The Marx Brothers Joke That Was Secretly an F-You to Hollywood Censors
The Marx Brothers classic anti-war satire Duck Soup is generally considered to be one of the greatest comedies ever made. Plus, it’s only 68 minutes long, meaning you could watch Duck Soup three times in a row and it would still be 10 minutes shorter than The Brutalist.
The film’s standout sequence is, of course, the mirror scene in which Harpo, who’s dressed up as Groucho, attempts to fool him into thinking that he’s looking at his own reflection. It’s a classic routine that’s still hilarious today, even though Saturday Night Live seems pretty determined to drive the joke into the ground.
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Less famous is the borderline scandalous scene in which Harpo rides a horse up to a young woman’s house, cut to: their shoes discarded at the end of the bed. But it turns out that the woman has a bed to herself, and Harpo is shacked up with his horse.
The gag still works as a simple reversal of expectations, but in the 1930s, there was a whole other layer to it.
Duck Soup was released in 1933, which was an interesting time in the history of film censorship. The Hays Code, Hollywood’s self-imposed set of content restrictions, was officially adopted by studios in 1930. But it didn’t take full effect until 1934, when all new movies were required “to obtain a seal of approval” indicating that it had adhered to the buzzkills in charge.
The code was established by Will H. Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. In 1927, the MPPDA established a list of “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls,” which served as the “basis” for the Hays Code. Some of the “Be Carefuls” included “the use of firearms,” “sympathy for criminals,” and depicting a “man and woman in bed together.” That explains why couples like Nick and Nora Charles, the married detectives from the Thin Man series, were forced to sleep in separate beds.
Given this context, a lot of Marx Brothers fans have interpreted the horse scene from Duck Soup to be a pointed dig at censors, because while Harpo may not have been allowed to sleep with the woman, “the Hays Code didn't have any rules about men and horses sleeping together.”
This wasn’t the only time that the Marxes joked about content restrictions in one of their movies. Less subtly, in 1939’s At the Circus, after a woman steals Groucho’s wallet and tucks it in the front of her leotard, the comedian broke the fourth wall to tell the audience: “There must be some way of getting that money without getting in trouble with the Hays office.”
Unfortunately for the Marx Brothers, the Hays Code really did have a negative impact on their work, even on their older pre-code films. For example, when it was re-released in 1936, Animal Crackers was edited to remove certain material that was no longer deemed suitable. And that footage wasn’t restored until the film was issued on Blu-ray in 2016.
Another win for physical media!
