Published on August 8, 2025 10:32 AM GMT
Inspired by the Inkhaven Residency but unable to attend it I still intend to write 30 blog posts in 30 days. The other 29 will be on a personal blog.
I’m surprised that Harpo Marx – someone who built his career on non-verbal comedy – was bilingual. I wish I was bilingual. Understanding another language permits you to also understand another way of seeing the world and grants access to a different culture. But to be honest I’m in it sheerly for the prestige, I’d love to be that jerk who has to show off how cosmopolitan he is.
If you don’t know who Harpo Marx is, I must disappoint you. There is no known relation to Karl Marx, Karl’s family comes from Frankfurt and Harpo’s from Alsace. But you know what? They’re practically next to each other. So I say they are related. You read it here first!
Harpo was, no surprise, a harpist, but I’m concerned with his anarchic and conspicuously silent pantomime, not his musical abilities – no matter how remarkable his autodidactic approach to the harp was. Harpo did surreal and oft impossible acts like making a real life dog emerge from a tattoo on his chest of a dog kennel, he could play the strings of a piano like a harp, or on request he could materialize a steaming hot cup of coffee from his trouser leg, and sometimes just casually light a cigar with a blow torch he just happened to have on his person. He married that with expressive facial contortions and a honking car horn. The rest of the troupe included his real life brothers Groucho and Chico, who were conspicuously verbal. Groucho remains legendary to this day for this witticisms and one-liners, while Chico somehow eked out an entire career with one of the worst mock Italian accents in cinema history, his dialogue often ridden with malapropisms and misunderstandings. There’s also brothers Zeppo and Gummo who people only talk about to show they’re a Marx Brother completist.
In 1925 the brothers tried to bring their stage act to film, this was two short years before Al Jolson made the first Talkie – the Jazz Singer. So it would have to be silent. No problem for Harpo there. The self-funded two reeler, Humor Risk has been lost and Groucho decried it as no loss. Comic Actor Eddie Deezer wonders how it would have worked: Harpo as a silent comedian would have been a natural, but would Chico and Groucho lose something in the transition?
Ironically, at the same time Harpo had his only on screen speaking role – a silent film called Too Many Kisses, where he gets an interstitial of dialogue. He never spoke on screen again – through card or voice – but the screen wasn’t done with him yet.
In 1929 Hollywood beckoned the Marx Brothers to take their successful stage show to the silver screen. The Jazz Singer and the Vitaphone technique caused a seismic shift in Hollywood. Studios clamoured for successful plays and musicals to exploit new sound technology. This same shift forced silent comedians like Stan Laurel, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton all to begin speaking on screen (luckily for them, they all had pre-cinema careers on the stage too). Harpo was unique, at a time where silent comedians were finding their voices once more: Harpo remained a silent clown just like Deberau, the codifier of the modern Pierrot, before him.
You might wonder just why his character was a mute? Muteness tends to suggest disability, like non-verbal autism, or it implies trauma. People who fall permanently silent after literally unspeakable suffering. The person who takes a vow of silence precipitated by loss. This makes the silent clown such an intriguingly paradoxical figure: that they give so much joy while likely harbouring a terrible past.
Harpo’s pivotal event was heartbreaking for him but more benign[1]. Their maternal Uncle Al, Al Shean the famous vaudeville star, penned a new stage show for his nephews but Harpo noticed one glaring omission… I think I’ll let him tell it in his own words form his cheekily titled Autobiography “Harpo Speaks”:
Uncle Al didn’t write a single line for me. I protested. Uncle Al said I could add wonderful contrast to the act if I played in pantomime. The hell with that. I would ad lib all the lines I wanted to, I said.
“Okay, okay,” said Uncle Al. “Go right ahead.”
At the time Harpo hadn’t yet learned the Harp and in the same way his brother Chico played an Italian stereotype, Harpo was playing an Irish stereotype called “Patsy Brannigan”. He continued to ad-lib until he saw the following review after a show in Illinois
“The Marx Brother who plays ‘Patsy Brannigan’ is made up and costumed to a fare-thee-well and he takes off on an Irish immigrant most amusingly in pantomime. Unfortunately the effect is spoiled when he speaks.”
Harpo reflected:
When I read the review I knew Uncle Al had been right. I simply couldn’t outtalk Groucho or Chico, and it was ridiculous of me to try. It was a cruel blow to my pride nevertheless. When I announced to Minnie that I would never speak another word onstage, she knew I had been hurt, and she looked at me with sorrow and sympathy. But she didn’t say, “Forget it—what does he know?” She said nothing.
I went silent. I never uttered another word, onstage or in front of a camera, as a Marx Brother.
(Harpo Speaks, Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber. Chapter 8 “The Silencing of Patsy Brannigan”)
While Harpo may have closed his mouth, it opened up new comedic possibilities. In comedy you can’t just give any joke to any actor or character – what works for Frank Dreben may not work for Daria Morgendorffer but might work for Inspector Clouseau if you French it up. You need to tailor the joke for whom you’re writing it for. Frank Tashlin, the Looney Tunes animator, described it well. When he left animation, one of the first live-action actors he wrote gags for was Harpo Marx:
…Harpo was fey and unbelievable; you could do anything with Harpo. Now, I did what, to me, was like one of the wildest jokes in the world, in the first picture with him. He was looking at a mirror, and combing his hair, and you saw the reflection of his face in the mirror. Now, he turned the mirror around, and you now saw the back of his head. He never moved. Well, it got a scream, but that you could only do with Harpo. You could do certain jokes with Jerry Lewis that you couldn't do with Bob Hope. So it depends on who.
Interview by Michael Barrier
In limitation there was liberation.
Harpo couldn’t outtalk his brothers. But he could do jokes that they, or indeed any other comedian in the talkies age, couldn’t by not speaking at all.
In comedy, music, art, even business it’s what you don’t do that is most powerful. It’s the notes you don’t play. It’s the negative space. It’s the ground and figure. Steve Jobs patted Apple on the back for saying no to almost anything.
Rather than being defined by his weakness as a verbal comedian, rather than trying to compete, he abandoned verbal comedy entirely and focused on what could be uniquely his own.
There’s an important lesson in this: if someone is better than you at something, you can always do something else, something wildly different.
One hundred years after he graced the screen, people like me are still talking about him.
And we should. The proliferation of social media and video content presents a wonderful opportunity for modern day comedians to return to the visual comedy of Harpo and other silent comedians.
- ^
I have made the mistake of conflating Harpo the mute character with Harpo the conversant actor
Discuss
