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MAD magazine, war comics, horror movies, TV detective shows, Monty Python and rock music would all take turns warping my mind in due course, but the Marx Brothers got there before any of them, and “Monkey Business” was my gateway to their world of inspired absurdity. Looking back at it now, the Marx Brothers were my first real pop cultural obsession. But almost as soon as Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo make their initial appearance - emerging from kippered herring barrels in the hold of an ocean liner that they’ve stowed away upon - I know that I have truly found my people.
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Nor do I know that 1931’s “Monkey Business” is part of a whole run of classic Marx Brothers films. I have no idea yet that the Marx Brothers are one of the greatest and most influential comedic acts of the 20th century, or that their decades-old films are currently enjoying a massive revival, especially on the college circuit where the Brothers’ penchant for surreal wordplay and anarchic pranks (the latter played chiefly at the expense of pompous authority figures) feels surprisingly in tune with the times. “Who’s in it?” I ask, thinking maybe it’s another Kurt Russell vehicle along the lines of “The Barefoot Executive,” the chimp-tastic Disney film she’d taken me to see just a few months earlier.Īnd that’s pretty much the only advance information I’m armed with as we walk into Angell Hall’s Auditorium A that fateful evening. She tells me that we’ll be seeing something called “Monkey Business,” a title which immediately sets my young brain alight with images of uproarious simian antics a la “Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp,” the live-action TV show I’ve been digging every Saturday morning, and whose Colorforms play set I recently received as a birthday present. I am, however, jubilantly aware that I will be going to the movies with my mom this evening. These three things will all prove extremely interesting to me later in life but as a five-year-old who’s just a few weeks away from entering kindergarten, I am currently completely oblivious to their existence. Louis Cardinals ace Bob Gibson will hurl the first and only no-hitter of his major league career. “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” by the Bee Gees is enjoying its second of four straight weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, “Klute” is the number one film at the U.S.