All those who say they can see through this movie are missing a lot.

Rating: Null/10 (8 September 2001)

"Take two turkeys, one goose, four cabbages, but no duck, and mix them together. After one taste, you'll duck soup for the rest of your life."
The Marx Brothers' finest and funniest film has all the right ingredients for a fine and funny film. It is an extraordinary dose of non-stop nonsense from start to finish, and one of the funniest films of all time. Groucho is on top form with his relentless puns and sharp insults, especially in the interplay between Margaret Dumont and himself; Harpo continues his quest to induce heart failure to those in the audience who are capable of laughter by use of first-class visual humour; Chico complements these two perfectly by adapting to their methods and creating a unique rapport with each, while adding his own brilliant style of looking and sounding like an idiot (but don't let this fool you -- he IS an idiot) through his seeming misuse of the English language and his zany behaviour; and Zeppo somehow completes the group quite nicely by providing good straight support.

The whole film succeeds because absolutely nothing (apart from the comedy) is taken seriously; situations, people, clichÃ©s, film techniques, political ideas, or anything that especially has to do with pomp and authority, are all mercilessly mocked, given a fresh slant, or their legitimacy simply ignored. Which, in a Marx Brothers satire, is as it should be. (In fact, the best comedies contain an element of this.) And the underlying theme of the absurdity of war ultimately comes across through the anarchy, satisfying the eggheads.
DUCK SOUP has been seen as one of the candidates for the best comedy ever made. It would definitely be in my top 5, with Laurel & Hardy's WAY OUT WEST and BLOCK-HEADS at 2 and 3. My personal favourite film is SONS OF THE DESERT. I do not wish to detract from the sheer genius of the Marx Brothers, and the dazzling brilliance of DUCK SOUP, but in my opinion, Laurel & Hardy remain unsurpassed as the supreme masters of comedy. Not only were they magnificently inventive and subtle (their subtlety was so good that a lot of people even today will refute the claim that Laurel & Hardy were subtle) -- like Chaplin -- but they also made this ingenuity exceptionally funny -- like the Marx Brothers (the greatest comedy group of all time), W.C. Fields (along with Charley Chase, the greatest solo comedians of the Golden Era) and Buster Keaton (the master of silent comedy) -- and did so consistently in the vast majority of the 106 films they made together (and even in a substantial number of the films they made separately), whether silent or sound, short or feature.
The Marx Brothers are those from the sound era who perhaps come closest to the levels of Laurel & Hardy's humour. Theirs has been described as Laurel & Hardy 'sped up', or with less of a sense of pace. The same absurdity and anarchy is present in their work, yet Laurel & Hardy's characters have more humanity. After watching DUCK SOUP, I felt elated and satisfied with the quality and quantity of the comedy, yet I observed that the characters had really been more or less zany caricatures and stereotypes, who were there mostly to keep the superb gags flowing, whereas Laurel & Hardy were two perfectly rounded and believable people, making mistakes and facing consequences (although the pair's general incapacity to fully comprehend their circumstances provided a certain distance, and in some cases a very basic form of cynicism or irony, ensuring that, as with the best comedy, things are considered or interpreted in a less serious fashion -- Stanley's deadpan graveness, like Groucho's, seems to mock the idea of solemnity), and this therefore, I feel, intensified the comedy and made the characters, situations and gags even funnier, because they came from a human well-spring, forming and producing human reactions. Although Stanley is regarded as a more extreme comic character, less in contact with logic than Ollie, it is the latter that provides the solid link with reality -- the Marx Brothers had this to a lesser degree than L&H, although it was not entirely absent, and they were given more depth in the MGM features. (That is why I believe the two best films from each of the eras in the Marxes' career -- this and A NIGHT AT THE OPERA -- should not be mutually exclusive, as their zaniness is at its least diluted in the Paramount years, but is set within more of a frame of believability at MGM, granting slightly more depth to the characters.)
Of course, Marx Brothers fans will argue that the Marxes were Hollywood's 'alternative comedians', attempting to change the face of traditional comedy, and create their own unique style; and concepts that were prevalent in the silent and early sound era, like creating identifiable comic characters, did not really need to be called upon. In fact, with their exaggerated costumes and mannerisms, the team seemed to be satirizing the whole idea of what Chaplin, Keaton or Langdon did with their 'Tramp', 'Stone-face' or 'Boy' characters.
However, I am not trying to pit Laurel & Hardy's groundbreaking comedy style (for they were in fact crafting a very innovative body of work under a subtle cloak of traditionalism) against the pioneering work of the Marx Brothers; I am just reasserting the brilliance of L&H after their work was practically overlooked in the disgraceful debacle of the AFI's comedy poll. I am also attempting to point out that although comic characters don't have to be three-dimensional to be funny (proved by the Marxes), comedy is generally intensified when they are (as with L&H). Unlike the Stooges, who were also two-dimensional, the Marx Brothers' personae were at least engaging. So give me a break.
Anyway, DUCK SOUP is a masterpiece, the Marx Brothers were geniuses, and you haven't stopped talking since I got here -- were you vaccinated with a gramophone needle?