Does Chico sell honey?

We received the following enquiry today from a new correspondent:

The other day my parents said there's an advert for honey being shown at the moment that Chico Marx is in! Whether it's done from archive footage or a lookalike (it's a tough break for both of them!) I don't know, but I had a look on youtube and googled it but I have no idea what they're going on about! Does anybody know, or are my mother and father slowly going crazy in their old age? Thank you!

My first instinct was to relegate this to the looney file, but then I suddenly remembered that it just so happened I was passing by a television the other day when I heard Chico and Harpo's Big Store piano duet being used as the background to an advert.
I didn't know what it was being used to sell, but turns out it was Rowse's honey.
So your parents were right, but sadly, no visual representation of the great man is involved.

Then around the same time, Damian, who had earlier remarked on the obsession with nuts and nut-related tie-ins and promotions in Marx Brothers pressbooks, sent me this:

It is, and I quote, "what could have been if a Planters/Marx endorsement had been signed".

I've known this fellow for over a decade, and only now do I discover that he's been keeping his own blog for the best part of two years. Take a look here, and tell him Groucho sent you.

Gems from the “Night at the Opera” Pressbook!

Look closely at this man on the left.

Think he's Groucho Marx? Well think again.

It's actually an usher made up like Groucho - just one of a thousand socko and surefire ways MGM have come up with to make you want to see their latest comedy release A Night at the Opera, starring this crazy bunch of goofs the Marx Brothers.

Pressbooks are always weird; their ballyhoo suggestions always peculiar in the extreme. But there's something especially revealing about these, since Opera was, after all, a prestige release from the ritziest studio on the block.

Given Thalberg's unease over the team's reputation for undisciplined zaniness, you might have thought they'd play down the madcap stuff and concentrate a little more on the production values, but these campaigns are, if anything, sillier than the Paramount ones.

The thanks for sending them my way go out to Damian, a Council regular (he's the man who solved the Abe Kabibble mystery). In his accompanying dispatch he notes the relentlessness with which the Brothers were associated with nuts, taken to extreme lengths here with a huge variety of peanut endorsement tie-ins and related nut-based tomfoolery.
It prompts the wider point that, while the Marx Brothers were regarded by their adherents as an oasis of comic sophistication in a roughhouse desert of pratfalls, they were always marketed as the most lowbrow comics imaginable, as a bunch of nuts, Tourette zanies almost to be pitied as much as enjoyed. An odd disjunction.

Anyway, time to let MGM work their magic.
Think you don't especially want to watch A Night at the Opera at the moment? You will after the hidden persuaders have gone to work on you with this lot:

MGM display the personal touch. Who, me?

Because the Marx Brothers are nuts themselves, see?

"Hey, honey, I've just seen three tramps on a tandem. Let's go to the movies tonight!"

Because the Marx Brothers are nuts themselves, see?

We've all heard the expression 'to laugh one's head off', but it takes the comic imagination of the MGM publicity department to see its true potential. Here we see a man distracting passers-by with a big coat and a small porcelain head.

Here they actually invent their own well-known expression out of thin air before converting it into comic promotional gold. But is it just me or does this person look like he's upside down in absolutely no way, shape or form?

More nut-related promotions, and a cuckoo clock one for variety. Because the Marx Brothers are cuckoo themselves, see? (No wonder Bernard Shaw and T.S. Eliot loved them so much.)

You loved them in Duck Soup!

Boy, that guy looks pleased to be there! MGM take no chances with their early or late Santa promotion. What's the betting they had a third sign made for Christmas Day screenings: "I came at exactly the right time to see A Night at the Opera"?

And what about that 'Press Idea'? Genius.

Michael Myers, the killer from the Halloween movies, stands in for Harpo at this Loew's Halloween midnight prevue event. The promotion presumably trades on the fact that the Marx Brothers are themselves nuts.

The only man who took up that 'want ad' offer was disqualified for laughing at the bit where Lasparri beats the crap out of Harpo.

A cigar ad. You can work out the connection for yourselves.

This idea was later revived for Go West, but by then it was: 'Hear for yourself Baltimore audiences chuckling every so often, a man at the back coughing, and the occasional sound of people heading for the exit'.

Or if you're really desperate:

Smutty business at Keith's, Flushing

Thanks to Damian, partly for designing our spiffy new header, and also for hitting upon this charming ad for one of the mini-touring shows incorporating bits of other shows that the Brothers used to do between proper shows.

The heading identifies them as the stars of The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers - that, and the films listed beneath, safely dates this as 1930.

In tiny type that defies you to read it, we learn that they are appearing in person with a 17 strong cast in The Schweinerei. Schweinerei, Damian assures me, is defined in the wictionary as
mess, nastiness, smutty business, (lit:) piggishness.

We are urged to "come and greet them and get your laugh of a lifetime".

It comes from this photostream, dedicated to saving the historic RKO Keith's Theatre. The pictures, of this and other ads plus great shots of the theatre in its heyday and now in heartbreaking disrepair, are well worth a look.

Late arrival at the Animal Crackers odd advertisements ball

Looks like the jungle animals from this one have been rounded up and put in a box, and they've got Lillian Roth to sit on them so as to make sure they don't escape. (Great to see a bona fide caricature of Lillian, rather than just some woman, as is usually the most you'll get from these artists.)
Harpo is his usual obliging self, opting to pull Lillian and the animals along on a rope, while Chico (the carniverous crook) and Zeppo (the zestful zaney - only slightly less bizarre than a zestful zancy, which is how I read it at first) simply watch from the middle-distance in revolutionary transparent suits and hats. Zeppo, in keeping with his reduced role in the film, has decided to leave his legs at home.
Meanwhile Groucho, true to form, leans on his famous upside-down walking stick.
But what's this? One of the tiny elephants has escaped, and is being merrily ridden from the scene by that pesky miniature Harpo, up to his tricks again.

I don't know about you, but this is a film I want to see.

Anyone know what a faint-stepping funster is, and where I can buy one?

Crackers at Loew's

Thanks to Damian for these fascinating newspaper ads for the first run of Animal Crackers at Loew's, the Home of Hits.
Oh, to have been alive and breathing that 1930 air!
Last week: Helen Kane in Heads Up; this week: the Marxes and Lillian Roth in Animal Crackers; next week: Roth again in DeMille's Madam Satan ("a marvelous picture"). All that plus an added Krazy Kat cartoon!
.
Saturday the fun begins! Those dizzy goofs on their way direct from three big weeks in Cleveland, Cocoanuttier than ever! A nice photograph of all four boys, and note the billing: Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, Groucho. It's not alphabetical, it's not left-to-right, it's just plain strange...

Starts today! Filmdom's four funniest fools in the biggest theatrical opening of the year! Four fools they may be, but only three make it to the poster this time, and only Groucho and Harpo are deemed worth caricaturing, along with a misleading selection of jungle beasts.

Only two more days to see the grand slam of comedies! Gags a mile a minute! And Zeppo's back! Harpo is speechless, Groucho is telling us that "it's all in pun", and Zeppo is saying "Scratch Elsie." Intriguingly, this refers to a snatch of dialogue in the 'dictating a letter' scene cut from all known prints of the film:

Groucho: Dear Elsie... no, never mind Elsie.
Zeppo: Do you want me to scratch Elsie?
Groucho: Well, if you enjoy that sort of thing, it's quite alright with me. However, I'm not interested in your private affairs, Jamison.

Odd that they couldn't have come up with an equally relevant quote for Chico, who's still saying "why a duck?" like The Cocoanuts never ended.

The Cocoanuts hits London!

Thanks to Anthony Blampied for these two unusual adverts used during the London run of The Cocoanuts.
The first is a real puzzler: who are these men?


And I love that quintessentially British mix of wild hyperbole and sober grammar: "It is impossible to resist splitting with laughter."

The other one is more straightforward:

I suppose I should point out to our younger readers, however, that neither "Ziegfeld's famous stars making love" nor "London's coolest theatre" mean quite what you think they do.