The Great Performers: Harpo Marx and the Harp

If you’re literally a lifelong student of comedy as I am, you have to constantly watch and study the comedy greats. The era is unimportant: you study the work of great film and TV comedians of the 20th and early 21st century. And any student of comedy has to view at least some of the classic Marx Brothers movies, where they’ll be amazed at the antics of all of the brothers — but perhaps most amazed by Harpo Marx, who never said a word in any of their films and was consistently funny.

When I was growing up in Connecticut, and later as a student at Colgate University in the late 60s and early 70s when there was a national revival of Marx Brothers movies, a common complaint was that the movies slowed down when Harpo Marx played the harp. Yet today when you look at Harpo’s serious interludes where he stops the horn honking, stops chasing the women, stops the hilarious vaudeville-derived schtick and picks up his harp what do you see?

You see an artist, totally absorbed in the music he plays and creates. It’s a moment that transcends show business.

Now you realize: the movie did not stop. The comedy stopped and another kind of art – the kind of art that can leave you in awe if you closely watch it — unfolded before your eyes. Something of beauty.

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