Excellent analogy.
Also an excellent analogy.
I asked my wife:
Me: “Wife, which one Marx brothers or Stooges?”
Wife: “What do you mean?”
Me: “Which is funnier?”
Wife: “What do you mean?”
**Me ** {slightly frustrated now}: “Are the Marx Brothers or the 3 Stooges funnier?”
Wife{Genuinely confused now}: “How could you ask, Marx Brothers are very funny, Stooges aren’t funny”
WAG: I think most Women agree with my wife.
Jim
Yeah, the Stones could never reach that level of perfection. It would be like Charlie Parker trying to become the master that is Kenny G.
<shrug> The Stooges did similar things. It was part of the culture of the times.
Marx Brothers. I loved them as a child, and I love them now. The 3 Stooges are okay, but mainly because of Curly. The Marx Brothers have the ability to crack me up, even when I’ve seen the movies over and over and over.
BTW, which movie makes the joke about “darkies”?
My wife loves the Stooges.
I was a little worried when I started reading this thread and saw a couple votes for the Stooges, then the Marx votes kicked in and you people have restored my faith in the intelligent people of the Straight Dope. sniff It brings a tear to my eye.
Like Frank I was a Marx Bros. fan as a child. The 3 Stooges made me uncomfortable, I could only stand to watch a few minutes of them if at all. However I would gladly sit through a Marx Bros. movie marathon. As a preteen I was going to the library and reading biographies and autobiographies of the Bros. I wanted to know more about them. Not only were they funny but they were talented musicians and they were all self-taught. I wanted to be a Marx Bros., but alas I was female and born many years too late.
I actually grew up without ever seeing a Marx Brothers movie, while the Stooges were on every weekday after school. My only experience with the Marxes at all were reruns of “You Bet Your Life.” See this for details.
I did say most, most girls and women I know can’t stand the Stooges. I like them, just not in a league with the Marx Brothers.
Here is the analogy I would make for myself: *{all my opinion only of course}*The Marx Brothers are to Bugs Bunny as the Three Stooges are to Tom Jerry.
Marx Brothers are the best comedy troupe ever and Bugs is the best cartoon ever.
Stooges are funny and Tom & Jerry are funny. I don’t go out of my way to watch either.
Jim putting too much thought into this.
Marx Brothers, hands down. They’re infinitely more clever than the Stooges. In my opinion there’s no contest here. The Stooges are good for a juvenile giggle, but the Marx Brothers were freekin’ geniuses!
Lemme see…there’s the embarrasing “All God’s Chillun Got Guns” minstrel sequence in Duck Soup (1933) – there’s the mortifying “Whoozat Man? It’s Gabriel!” scene in the shantytown towards the end of A Day at the Races (1937)…
…there’s also one Groucho routine that goes something like “My father was a little headstrong. My mother was a little Armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs and that’s why Darkies were born.” Also in Duck Soup, I believe.
The Stooges seemed to be on ALL THE TIME on the local Cleveland UHF channels during the late '60s/early '70s, and my more brutish friends loved 'em. I had just missed getting to see The Laurel, Ghoulardi, and Hardy Hour, which ran a few years earlier and which I would have much preferred.
I was lucky enough to have a local bijou run a Marxfest when I was 11 or 12. I talked my dad into taking me…we got there just at the end of Horse Feathers, the old man promptly passed out asleep, and I reveled in Duck Soup, The Cocoanuts, and Monkey Business one after the other. Changed my freakin’ life.
Marx Brothers, for humor that makes you think.
Not that I don’t enjoy the Stooges, but it’s like the difference between The Naked Gun and The Princess Bride.
In High Weirdness by Mail, – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067164260X/002-9647522-7317627?v=glance&n=283155 – Church of the SubGenius cofounder Ivan Stang wrote a classic essay on how humanity is divided into “Moes, Larries and Curlies.” The Curlies are the artistic, creative ones; the Larries, ordinary, unimaginative followers; the Moes are the control freaks, the leaders or would-be leaders who want to dominate all the Larries and Curlies. And there was a footnote about how powerful Moes, to throw everybody off the track, “spread myths about the Harpos, Chicos, Grouchos and Zeppos.” I wish I could find the essay linked online . . .
I found it! http://www.kentaurus.com/stooges.htm
And a reference to a popular song of the time (Sung by Kate Smith!):
Also in At the Circus, there’s a scene where a caged lion roars and a black roustabout screams and runs. Even though he can see perfectly well that the lion is caged. :rolleyes:
First off, the comparison cannot be symmetrical because the Stooges’ best work is their shorts (gack, not the feature films, surely!), whereas the Marx Bros.’ best work is their feature films (did they do any shorts?).
The Stooges’ best shorts are absolutely brilliant. They are gut-busting funny and even fairly sophisticated humor. About the funniest film I’ve ever seen is the one where they are working at a gas station, blow up some professors’ car, and end up impersonating them at a function (and sing the classic “E-I-Bickie-Bye”).
So, you have Stooges’ shorts that are nearly perfect (there is no doubt that the bad shorts are really bad). Comparing best work and best work, you have Marx Bros. feature films that are, as individual films, highly hit and miss. Some scenes are brilliant; some suck. More importantly, however, they have very little cohesion as features and the plots are rarely anything to shout about. That said, some of the skits (that’s what they are, really) are fabulous and some of the musical numbers brilliant.
In sum, the Stooges have quite a few shorts are extremely funny and work very well as miniature movies (with good story arcs and escalations of absurdity). The Bros. have feature films with some, sometimes many, good parts but which don’t really work well as features overall.
My argument isn’t complete with the above, however, since someone could still claim that the Bros.’ humor is that much better than the Stooges’ despite the above flaws and thus better overall.
That’s a matter of opinion of course; if someone says that the Stooges’ humor is just rotten then there’s not much I can say in response. There are concrete reasons, however, why I think the Stooges’ humor is fundamentally superior.
The Stooges’ have their own internal relationships (Moe bossing the other two, Curly rebelling against this, etc.) which are funny in their own right, but the really funny thing is seeing these idiots interact with believeably normal people. For example, they take on a painting job and totally trash someone’s house; people react as you’d expect them to react: with shock and anger.
In contrast, the Marx Bros. interact only with patsies, it seems. Groucho insults someone; the person doesn’t notice or plays along. Groucho bursts into an absurd song; people just sit there and listen. Harpo chases girls; the run and giggle without any serious or realistic repercussions. And often they are not interacting with the outside world anyway, but just doing their “skits” with each other.
At the end of the day, the Stooges are making real movies, whereas the Bros. are just forcibly implanting a vaudville act into a feature length format. With the Bros., therefore, you are left only with the absolute value of their wordplay or slapstick, which can be funny enough but seems like “just an act.”
At first I liked the Marx Bros. Then I really stopped liking them (mostly based on the patsy factor and how mean-spirited some of their humor can be). A couple of years ago I watched Horse Feathers again and, although I thought it had the flaws mentioned above, I did enjoy the intelligently wrought absurdist humor and the songs. The whole football game was a snore, however.
I’ve always enjoyed the Stooges, however, and I would say that, at their best, they are thinking person’s comedy and nothing to be ashamed of at all.
The Marx Brothers. No real contest.
OTOH, some of the Stooges’ stuff is very good.
The end of “Hoi Polloi”, where all the rich people start to act like the Stooges, is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.