Comedian Groucho Marx passed away tonight at the Cedar Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he had been sent on June 22 due to a respiratory illness he had not been able to shake. His age was given as 86.
Doctors say Marx’s entertainment career, which began nearly 70 years ago and included vaudeville and television, ended suddenly late Friday night.
Groucho Marx Cause of death
Pneumonia was the official cause of his death. After Marx and his brothers Chico, Harpo, Gummo, and Zeppo dominated Broadway with hits like “The Cocoanuts” and “Animal Crackers,” they relocated to Hollywood and began a nearly legendary film career with classics like “A Night at the Opera” and “A Day at the Races.” ”
The death of Groucho left just Zeppo alive out of the five brothers. In March, Groucho was admitted to the hospital with hip pain. He had hip replacement surgery in late March and was released in late April. He had to have another hip surgery because he reinjured it.
After 11 days, he was discharged but readmitted the following day with a respiratory illness. No longer able to leave the hospital, he never did. While he was in the hospital, he was unaware that his estate was the subject of a heated legal struggle.
His son Arthur and his wife Lois and their son Andrew were there to witness his passing. According to a hospital spokesperson, no funeral plans have been finalised as of tonight.
Master of the Inuit
Groucho Marx’s main selling point was brazen, unrestrained brashness. A crucial figure in the most famous brother act in movie history, he elevated insult comedy to fine art. And he would hurl the insult with psychotic joy, therefore destroying the self-importance of his targets and plunging his listeners into helpless laughter.
Their comedy was rooted in slapstick farce, lowbrow vaudeville chaff, freespirited anarchy, and zany assaults on the myths and values of middle-class America, but it was also extremely unpredictable.
Neither Groucho Marx’s private life nor his public persona was really different from one another. When he was married, he cursed at the minister, but when his wife left him 21 years later, he shook her hand and said, “Well, it’s been wonderful knowing you, if you’re ever in the neighborhood again, drop in.” ”
Ants are bigger and nuttier than life, to quote Groucho. It was always him, the grotesquely hunched man in the swallowtall coat, lumbering across the screen with a long, fat cigar in his hand. Beneath a pair of steel-rimmed glasses, his wicked eyes rolled and leered.
A smear of black greasepaint below his big nose stood in for a mustache. His jokes relied on absurdity, surprise, and the outlandish to make their point. If there wasn’t a doctor in the house, he’d pause at the footlights and ask, “Is there a doctor in the house?” like he was in a Marx Brothers play.
When an unwary doctor stood up, he would ask, “If you’re a doctor, why aren’t you at a lie hospital making your patients miserable, instead of wasting your time here with that blonde? In addition, when a contestant on one of his wildly popular 1950s TV quiz shows answered that she was “approaching 40,” he famously quipped, “From which direction? ”
Aimed at Deflation
Groucho’s rapid-fire insults were more angry than annoying, and they weren’t cruel since they grew out of his pursuit of humor that deflated rather than destroyed. In reality, this trait was the defining feature of the comedy so liberally distributed by Groucho Marx, his brothers, and their great contemporaries like Charles Chaplin, W. C. Fields, and Buster Keaton.
When asked about the state of comedy in 1968, Groucho replied, “It was the kind of humor that made people laugh at themselves, rather than the sort that predominates today—the sick, black, purely smart-aleck stuff designed to evoke malicious laughing at the other person.” ”
The comedian was able to maintain his sense of humor in the face of his hectic lifestyle by often poking fun at himself. Even the fact that he spent his formative years in abject poverty didn’t seem to register with him. When it was suggested, for instance, that his “rags to riches” story
There were no rails to divide in the area surrounding 93rd Street and Third Avenue, he noted, adding that the area’s growth had Lincolnesque connotations. Only the El’s third rail, and playing with it wouldn’t lead anywhere. ”
On October 2, 1890, in a tenement on East 93rd Street, the world was introduced to Julius Henry Marx. His mother, the former Minnie Schoenberg, was the star-struck sister of Al Shean of the comic duo Gallagher and Shean, his father, Samuel Marx, was a failed tailor from Alsace.
Mrs. Marx was the quintessential “stage mother,” thus she encouraged all five of her boys to pursue careers in show business. This was in part because they all needed to contribute financially to the family.
By the time he was 10, Groucho was performing as a soprano with the vaudeville act of Gus Edwards; by 14, he had finished his official education and dropped out of P. S. 86. Years later he reflected, “If I planned to eat, I would have to scrape for it.”
Mother Assembled Act
When Groucho was still a teenager, he joined the Le May Trio, a comedy act that paid him $4 per week but eventually disbanded in Denver, leaving him destitute. He worked at a supermarket long enough to save money for a train ticket back to New York, where his mother was putting together a show called the Six Musical Mascots.
Janie O’Riley, Mts., Groucho, Adolph (later Harpo), and Milton (Gummo) Marx, and two of Groucho’s brothers. Both Marx and her sister Hannah are quite smart. Mrs. Marx quickly came to terms with the fact that, between the two of them, the act was hopeless and could only survive if one or both of them left.
They decided to leave the entertainment industry and retired. To fill the need, there was an act known as the Four Nightingales, which rebranded itself as the Marx Brothers and Company during its tour of small communities in the South and Midwest. The vaudeville phenomenon of harmony singing
when they first started out, before they found the format that would make them famous. In 1914, while performing in a shabby Nacogdoches, Texas theatre, they did just that. When word got out to the dumb Texans in the crowd that the mule had run away, Groucho quipped, “they all got up and left to go watch something livelier.”
We expected to hear jeers and insults, yet they nevertheless infuriated us. When the guys with the big hats and little brains came back, we gave them what they wanted. I don’t think it was my most brilliant improvised phrase, but I do remember telling them, “Nacogdoches—is full of bugs.” Even worse, I dubbed the Texans “damn Yankees,” the highest insult. ‘”
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