Chico, Harpo & Groucho Marx at the piano (Animal Crackers, 1930)

Useful quotation: "The first Marx Brothers film we saw here—*Animal Crackers*—struck me (and was viewed by everyone) as something extraordinary: the cinematic liberation of a unique magic not usually revealed by the customary interplay of words and images. If there is a distinct state of mind—a poetic degree of the spirit—that can be termed 'surrealism,' then *Animal Crackers* fully embodied it. It is difficult to define exactly what this kind of magic entails; in any case, it is perhaps not something specifically cinematic, yet it does not belong to the theater either—it is something that only certain successful surrealist poems (if such things exist) could perhaps evoke. The poetic quality of a film like *Animal Crackers* might well fit the definition of 'humor'—were it not for the fact that the word has long since lost its sense of total liberation, of the mind tearing through all reality. To grasp the powerful, total, definitive, absolute originality (I am not exaggerating; I am simply trying to define it, and never mind if enthusiasm carries me away) of a film like *Animal Crackers*—and, at times (certainly throughout the finale), *Monkey Business*—one must add to the concept of humor an element of the unsettling and the tragic: a sense of fatality (neither happy nor unhappy, yet difficult to articulate) that creeps in behind it like the revelation of a hideous disease upon a face of absolute beauty" (Antonin Artaud, *The Theatre and Its Double*, "Two Notes").