Duck Soup (1933)

I am quite ashamed of the fact that I have never seen a Marx brothers movie before - until now. My reason is perhaps that when I was a kid I used to hang out with my neighbors who spend idle and endless afternoons with extremely boring old comedies from the silent movie era. So - I wasn't particularly thrilled about watching Duck Soup (which is not even a silent film). Perhaps this is because of my low expectations, but I am surprised about how much I enjoyed it. Even though most of the gags were not that funny, I liked the anarchic joy of messing stuff up - there was a kind of vitality about it all which had perhaps little to do with making particular points about politics or war. The story seems quite hard to spend many words on (I must say the satire of seriousness in politics works quite well), but what caught my attention was Duck Soup's approach to comedy as an inspired and rambling form of deconstruction - it all falls apart, in a good and edifying way.