I just ran across this. I have never heard it before. Has anyone?
I was at the National Geographic site, and I came across the photos of the newly discovered cat goddess temple. National Geographic This is a photo of a bust of Harpocrates, with the caption saying he’s “the Greek god of silence…adaptation of the Egyptian god known as Horus the child.” I immediately thought, “Harpo Marx? Incredible coincidence!!!” (Of course, Harpo’s character was only mute. He made sounds with his harp and horn.)
So I went to wiki for more info. The article happens to say Groucho used to joke about this, but I’d love to know where to find that in print. The footnote there refers to the actual source of the nickname, namely, his harp.
There are not a lot of references to this coincidence on the Web.
In the NY Times, William Safire only wonders if this was the true source of Harpo’s name.
It’s a cool coincidence, but staggeringly implausible as an actual source. By the usual story (there are more than one, as with all stories about the Brothers), they were given the names during a poker game by a fan of giving people nicknames that ended in o. Most people today have their doubts about this character, since he doesn’t seem to have any existence outside of this one poker game. He’s wildly unlikely to have had a Greek classical education.
Groucho was the reader in the family. (The joke was that Harpo never read any books, including his autobiography.) Groucho read serious novels but I don’t remember anything from the Greeks ever being mentioned. He was a dour Russian type of guy. If he knew of the name he certainly would have mentioned it at least once in his many books. He doesn’t, so I don’t know where Wiki is getting its source from.
A search of Google Books finds many others have noticed the link.
Reading comics: how graphic novels work and what they mean By Douglas Wolk (2007)
Abrahadabra: Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic Magick By Rodney Orpheus (2005)
Notes on the possibilities and attractions of existence: selected poems … By Anselm Hollo (2001)
Wordlessness By Bart Verschaffel, Mark Verminck (1993) [they say they’re the first to suggest this]
A Pleasure in Words By Eugene T. Maleska (1982)
Introduction to film structure By Peter L. Klinge, Lee McConkey (1982)
I’m not going to be convinced until someone Photoshops a fright wig and maybe a beat-up hat onto that bust. In reality, though, the truth is obvious: Harpo played the harp, hence, “Harpo.” Now, if he’d just been a mute character who played another instrument, this would be believable. But this is a very roundabout version of a story with a simpler explanation.
Is there really no other documentation of this monologist named Art Fisher, Exapno Mapcase? I’ve read Groucho and Harpo’s books but have not gotten around to the Crichton book.
The bio Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx says the inspiration for the nicknames was a comic strip popular at the time that had many characters’ names that ended in ‘-o’. I don’t have my copy of the book anymore, or I could post the name of the comic strip.
The real research on the subject is to be found in Simon Louvish’s Monkey Business, where he consults Paul Wesolowski, the foremost Marx Brothers fan, founder of the Marx Brotherhood and the erstwhile fan history publication the Freedonia Gazette, whose house is filled from top to bottom with every piece of Marx memorabilia ever made and a newspaper clipping file that tracks their every appearance in vaudeville. I’ve been there and it is mindboggling.
Anyway, Louvish writes of the two:
Harpo, BTW, doesn’t name Art Fisher, doesn’t give a date, and places the poker game in a completely different city. But that’s par for Harpo’s memory.
Groucho also says that the trend for naming people with -o endings came from the comic strip Sherlocko the Monk. (Harpo calls it, incorrectly, Knocko the Monk.) It even had a character named Groucho, along with gems like Yanko the Dentist and Hamfatto. Sherlocko’s buddy was named Watso. But that strip ended in 1913 after Conan Doyle sued and made it change its name to Hawkshaw the Detective. And the usual date given for the naming was not until 1914. And there is no trace of their using the names professionally until 1919 and their birth names kept appearing until as late as 1924.
It’s coincidence. High class, finest kind coincidence, to be sure. But coincidence nonetheless.
Very interesting. As usual I wonder how this ever got to be such a mystery. As long as we’re talking coincidences, isn’t “harp” sometimes a derisive nickname for Irish people? I’m sure I’ve heard that somewhere and I wondered if it fed into Harpo’s nickname, too.
So this harp is the wrong kind of musical instrument. And the Marxes weren’t Irish, but German. And Jewish, for those who think that’s an ethnicity. I’m not seeing the connection.
If there was ever a situation set up for Occam’s Razor, it’s this one. Adolph played the harp, so he’s Harpo. Groucho and Zeppo are in dispute, but not Harpo.
I read once in one of Isaac Asimov’s popular histories that Isis was often portrayed with the child Horus sitting in her lap with his finger to his lip, which was merely meant to show him doing something a child would do; but the Greeks misinterpreted this and thought it meant Horus was a “god of silence,” which he was not.
In this, Harpo is correct. Gus Mager created Knocko the Monk in 1904. He changed it to Rhymo the Monk, then back to Knocko, then added new strips, including Groucho the Monk and Henpecko the Monk. Finally in 1910, he created Sherlocko the Monk, which was his most popular work. He changed the name to Hawkshaw the Detective in 1913, when he moved from The New York Journal to The New York World.*
Conan Doyle had nothing to due with the name change; in addition to moving from Hearst to Pulitzer, Mager wanted to make a change from monkeys to human characters in his strip. [This from The World Encyclopedia of Comics by Maurice Horne]. Mager later revived Sherlocko for several months in 1924-25, another indication that he didn’t drop the strip for legal reasons.
So the various Mager’s Monks strips were popular for nine years, more than enough to stay on the public consciousness for a few years later. It would be like naming a couple today “Ross and Rachel.”
John Ciardi also mentioned “Harpocrates” in one of his reference books.
*As was typical of the time: artists would be hired by other newspapers and be allowed to draw the characters while the original newspaper kept the same name of the strip
Nice, but the change clearly was tied in with Mager changing newspapers and deciding he wanted to ditch the monkeys.
Conan Doyle may have threatened legal action, but it doesn’t sound like he did anything about it, especially since Sherlocko would most likely be allowed as parody.
(I do trust Horne over Markstein in matters about comic strips.)
Exapno Mapcase is named after Harpo Marx, as rendered by writing his name in Cyrillic (looking, I guess, something like <Xapпo Mapkc>; I’m too lazy to type in the proper Cyrillic characters when a Latin lookalike is available), then playfully trying to read it as though it were in English (squinting one’s eyes to see <п> as lookalike <n>), then transcribing it back down into more idiomatic English orthography.
As to my name, the context I originally read it in was something like “He’s getting rowrbazzle bucks for that.” In other words, it meant a surprisingly large but indefinite amount. Only later did I find out the connection with Pogo.
I joined this forum just to respond to this thread, which is apparently a bit stale now. Back around 1970, I ran across Harpocrates in a dictionary while looking up some long-forgotten word, and immediately, of course, thought of Harpo.
I think an essential point is being missed in all these discussions: The question should not be whether Harpo got his name from Harpocrates, but if his (vocal) silence is a nod to Harpocrates. He could easily have been Harpo without the non-speaking schtick.
And since that moment in 1970, I’ve been vainly researching the brothers of Harpocrates: Grouchocrates, Chicocrates and Zeppocrates.
Does any of you have any information on them? If so, you might provide me with the means by which to return to life a happy man.
M
Completely off-topic, but maybe someone here knows: There is a term for an argumentative device in which a person states “Anyone with any intelligence at all will agree that…” or the like. Can anyone tell me what that term is? It’s not argumentum ad hominum, though I imagine it’s a variation of it.
What? No!!! Are relying upon the accuracy of Urban Dictionary. :eek:
Clearly this UD entry is, quite gratuitously, conflating two quite different meanings of “harp”. The Irish harp is a stringed instrument, not quite identical to, but not hugely dissimilar from, the thing used by Harpo, which, by the look of it, was a regular “concert” or “orchestral” harp. “Harp” as a term for a type of harmonica comes from the African American blues tradition. (I don’t really know the origin, but it seems plausible to guess that, apart from teh coincidence of the the similarly beginning “proper” names, it originated as a bit of self-deprecating humor, comparing the cheap, demotic, crude sounding harmonica, used in the music of the lowest caste of American society, with the expensive, celestial sounding harp, and that was used in highbrow, fancy-schmantzy symphonic music for rich people.)
Anyway, my point is that the Irish type of harp is not the wrong kind of musical instrument (or scarcely so), and the harmonica-harp has nothing to do with the issue. Nevertheless, your larger point is surely correct: there was nothing Irish about the Marx brothers, so there is no reason to think that Harpo’s name had anything to do with any derogatory term for the Irish.
