Great comedy, nice satire

Rating: 8/10 (3 November 2019)

Lots of fun, great pace, and a nice satire of the lunacy of war. Groucho doles out wordplay and general zaniness, but it was Harpo that really cracked me up. If the brothers map to Freud's view of the parts of the human psyche, Harpo is definitely the id. His humor comes out of left field from a place of mayhem and anarchy (him taking scissors to pretty much anything he can get his hands on comes to mind), and the fact that he doesn't speak makes it all the more primal. Not all of the jokes in the script land, but many still do, and there is great range as well. At the suggestive end of the spectrum little is filtered because the film was pre-Code, and there's even a little jab at the unenforced guidelines when a horse is shown in bed with a couple. Through all of the craziness and despite Harpo saying years later that "We were just four trying to get a laugh," there is a sophistication and a message to this humor.