaum
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BINGO-EYES MOVING LEFT AND RIGHT Who slugged Harpo? Batty bingo-eyes oscillate; tongue protrudes. Lacking gravity, he stumbles behind Chico’s peanut-vending cart and, like an anhedonic somnambulist staring at death’s bull’s-eye, Harpo pockets handful after handful of nuts while his head wiggles. Peanuts are merely the pretext: he loves to steal. Before Chico can bite a hot dog, Harpo clips it with scissors and then awaits a verdict. Does he expect a spanking or a smile? He tucks the scissors back into his pants, beside his taxi-horn, which looks like a syringe, a bulb, a phallus, or an enema. I’ll enlarge the list of comparisons. Harpo’s horn resembles a lekythos—a flask for storing the libations that survivors in Greek tragedies poured on thirsty graves. Harpo’s three bulbs (udders, enemas, phalli) constitute a belt-level castration chemistry set, a compensatory tool kit. Any future scapegoating will find him equipped. He’ll convert emergency into an occasion for pranksterism—for Nietzschean, philosophically motivated mischief. Harpo pushes outward his scapegoated status, the way an uncircumcised penis-head pokes through foreskin.
Harpo, responsive to rebuke, scans the horizon, his shifty gaze teetering between Chico and the unseeable outside, off-camera: a restless desire to travel, beyond confining scenes, toward thought’s periphery.
SCAPEGOATING When questioned by Chico, Harpo acts like a kid who hasn’t done homework, or who doesn’t understand the local dialect, or who lives in a country where open-mindedness is a crime: pivoting eyes brand him as guillotine-worthy. Without explanation or apology, without nodding yes or no, staring poker-faced and mirthless, Harpo hands his leg to Chico. The leg trick, responding to an unanswerable question, fills the test’s blank with a nonsensical mark that neuters the Grand Inquisitor.
Victim-seeking, Harpo strides—his piggy-bank mouth a platypus bill of mock-outrage—toward the other vendor (a dumb sop played by Edgar Kennedy) and bumps into him. Kennedy sells lemonade. Kennedy will go down in history as “king of the slow burn.” I like the fact that his name is Kennedy. I like the fact that a funny Marx picks on a slow-burning Kennedy.
“BUTT” AS CATEGORY Harpo unconditionally loves Chico but also quickly takes offense; at the first sign of disrespect, Harpo slides into fisticuffs, swinging his right arm, warming up for a slug, and then delivering a buttkick instead. His lower lip juts out, impersonating pique. Chico says, “Up the stairs this time, no downstairs” (don’t kick my ass): he acknowledges Harpo’s buttward transgression. I make a big deal out of the occasions when straight men acknowledge “butt” as category.
LIMP SHYSTER HANDS Harpo’s limp hands flamboyantly advertise indifference to standard opinions of how men should behave. Harpo’s hands, a shyster’s, refuse masculinity: he offers slapped knuckles, silenced fingers. And he flaunts these rebuffed tools: engines of reprisal. By hanging flogged hands out to dry, Harpo sends Kennedy a shame valentine.
YARMULKE PEANUT CUP With ever-ready scissors, Harpo snips Kennedy’s pocket, creating a yarmulke-shaped cup for pilfered peanuts. The cap-cup also resembles a diaphragm or condom. In the man’s trousers Harpo finds a vagina, an opening, and snips it away to create a portable amphora. I will explain, in subsequent chapters, why “vagina” is an important conceptual part of Harpo’s armature; here, suffice it to say that Harpo creates a little yarmulke-shaped vagina because he is nondogmatic. Like Chaplin’s tramp, or a Pentateuchal exile, Harpo is adept at constructing tent-like enclosures in dire circumstances.
EXCHANGING HATS: WATER SPORTS Kennedy’s and Harpo’s hats fall to the ground. Harpo watches him carefully pick up the wrong hat. Our hero engenders hat confusion because he wants the other toy, the forbidden possession. (Hat exchange has queer pedigree: the Elizabeth Bishop poem “Exchanging Hats” features an “unfunny uncle” who tries on a lady’s hat.) Kennedy realizes that hats have been exchanged; Harpo nods briefly to propose restitution. But as he hands over the proper hat, Harpo drops it and looks tauntingly at his victim.
I argue: humiliation is reversible. You think it goes in one fixed direction—from you to me—but I can flip its trajectory. We can trade humiliation, like baseball cards.
Water sports begin. Harpo uses his horn as turkey-baster vacuum, to suck lemonade out of the open vat, and then tucks the engorged horn into his belt. Harpo suggestively leans into Kennedy, two groins dry-rubbing: pressure sends water spuming into Kennedy’s face. Harpo seems happy to escalate prankishness and to humiliate a Gentile. Kennedy, stumped, laughs, and Harpo catches on, mouth wide open in a rictus of hilarity, mockery disguised as comity. Laughter is an excuse to touch the enemy’s shoulder. Intimacy requires two steps. Step one: laugh with the other. Step two: touch the other.
While Harpo laughs, Kennedy reverses the horn; he points its spigot downward and squeezes the bulb, which sends liquid flooding Harpo’s pants. Sudden emission stuns him, but he still touches Kennedy. (The first time Harpo appeared in vaudeville, he wet his pants onstage. His mother had forced him to perform, to fill a gap in the fraternal act—the Nightingales, a singing group. Don’t forget stage fright’s primacy: Harpo began his career by pissing himself in public.) He moves away, whistling, from the shame puddle, and lifts his feet gingerly, to disavow mess. Faux urination brings out the piss-and-testicles innuendo of the rival carts: Kennedy sells lemonade, Chico sells nuts.
LOOK AT MY HOLOCAUST! Harpo sticks Kennedy’s hat in the glass case’s peanut-roasting fire. The fire, a holocaust, horrifies, though Harpo has reversed the atrocity vector: Jew persecutes Irishman, neighbor immigrant, hardscrabble guy trying to sell his way to security. Harpo taps Kennedy, whistles, and points to the flame: Look at my holocaust! The pointing thumb (hitchhiker’s gesture) expresses pride: see my achieved trickery. Also the thumb disperses humiliation, directs it elsewhere, toward the scapegoat. The formal name for pointing, in linguistics, is deixis. Children learn that pointing is rude, yet, like a teacher, I point to Harpo, himself a pointer.
Harpo’s prankster nature relies on a mobile gaze. Briefly he looks toward the camera, away from hat and Kennedy: Harpo wants to ascertain that we witnessed the crime. At Kennedy’s fiery martyrdom, Harpo warms his hands, as the frame grows black.
I LIKE SAYING “CASTRATION” Groucho, at his desk, writes with a long quill. Harpo’s horn, a codpiece, sticks out of his pants. Compare endowments: horn, pen. Which communicative machine is bigger? To equalize, Harpo scissors the feather and then smiles, as if blind to crime.
Voiceless Harpo eagerly spreads castration around; he spills it onto others. He doesn’t consider castration a problem. Remember: I like saying “castration,” a useful critical toy.
HARPO’S TATTOOS “Who are you?” asks Groucho. Harpo shows an arm tattooed with a self-portrait. (Jewish law forbids tattoos.) Groucho says he doesn’t go for modern art; he asks for an old master. Harpo, excited, shows the other arm’s tattoo—a woman in a bikini—and undulates the image. Groucho asks for her phone number: it’s tattooed on Harpo’s abdominals. (Tattooed numbers point to the Holocaust.) Harpo, flashing flesh, grins with unseemly width—proud of virtuosity, or pleased to comply. His gesture—lifting up his shirt—recalls my mother ducking into the bathroom with my father to discuss private disease worries.
“Where do you live?” asks Groucho,