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Hail, Hail, Euphoria! Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made
Bestselling author Roy Blount Jr. tells the story of theclassic Marx Brothers wartime satire Duck Soup. As always, Blount isinformed yet informal, tongue-in-cheek yet tempered, providing the perfectvoice to recount the irreverent antics of Harpo, Chico, Groucho, and Zeppo. Readers of HarpoSpeaks, The Essential Groucho,and Monkey Business and fans of Animal Crackers, A Night at the Opera and the Marx Brothers’ other timelesscomedies—as well as all fans of Blount’s witty and insightful books like Alphabet Juice and Feet on the Street and listeners to NPR’s weekly news quiz, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me—will becaptivated by the lyrical humorist’s compelling, behind-the-scenes storytellingof the 1933 classic film.
160 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 28, 2010
24 people are currently reading
264 people want to read
About the author
Roy Blount Jr.
70 books67 followersRoy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-three books. The first, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, was expanded into About Three Bricks Shy . . . and the Load Filled Up. It is often called one of the best sports books of all time. His subsequent works have taken on a range of subjects, from Duck Soup, to Robert E. Lee, to what cats are thinking, to how to savor New Orleans, to what it’s like being married to the first woman president of the United States.
Blount is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, an ex-president of the Authors Guild, a usage consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and a member of both the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the band the Rock Bottom Remainders.
In 2009, Blount received the University of North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe Prize. The university cited “his voracious appetite for the way words sound and for what they really mean.” Time places Blount “in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H. L. Mencken and W. C. Fields.” Norman Mailer has said, “Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time.” Garrison Keillor told the Paris Review, “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.”
Blount’s essays, articles, stories, and verses have appeared in over one hundred and fifty publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, the Oxford American, and Garden & Gun. He comes from Decatur, Georgia, and lives in western Massachusetts.
Blount is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, an ex-president of the Authors Guild, a usage consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and a member of both the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the band the Rock Bottom Remainders.
In 2009, Blount received the University of North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe Prize. The university cited “his voracious appetite for the way words sound and for what they really mean.” Time places Blount “in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H. L. Mencken and W. C. Fields.” Norman Mailer has said, “Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time.” Garrison Keillor told the Paris Review, “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.”
Blount’s essays, articles, stories, and verses have appeared in over one hundred and fifty publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, the Oxford American, and Garden & Gun. He comes from Decatur, Georgia, and lives in western Massachusetts.
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July 31, 2025
Blount begins his tale with a visit to the Thalia, (which, sadly, closed in 1987) an upper-west-side Manhattan theater where Duck Soup was being shown in a matinee. Kids were in the audience, young ones, 6, 7 years old. Their reaction was to be amazed. My personal experience with kids and the Marx Brothers was not so fortunate. I used to torture educate my progeny with Friday Family Movie Night. I forced them to endure a long list of classic cinema, even in black and white! Somehow no one reported me for child abuse. The Marx Brothers were well represented in that series. So much so that for one of her birthday parties, my youngest wanted to include a showing one of the brothers’ films. I had images of pajama’d ten-year-old girls splayed on the living room carpet, couch and chairs howling raucously, as popcorn spilled from bowls, upended as the audience rolled on the floor laughing. It did not work out. “Atsa no funny,” was the general sense. My daughter did not understand why her philistine friends did not get it. She did. In a way, I feel that way about Hail, Hail, Euphoria. Somehow, I just didn’t seem to get it.
Roy Blount Jr. - image from Washington Life
Well, that may be overstating. I came to this book expecting an intelligent yuck-fest. And it does offer intel aplenty. In fact, Hail, Hail Euphoria is as full as an overstuffed stateroom with information about the Marxian fab four (counting Zeppo, but not Gummo or Karl). Blount dishes about the off-screen relationships among the brothers, about why Harpo never speaks, about how their film director hated working with them, and about their stage background. You see the name “Chico,” for example, and think cheek-oh, right? Not a so fast. It is actually chick-oh, as the eldest brother was quite the ladies man. Yes, really. And a degenerate gambler by age 11.
There are many tangential bits of info as well, including on Margaret Dumont, and they are interesting. That Duck Soup is rated among the best (actually the 24th best, the book cover exaggerates a tad) all time war movies by Military History Magazine (which reminds me it must be about time to renew) which seems odd, although it is a rather magnificent send-up of faux casus belli, which is enough to give anyone indigestion. It is enlightening to learn that in an earlier script version, Rufus T. Firefly was an arms merchant, and was thus motivated to start a war as a way of boosting sales.
From The Mirror Sketch – You can see the full scene here
Blount offers many quotes from the film, and these are the funniest parts of the book. I was surprised that, while I did guffaw, chortle, laugh out loud, snicker and otherwise react in an expected manner to these, (as a complete sucker for puns, I was guilty of frequent laughter to the point of gagging) I found no such reaction to the actual words of the author. He looks, for example, at the film with French subtitles and finds it amusing to comment on that. It seemed to me that it was more a way of padding the material to reach a publishable length. A more interesting sequence was when he went through a scene from the film in minute detail, pointing out specifics that are likely to flash by those of us who have only seen it at regular speed. I like Roy Blount, appreciate him on radio, and generally take him to be a funny guy. But all the humor in this book is by reference and not from Blount himself. I guess one must, then, be satisfied with the humor of the Marxes and the information and analysis added by the author, which is considerable. If you are a Marx brothers fan (or a Marx Brothers air conditioner) there is ample material here to sustain your interest (without leaving a mark) and enhance your appreciation. And atsa no joke.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Roy Blount Jr. was a staff writer at Sports Illustrated for seven years, but continued to contribute pieces after moving on. He has been a panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me since 2011, and a frequent guest on Prairie Home Companion. He narrated a PBS documentary about the Mississippi River, made a guest appearance on the HBO series, Treme. Blount was a member of the all-writer band Rock Bottom Remainders, was a president of the Authors’ Guild, and in between these and other activities, he managed to find time to crank out about two dozen books. His shorter work has appeared in over 150 publications.
Links to the author’s personal and FB pages
Interview with Kerry Shelby at Key West Kitchen – the material relevant to this book is in the first eight minutes of the vid
A wonderful piece about the film in this 2015 article by Craig Brown in The Guardian - A whole lotta relephants: the enduring delights of Duck Soup
Roy Blount Jr. - image from Washington Life
Well, that may be overstating. I came to this book expecting an intelligent yuck-fest. And it does offer intel aplenty. In fact, Hail, Hail Euphoria is as full as an overstuffed stateroom with information about the Marxian fab four (counting Zeppo, but not Gummo or Karl). Blount dishes about the off-screen relationships among the brothers, about why Harpo never speaks, about how their film director hated working with them, and about their stage background. You see the name “Chico,” for example, and think cheek-oh, right? Not a so fast. It is actually chick-oh, as the eldest brother was quite the ladies man. Yes, really. And a degenerate gambler by age 11.
There are many tangential bits of info as well, including on Margaret Dumont, and they are interesting. That Duck Soup is rated among the best (actually the 24th best, the book cover exaggerates a tad) all time war movies by Military History Magazine (which reminds me it must be about time to renew) which seems odd, although it is a rather magnificent send-up of faux casus belli, which is enough to give anyone indigestion. It is enlightening to learn that in an earlier script version, Rufus T. Firefly was an arms merchant, and was thus motivated to start a war as a way of boosting sales.
From The Mirror Sketch – You can see the full scene here
Blount offers many quotes from the film, and these are the funniest parts of the book. I was surprised that, while I did guffaw, chortle, laugh out loud, snicker and otherwise react in an expected manner to these, (as a complete sucker for puns, I was guilty of frequent laughter to the point of gagging) I found no such reaction to the actual words of the author. He looks, for example, at the film with French subtitles and finds it amusing to comment on that. It seemed to me that it was more a way of padding the material to reach a publishable length. A more interesting sequence was when he went through a scene from the film in minute detail, pointing out specifics that are likely to flash by those of us who have only seen it at regular speed. I like Roy Blount, appreciate him on radio, and generally take him to be a funny guy. But all the humor in this book is by reference and not from Blount himself. I guess one must, then, be satisfied with the humor of the Marxes and the information and analysis added by the author, which is considerable. If you are a Marx brothers fan (or a Marx Brothers air conditioner) there is ample material here to sustain your interest (without leaving a mark) and enhance your appreciation. And atsa no joke.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Roy Blount Jr. was a staff writer at Sports Illustrated for seven years, but continued to contribute pieces after moving on. He has been a panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me since 2011, and a frequent guest on Prairie Home Companion. He narrated a PBS documentary about the Mississippi River, made a guest appearance on the HBO series, Treme. Blount was a member of the all-writer band Rock Bottom Remainders, was a president of the Authors’ Guild, and in between these and other activities, he managed to find time to crank out about two dozen books. His shorter work has appeared in over 150 publications.
Links to the author’s personal and FB pages
Interview with Kerry Shelby at Key West Kitchen – the material relevant to this book is in the first eight minutes of the vid
A wonderful piece about the film in this 2015 article by Craig Brown in The Guardian - A whole lotta relephants: the enduring delights of Duck Soup
August 3, 2015
Duck Soup is one of my favorite movies ever and regularly makes the top hundred films of all time and the top ten of film comedies of all time. Often it is THE TOP funny film of all time. And Roy Blount is one of our funniest commentators. I like him on NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me." He's funny. And he is obsessed with the Marx Bros and and this film. So this short book has a weird premise: Blount will have the movie on one part of the screen of his computer while he comments on it on another screen, like a lot of film commentaries you can get with many DVDs, the director or minor character commenting on it as we all see it. And in this, Blount looks up stuff on wikipedia and wherever as he goes and stops to talk about the Marx Bros and related topics along the way, whatever he thinks is interesting. I like what he talks about.
This book, written by a funny man about some of the funniest men ever in their funniest movie, is not funny. Not supposed to be, I think, for the most part. It is a comedian and comedy fan's love letter to the movie. And what you're looking for, deep insights and tidbits of stuff to share at cocktail parties, or in showing the film (and showing off) to friends, that part's kinda fun and sometimes a little disappointing, since I knew some of it already from reading other books on the Marx Bros and Duck Soup. I'm not saying it's boring, but it often reads like a first draft ramble, a highly unstructured journal, all over the place, with some typos and different fonts, not even that carefully edited. But I love the film, so it is maybe a little like a serpentine bar conversation about an agreed favorite film at its best. There's the famous mirror scene with Harpo and Groucho and that is a great part where he finds lots of similar scenes in movies. Fun.
So it IS about the Marx Bros and Duck Soup, so it's never really boring, but also not always compelling. My recommendation, as would be his, I bet: See the movie again, even if you have seen it a dozen times. It's one of the best anti-war absurdist films of all time, and still funny. Classic in the best sense of that word.
This book, written by a funny man about some of the funniest men ever in their funniest movie, is not funny. Not supposed to be, I think, for the most part. It is a comedian and comedy fan's love letter to the movie. And what you're looking for, deep insights and tidbits of stuff to share at cocktail parties, or in showing the film (and showing off) to friends, that part's kinda fun and sometimes a little disappointing, since I knew some of it already from reading other books on the Marx Bros and Duck Soup. I'm not saying it's boring, but it often reads like a first draft ramble, a highly unstructured journal, all over the place, with some typos and different fonts, not even that carefully edited. But I love the film, so it is maybe a little like a serpentine bar conversation about an agreed favorite film at its best. There's the famous mirror scene with Harpo and Groucho and that is a great part where he finds lots of similar scenes in movies. Fun.
So it IS about the Marx Bros and Duck Soup, so it's never really boring, but also not always compelling. My recommendation, as would be his, I bet: See the movie again, even if you have seen it a dozen times. It's one of the best anti-war absurdist films of all time, and still funny. Classic in the best sense of that word.
February 29, 2012
“So that you don’t have to, I have watched this scene some twenty or thirty times, and in slow motion, and frame by frame. A lot of things happen, and here they are for the record:”
That’s a funny premise. Instead of saving it for half-way through “Hail, Hail, Euphoria!”, however, Roy Blount, Jr. might have warned us at the beginning that this was actually the premise of the book. And it’s not a joke. Not only does Blount go frame-by-frame, he pauses the DVD of “Duck Soup” he is apparently watching to look up translations of the French subtitles, check what Wikipedia or IMDB has to say about an actor, quote other random websites as if he’s just discovered the Internet, and draw upon his impressive and often fascinating knowledge of movie history to weave elaborate riffs on, well, just about everything.
Hail, Hail, Euphoria! reads as if someone turned on a recorder and let Blount speak about whatever came to mind as the movie played. When it works, he provides entertaining insights into whatever appears on screen. When it doesn’t work, it comes across as if you’re watching a film with Andy Rooney and he won’t shut up.
With the book’s many typos and inconsistent fonts and type sizes, I can’t help feeling that someone had a funny idea and rushed this to print. It might have been better to wait and give it some shape and thought (and editing, so that it might actually defend its thesis that this is “The Greatest War Movie Ever Made”) or release it as it was perhaps originally intended: as special recorded commentary on a DVD of Duck Soup.
Although I'm a Marx Brothers nut, and a fan of this film, it took me WAY too long to slog through 145 pages.
That’s a funny premise. Instead of saving it for half-way through “Hail, Hail, Euphoria!”, however, Roy Blount, Jr. might have warned us at the beginning that this was actually the premise of the book. And it’s not a joke. Not only does Blount go frame-by-frame, he pauses the DVD of “Duck Soup” he is apparently watching to look up translations of the French subtitles, check what Wikipedia or IMDB has to say about an actor, quote other random websites as if he’s just discovered the Internet, and draw upon his impressive and often fascinating knowledge of movie history to weave elaborate riffs on, well, just about everything.
Hail, Hail, Euphoria! reads as if someone turned on a recorder and let Blount speak about whatever came to mind as the movie played. When it works, he provides entertaining insights into whatever appears on screen. When it doesn’t work, it comes across as if you’re watching a film with Andy Rooney and he won’t shut up.
With the book’s many typos and inconsistent fonts and type sizes, I can’t help feeling that someone had a funny idea and rushed this to print. It might have been better to wait and give it some shape and thought (and editing, so that it might actually defend its thesis that this is “The Greatest War Movie Ever Made”) or release it as it was perhaps originally intended: as special recorded commentary on a DVD of Duck Soup.
Although I'm a Marx Brothers nut, and a fan of this film, it took me WAY too long to slog through 145 pages.
November 1, 2010
recently read a review that claimed this book was a scene-by-scene look at the classic Marx Bros. movie Duck Soup (1933). First of all, that reviewer must have jumped to that conclusion and written the review before reading the actual book because his statement couldn't be further from the truth. Hail, Hail, Euphoria! is more than just a book about a movie. It's also about the lives of the Marx Bros., Leo McCarey (the director of the movie), the cultural and historical circumstances that allowed for the movie's inception, the methods of comedic style employed by each of the brothers and lots of other fun tidbits and trivia. This is a book that any classic film fan would love to devour and it's a lot of fun to read. Roy Blount Jr., of NPR fame, has a natural sense of humor that lends itself to writing a book about a funny movie made by some funny guys.
The book is both structured and structureless. While it's not a scene-by-scene play on the movie, it does follow the flow of the movie discussing scenes in the order in which they appear. The text flows with information stopping along the way to look closely on a scene before it moves on. There are no chapters and not a lot of breaks. The book is relatively short, 145 pages, and you could easily read it in one sitting. Make sure when you start it that you are near a computer because there is a YouTube clip, an online radio recording of Harpo plus a few other links you'll need to check out before you can proceed.
The book's subtitle claims that Duck Soup was the greatest war movie ever made. While this is never really explained in the book, the author does give us various insights into why Duck Soup was an effective anti-war film and why it's a good example of the time period it represents. What I liked about the book is that reading it was like going on a treasure hunt, finding goodies along the way including: links to various clips (you have to type the URLs out on your computer because no you can't click on the page!), the reason why the book is called Hail, Hail, Euphoria! instead of Freedonia!, the meaning of the phrase "duck soup", etc.
read the rest of my review here: http://bit.ly/cRtYRR
The book is both structured and structureless. While it's not a scene-by-scene play on the movie, it does follow the flow of the movie discussing scenes in the order in which they appear. The text flows with information stopping along the way to look closely on a scene before it moves on. There are no chapters and not a lot of breaks. The book is relatively short, 145 pages, and you could easily read it in one sitting. Make sure when you start it that you are near a computer because there is a YouTube clip, an online radio recording of Harpo plus a few other links you'll need to check out before you can proceed.
The book's subtitle claims that Duck Soup was the greatest war movie ever made. While this is never really explained in the book, the author does give us various insights into why Duck Soup was an effective anti-war film and why it's a good example of the time period it represents. What I liked about the book is that reading it was like going on a treasure hunt, finding goodies along the way including: links to various clips (you have to type the URLs out on your computer because no you can't click on the page!), the reason why the book is called Hail, Hail, Euphoria! instead of Freedonia!, the meaning of the phrase "duck soup", etc.
read the rest of my review here: http://bit.ly/cRtYRR
December 14, 2019
I've always been fine with Roy Blount Jr., when I came across him, that is, say on NPR or some such. He's that droll intellectual type, but unlike Dick Cavett, another droll intellectual type (and Marx fanatic) whom I have adored for nearly forty years, I have no real sentimental, romantic attachment or willingness to forgive Mr. Blount's foibles past a certain point. I tolerated this book's lack of chapters (an admitted pet peeve of mine, due to my reading style), and frequent over-personalization and digression; I rolled my eyes mildly at the armchair psychoanalysis that led Blount to repeatedly compare Margaret Dumont to Minnie Marx. I put up with the mild dullness of this whole enterprise, the conceit of watching Duck Soup and pausing to write an essay as we go along--he's writing about my beloved Marxes, after all, so how could it be so unfunny and dry?
But when, 20 pages from the end, he referred to Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters character as Alvy Singer, when any self respecting white American movie buff over 40 KNOWS that's his Annie Hall character, even if they don't know his H&HS character is named Mickey, I had half a mind to chuck the whole damn book into the street and never look back. Where have all the decent editors gone? Phooey on this whole waste.
But when, 20 pages from the end, he referred to Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters character as Alvy Singer, when any self respecting white American movie buff over 40 KNOWS that's his Annie Hall character, even if they don't know his H&HS character is named Mickey, I had half a mind to chuck the whole damn book into the street and never look back. Where have all the decent editors gone? Phooey on this whole waste.
February 9, 2016
Kinda disappointing. The book is one long essay on the movie "Duck Soup," but it is packed with other tidbits of Marx Brothers history. Some of it relates to the scene being described and the rest seems vaguely connected to the current discussion. Along the way Blount diverges into such topics as racism within the Brother's films, other co-stars of other Marx Brothers movies, other silent and early Hollywood films and stars, what happened to each of the five brothers before and after this picture, what the French subtitles say and how the jokes are translated to French, and background on the director, producers, original screenplay writers and almost everyone else even tangentially connected to the film. At times I felt that Blount was trying to pad out his essay or to demonstrate just how smart he considers himself to be or both. And long-winded. I was one third of the way through the book before we got past the opening credits of the film.
Some good anecdotes and history and background of the movie, but way too much fluff to wade through for those gems.
Some good anecdotes and history and background of the movie, but way too much fluff to wade through for those gems.
March 2, 2016
I was pretty disappointed in this book. Some of it was very intetesting, but a lot of it was just recapping the plot. There was also, for reasons I can't understand, a lot of explaining the French subtitles of the movie. I wish there was more analysis of the comedy and behind the scenes anectdotes, because the little of that there was, was very good. I just found there wasn't enough to justify making this an entire book. It felt padded and stretched out. Instead, it could have just been a very good long essay, instead of a mediocre short book. One minor complaint, the author brings up the movie Hannah and Her Sisters, but refers to Woody Allen's character as Alvy Singer, who was actually his character in Annie Hall, not Hannah and Her Sisters.
August 23, 2013
Just...bad. I'd give this a skip.
May 16, 2019
I’d suggest getting it on audio book and playing it while you watch Duck Soup. It’s a great commentary
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December 3, 2011
A wild, weird look into the history of the Marx Brothers (and more especially the making and impact of "Duck Soup" ((and even more especially into the thoughts and feelings of Roy Blount Jr. on the same)) ) written almost as a stream of consciousness exploration. Dangerous to start reading before bedtime, because now I don't want to stop!
January 23, 2016
I read and enjoyed this in the way that a fan often enjoys pieces about the objects of his obsessions more than clearly sane people would enjoy them.
Recommended for the Marx Brothers fan who keeps a copy of Why a Duck on his bathroom shelf.
Recommended for the Marx Brothers fan who keeps a copy of Why a Duck on his bathroom shelf.
February 28, 2021
Books that attempt to recount films and account for their greatness (or perhaps their lack thereof) can be fraught with problems. How much of the text will be a regurgitation of the movie's plot with associated quotes and descriptive passages? How does one understand a film in print when it is a, after all, a motion picture? Does one need to be given an in depth analysis of genre, history, the cast, creative elements, studio politics etc? And does one actually need to see the movie beforehand?
Blount's book on the Marx Brothers' classic 'Duck Soup'does well at times to deal with all these questions, does very well in one or two areas some of the time, and yet overall doesn't quite succeed as one might hope. I suspect some of this is due to the (deceptively) simple and cursory construct of the film. 'Duck Soup' is only 68 minutes long, and whilst the running time is filled with plenty of inspired comedy I don't believe there is enough in toto to sustain an entire critical text.
Now the author doesn't just rely on an analysis of the movie to ensure his work hits more than 100 pages. There is a substantial amount of biographical information on the Marx Brothers in 'Hail, Hail Euphoria', as well as other major participants in the movie's creation. I've no quibble or issue with this aspect of the book; in fact the material presented to supplement the discussion of the movie is very good indeed. I have been a fan of the Marx Brothers for many a year and I learned quite a lot from Blount's text about these fascinating comedy stars.
At the end of the day though this book is set up as a case study on what is cited in the subtitle as '...The Greatest War Movie Ever Made', and Blount doesn't quite do enough in my mind to present compelling arguments either for or against this proposition. Instead he offers an interesting and enjoyable ramble through the movie as an historical and biographical spotlight on Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and the attendant cast and crew.
One thing that did annoy me a little was Blount's device of interposing punning dialogue with his fictional construct of Chico and Groucho as characters in the text. It wasn't that funny nor clever; more a needless distraction and 'look at me' egotistical exercise. Oh and the French subtitles discussion...that could've been edited out as well.
'Hail, Hail Euphoria!' is a very good book on a great film and a superb team of comedians. However I would've enjoyed a less diffuse text that focused solely on a critical analysis of 'Duck Soup' within its historical context, and then looked for a more expansive biographical book on the Marx Brothers for much of the other parts of the book.
Blount's book on the Marx Brothers' classic 'Duck Soup'does well at times to deal with all these questions, does very well in one or two areas some of the time, and yet overall doesn't quite succeed as one might hope. I suspect some of this is due to the (deceptively) simple and cursory construct of the film. 'Duck Soup' is only 68 minutes long, and whilst the running time is filled with plenty of inspired comedy I don't believe there is enough in toto to sustain an entire critical text.
Now the author doesn't just rely on an analysis of the movie to ensure his work hits more than 100 pages. There is a substantial amount of biographical information on the Marx Brothers in 'Hail, Hail Euphoria', as well as other major participants in the movie's creation. I've no quibble or issue with this aspect of the book; in fact the material presented to supplement the discussion of the movie is very good indeed. I have been a fan of the Marx Brothers for many a year and I learned quite a lot from Blount's text about these fascinating comedy stars.
At the end of the day though this book is set up as a case study on what is cited in the subtitle as '...The Greatest War Movie Ever Made', and Blount doesn't quite do enough in my mind to present compelling arguments either for or against this proposition. Instead he offers an interesting and enjoyable ramble through the movie as an historical and biographical spotlight on Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and the attendant cast and crew.
One thing that did annoy me a little was Blount's device of interposing punning dialogue with his fictional construct of Chico and Groucho as characters in the text. It wasn't that funny nor clever; more a needless distraction and 'look at me' egotistical exercise. Oh and the French subtitles discussion...that could've been edited out as well.
'Hail, Hail Euphoria!' is a very good book on a great film and a superb team of comedians. However I would've enjoyed a less diffuse text that focused solely on a critical analysis of 'Duck Soup' within its historical context, and then looked for a more expansive biographical book on the Marx Brothers for much of the other parts of the book.
November 6, 2019
I love the Marx Brothers. I like Roy Blount Jr. “Duck Soup”, while not my favorite Marx Bros. film, is at least a Paramount-era film, and therefore superior to their MGM work. (I still think “Animal Crackers” is the funniest film ever made, and have given it as my default answer to the question “what is your favorite film?” since I was in high school, if not earlier.)
Given all this, I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, I couldn’t. The book had no real reason to exist. It’s a short read, and thus isn’t particularly in-depth or informative, but it’s not even funny, and that’s perhaps the most damning thing. Blount usually excels at oddball tangents on unrelated subjects--it’s what makes him such a star on NPR's Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me--and in previous books of his that I’ve read or glanced through, his takes on everything from grammar to cinematic depictions of Robert E. Lee to songs about food have generally managed to contain his characteristic brand of mildly educational whimsy, if not his glorious southern drawl. (I periodically forget that he was actually born in Indiana.) He completely falls flat here, though.
Part of the problem is that you get the sense he’s writing the book because he has to, not because he wants to. Every time he describes pausing the movie on the computer on which he was watching it, advancing through some complex scene one freeze-frame at a time to describe what exactly is going on with a hat, say, you get the sense that he lacks the inspiration to write about anything else. Asides on the film’s French subtitles are mildly interesting, but feel similarly like mere acts of transcription rather than interpretation, explanation, or evaluation. (Given the heavy reliance on puns and wordplay, I imagine the non-Harpo Marxes are incredibly difficult to translate into other languages--now that would be something interesting to read about!)
The nicest thing I can say about the book is I learned a few facts from it, but given the lack of sourcing and the prevalence of general mythologizing floating around about the brothers, I can’t say whether I can trust all of it as factual. All in all, a big disappointment, on both the entertainment and educational fronts. The only thing stopping me from giving it a one-star review is my preexisting fondness for the author and the subject.
Given all this, I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, I couldn’t. The book had no real reason to exist. It’s a short read, and thus isn’t particularly in-depth or informative, but it’s not even funny, and that’s perhaps the most damning thing. Blount usually excels at oddball tangents on unrelated subjects--it’s what makes him such a star on NPR's Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me--and in previous books of his that I’ve read or glanced through, his takes on everything from grammar to cinematic depictions of Robert E. Lee to songs about food have generally managed to contain his characteristic brand of mildly educational whimsy, if not his glorious southern drawl. (I periodically forget that he was actually born in Indiana.) He completely falls flat here, though.
Part of the problem is that you get the sense he’s writing the book because he has to, not because he wants to. Every time he describes pausing the movie on the computer on which he was watching it, advancing through some complex scene one freeze-frame at a time to describe what exactly is going on with a hat, say, you get the sense that he lacks the inspiration to write about anything else. Asides on the film’s French subtitles are mildly interesting, but feel similarly like mere acts of transcription rather than interpretation, explanation, or evaluation. (Given the heavy reliance on puns and wordplay, I imagine the non-Harpo Marxes are incredibly difficult to translate into other languages--now that would be something interesting to read about!)
The nicest thing I can say about the book is I learned a few facts from it, but given the lack of sourcing and the prevalence of general mythologizing floating around about the brothers, I can’t say whether I can trust all of it as factual. All in all, a big disappointment, on both the entertainment and educational fronts. The only thing stopping me from giving it a one-star review is my preexisting fondness for the author and the subject.
April 2, 2012
If you can’t finish Hail, Hail, Euphoria! in a single trip to the bathroom then you never really had to go in the first place. This is Roy Blount, Jr.’s companion to his favorite flick, an Asimovian “Guide” to 68 minutes of movie mayhem, and like its subject, breezy, well-researched, anecdotal, and (unlike Asimov’s “Guides”) incredibly short. Blount claims here to be sitting at his computer, forwarding the DVD a frame at a time while typing out his manuscript. He acts as sort of an MST3K for the literati, which for an author as prolific as Blount is duck soup (meaning easy, apparently).
What’s the more remarkable (albeit frankly, disappointing) is that Blount does all his commentary without reference to the screenplay. Blount excuses this by quoting Groucho’s distaste for “criticism” which serves primarily as a vehicle to recycle plagiarized jokes, but of course, that’s why copyright law provides for licensing arrangements. The glaring omission is what reduces this book from a 5-star essential companion to a 3-star curiosity. Of course, you’ll find a fine excerpt of Duck Soup (among other Marxisms) in The Essential Groucho: Writings by, for, and about Groucho Marx, and I suppose it’s but a minor extra step to find a fan transcript on the web, but it would have been nice to have the copy immediately to hand.
If you can get past the 10 or so pages Blount devotes to the (completely ordinary) opening credits, you’ll find the best part of Blount’s exegesis occurs at pp. 90-91. It is here that Blount explains why he thinks Groucho was not tongue-in-cheek in considering Duck Soup the Marx Brothers’ “war movie.” “What is war, but tit-for-tat?” Blount all-too-glibly asks. Blount suggests that tit-for-tat is the core of Marxian slapstick, humor arising from mutual assured destruction. “The Marxes are a series of chain reactions,” he writes, “they expose machinations as mechanical.” Duck Soup in this light ought therefore to be seen as an anti-war movie, its plot the result of an unhinged leadership and proletariat. Show me a country financed by a widow’s largess, and I’ll give you Groucho, Commander in Chief. Hilarity (and war) ensues.
Page 90 is also where Blount wraps up a blow-by-blow description of four minutes of onscreen schtick, the hat-exchange slapstick performed by Chico, Harpo, and Edgar Kennedy (here, portraying a put-upon lemonade vendor). Elegant slapstick never gets old; it reduced my not-quite 10 year old son to floor-rolling giggles, and he’s since taken to saying “Honk” at every opportunity. Parents be warned: this is what you’ll get if you invite Harpo to help raise your kids.
Blount goes there, but he also uses the scene to consider genre. I should say at this point that I picked up this book to get a deeper understanding of the genre of farce (and I should add that I did indeed find this book to be useful in that regard). Including Duck Soup, all the Marx Brothers’ comedy is considered driven by farce. Now, the Marxian variety is not what I’d previously considered farce to be. I’d always understood farce to mean a comedy of errors, the humor of juxtaposition and incongruity following directly from an escalating (and, at its best, accelerating) series of misunderstandings. This is possibly best exemplified by Neil Simon’s Rumors, or Blake Edward’s A Shot in the Dark, the Gelbart/Sondheim A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, or... okay, Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Thus defined, I’d always felt that farce was the hardest and so the most rewarding kind of comedy to pull off, just a monumental feat of craft and discipline to write, stage, and direct.
Perhaps I'm overselling these two pages of Blount's random ruminations on Duck Soup, but here I begin to start thinking of farce as less comedy of errors than as comedy of the ridiculous. “The idea is that if something happens, some other thing inevitably flows from it... a series of incidents that succeed and provoke each other” (Blount quoting the film’s director). This seems more all-encompassing and in fact allows plot to be reduced to mere Rube Goldbergian connectedness. That sounds fairly easy, right? Of course, abiding by such a definition still leaves playwrights with the inherent challenge of securing suspension of disbelief throughout an entire work -- no mean feat for absurdist humor. Creative freedom aside, I'd think adopting this kind of approach risks incoherence, which is usually more boring than funny. Yet Duck Soup clearly works. Why?
Genre taxonomy matters to the extent that it clearly classifies or lays out expectations for the structure of any work. It shouldn’t just be an ex post facto label. Perhaps this is just wishful thinking on my part, but following Milton, I believe that having a deeper, more articulable understanding of the ins-and-outs of a given genre makes you more likely to be able to pull it off yourself (or at least know why you failed). If “luck is the residue of design,” then writers and directors follow or ignore the mandates of structure at their peril. Back then to Blount’s consideration of Duck Soup, giving farce as broad a jurisdiction as comedy-of-the-ridiculous is to say that if you’ve got bits that are funny enough on their own merits, you’re free to string them together even if they are completely extraneous to the narrative (whether that’s Duck Soup’s street vendor squabble or Harpo’s literal mirroring of Groucho, or virtually every scene that makes up Monty Python and the Holy Grail for that matter) so long as the transitions are seamless. The implication is that audience acceptance depends as much or more on the less quantifiable fluidity of rhythm, contrast, and feel than to any kind of organic continuity or consistency. Or, as Blount puts it, “Does any of this advance the plot? No. But none of it seems dragged in either.”
If that’s “all” there is to being a successful farceur, then abandon all hope, ye who enter. You’ve either got the knack, or you ain’t, and no two ways about it. Fortunately, the Marx Brothers got it and got it in spades. Now if you’ve stayed with me to this point, I think you’ll enjoy picking up Blount’s book, though I’ve probably done him an injustice in reading thus into his various observations. This is a fine companion, but to be blunt with Blount, there’s practically nothing in his writing (or mine) that beats taking Duck Soup at face value. And as he suggests right off, you might as well just watch the movie.
What’s the more remarkable (albeit frankly, disappointing) is that Blount does all his commentary without reference to the screenplay. Blount excuses this by quoting Groucho’s distaste for “criticism” which serves primarily as a vehicle to recycle plagiarized jokes, but of course, that’s why copyright law provides for licensing arrangements. The glaring omission is what reduces this book from a 5-star essential companion to a 3-star curiosity. Of course, you’ll find a fine excerpt of Duck Soup (among other Marxisms) in The Essential Groucho: Writings by, for, and about Groucho Marx, and I suppose it’s but a minor extra step to find a fan transcript on the web, but it would have been nice to have the copy immediately to hand.
If you can get past the 10 or so pages Blount devotes to the (completely ordinary) opening credits, you’ll find the best part of Blount’s exegesis occurs at pp. 90-91. It is here that Blount explains why he thinks Groucho was not tongue-in-cheek in considering Duck Soup the Marx Brothers’ “war movie.” “What is war, but tit-for-tat?” Blount all-too-glibly asks. Blount suggests that tit-for-tat is the core of Marxian slapstick, humor arising from mutual assured destruction. “The Marxes are a series of chain reactions,” he writes, “they expose machinations as mechanical.” Duck Soup in this light ought therefore to be seen as an anti-war movie, its plot the result of an unhinged leadership and proletariat. Show me a country financed by a widow’s largess, and I’ll give you Groucho, Commander in Chief. Hilarity (and war) ensues.
Page 90 is also where Blount wraps up a blow-by-blow description of four minutes of onscreen schtick, the hat-exchange slapstick performed by Chico, Harpo, and Edgar Kennedy (here, portraying a put-upon lemonade vendor). Elegant slapstick never gets old; it reduced my not-quite 10 year old son to floor-rolling giggles, and he’s since taken to saying “Honk” at every opportunity. Parents be warned: this is what you’ll get if you invite Harpo to help raise your kids.
Blount goes there, but he also uses the scene to consider genre. I should say at this point that I picked up this book to get a deeper understanding of the genre of farce (and I should add that I did indeed find this book to be useful in that regard). Including Duck Soup, all the Marx Brothers’ comedy is considered driven by farce. Now, the Marxian variety is not what I’d previously considered farce to be. I’d always understood farce to mean a comedy of errors, the humor of juxtaposition and incongruity following directly from an escalating (and, at its best, accelerating) series of misunderstandings. This is possibly best exemplified by Neil Simon’s Rumors, or Blake Edward’s A Shot in the Dark, the Gelbart/Sondheim A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, or... okay, Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Thus defined, I’d always felt that farce was the hardest and so the most rewarding kind of comedy to pull off, just a monumental feat of craft and discipline to write, stage, and direct.
Perhaps I'm overselling these two pages of Blount's random ruminations on Duck Soup, but here I begin to start thinking of farce as less comedy of errors than as comedy of the ridiculous. “The idea is that if something happens, some other thing inevitably flows from it... a series of incidents that succeed and provoke each other” (Blount quoting the film’s director). This seems more all-encompassing and in fact allows plot to be reduced to mere Rube Goldbergian connectedness. That sounds fairly easy, right? Of course, abiding by such a definition still leaves playwrights with the inherent challenge of securing suspension of disbelief throughout an entire work -- no mean feat for absurdist humor. Creative freedom aside, I'd think adopting this kind of approach risks incoherence, which is usually more boring than funny. Yet Duck Soup clearly works. Why?
Genre taxonomy matters to the extent that it clearly classifies or lays out expectations for the structure of any work. It shouldn’t just be an ex post facto label. Perhaps this is just wishful thinking on my part, but following Milton, I believe that having a deeper, more articulable understanding of the ins-and-outs of a given genre makes you more likely to be able to pull it off yourself (or at least know why you failed). If “luck is the residue of design,” then writers and directors follow or ignore the mandates of structure at their peril. Back then to Blount’s consideration of Duck Soup, giving farce as broad a jurisdiction as comedy-of-the-ridiculous is to say that if you’ve got bits that are funny enough on their own merits, you’re free to string them together even if they are completely extraneous to the narrative (whether that’s Duck Soup’s street vendor squabble or Harpo’s literal mirroring of Groucho, or virtually every scene that makes up Monty Python and the Holy Grail for that matter) so long as the transitions are seamless. The implication is that audience acceptance depends as much or more on the less quantifiable fluidity of rhythm, contrast, and feel than to any kind of organic continuity or consistency. Or, as Blount puts it, “Does any of this advance the plot? No. But none of it seems dragged in either.”
If that’s “all” there is to being a successful farceur, then abandon all hope, ye who enter. You’ve either got the knack, or you ain’t, and no two ways about it. Fortunately, the Marx Brothers got it and got it in spades. Now if you’ve stayed with me to this point, I think you’ll enjoy picking up Blount’s book, though I’ve probably done him an injustice in reading thus into his various observations. This is a fine companion, but to be blunt with Blount, there’s practically nothing in his writing (or mine) that beats taking Duck Soup at face value. And as he suggests right off, you might as well just watch the movie.
October 6, 2023
"So don't take my word as gospel about anything you see in this movie. I know I don't."
-Roy Blount, Jr., the author, footnote on page 110
I love the Marx Brothers. I really, really love to read. When I'm not reading, I'm looking forward to when I actually can be reading.
So, I checked out this book from the library. It's been on my To Be Read list for some time. I got a big ol' stack of a baker's dozen books and read this one third, because I was so looking forward to it! But wow, once I started reading this book, I wanted to do ANYTHING ELSE but read it. I feel like if I'd rather go unload the dishwasher, dry and put away dishes, rather than reading a book, it's a real stinker.
In this book, the author quotes from Joe Adamson's excellent Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo, Harpo's autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, and a book by Stephen Kanfer, which I believe is Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx. It seemed that every time he quoted from one of those other books, I thought to myself that I should go over to my small Marx Brothers library shelf and select, and read, one of those instead of the Roy Blount, Jr. book.
Not recommended, even for the biggest Marx Brothers fan.
-Roy Blount, Jr., the author, footnote on page 110
I love the Marx Brothers. I really, really love to read. When I'm not reading, I'm looking forward to when I actually can be reading.
So, I checked out this book from the library. It's been on my To Be Read list for some time. I got a big ol' stack of a baker's dozen books and read this one third, because I was so looking forward to it! But wow, once I started reading this book, I wanted to do ANYTHING ELSE but read it. I feel like if I'd rather go unload the dishwasher, dry and put away dishes, rather than reading a book, it's a real stinker.
In this book, the author quotes from Joe Adamson's excellent Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo, Harpo's autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, and a book by Stephen Kanfer, which I believe is Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx. It seemed that every time he quoted from one of those other books, I thought to myself that I should go over to my small Marx Brothers library shelf and select, and read, one of those instead of the Roy Blount, Jr. book.
Not recommended, even for the biggest Marx Brothers fan.
July 7, 2019
My attitude to this book is probably somewhat biased by my attitude towards learning any thing about the artist[s] behind their work. A part of me is always afraid I won't like, or will learn something negative, about them which will then affect my enjoyment of their work. There are probably much worse people than the Marx Brothers though to whom this worry could apply but it did still colour a bit my reaction to this book. Secondly the chatty matey style in which it is written irked me at times. Those gripes aside thought this slim volume does a decent job in deconstructing one of the Brothers greatest and probably most enjoyably anarchic films. There are plenty of "well I didn't know that" and "ahhhhhhhh..." moments (well for me anyway). Some of the cultural and historical details which might not be familiar to watchers today are helpfully highlighted. Particularly interesting for me were the detailed studies of the Edgar Kennedy "Peanuts!"escalation scene and the mirror scene. An enjoyable and light read which will probably have the true addict reaching for the dvd to confirm, or disconfirm, a claim! For Marxists intellectuals and fellow travelers!
November 21, 2017
This book is set up as an attempt at a movie commentary, which means that at least a third of the book is Blount describing the action and verbatim the script, which gets old very quickly. Some of the information about the unused scripts is interesting, but since there are no citations, I have no idea where he got these scripts and can't look for them myself. If you have already read Harpo Speaks, then you've already learned a lot of what Blount says in the book. He does have some interesting trivia, especially about the director McCarey, but then he also talks about a French film that comes out about the same time, but not in time to influence Duck Soup nor released outside of France, and acknowledging this, he spends at least a couple of pages talking about this French movie. If you make a plot vague and general enough, then any movie can be similar to another movie. There are several instances of this, as well as an attempt to make sense of the movie. In sum, I'm sorry I paid full price for this book, but I was desperate for Marx Brothers info. So little is written.
November 9, 2024
A light, easy read that I burned through in a few days here and there. Very fun too! Blount really nails the mood of the Marxist milieu and dishes out anecdotes and factoids that do nothing but make you love and appreciate Marxism more and more.
Focusing on Duck Soup was a brilliant way to go, as it really is the odd one out in their catalog. Blount really gets into the hows and whys in that matter. The way he writes it is as if you should be watching the film almost frame-by-frame along with him. Of course, I didn't do that, but I did stop reading about a third through the book to watch the first 20 minutes of the film. As soon as I finished the book, I finished the film. I also snuck a repeat viewing of At The Circus in while reading too.
If you dig Marx humor, get this.
Focusing on Duck Soup was a brilliant way to go, as it really is the odd one out in their catalog. Blount really gets into the hows and whys in that matter. The way he writes it is as if you should be watching the film almost frame-by-frame along with him. Of course, I didn't do that, but I did stop reading about a third through the book to watch the first 20 minutes of the film. As soon as I finished the book, I finished the film. I also snuck a repeat viewing of At The Circus in while reading too.
If you dig Marx humor, get this.
February 20, 2018
I could only get 2/3 the way through, and that was a chore. It's such a short book, that should tell you something. The author is enamored with his own voice. I didn't like that voice.
It reads like an introduction to the book that you'd like to read. Wow! you say, as you read. THAT book sounds awesome! I'd read THAT book about "Duck Soup" for sure! But this book is not THAT book. This book has lots of lengthy, tedious, irrelevant asides. This book quotes from someone else's book about someone else's story about something-or-other. Often. THAT book is awesome; this book sucks.
It reads like an introduction to the book that you'd like to read. Wow! you say, as you read. THAT book sounds awesome! I'd read THAT book about "Duck Soup" for sure! But this book is not THAT book. This book has lots of lengthy, tedious, irrelevant asides. This book quotes from someone else's book about someone else's story about something-or-other. Often. THAT book is awesome; this book sucks.
April 29, 2020
They call this a live blog nowadays, but the author is old, so he muses on one of the funniest movies of all time as watching it from the corner of his computer screen and collects it in a book — not even an ebook (well, what I read — I’m old, too). It’s not just opinion, though his are funny and insightful enough, but sandwiched between context, biography and gossip to fill it out. Short and worth your while, if only to watch “Duck Soup” again.
October 1, 2023
This is a slim volume, more of a prose version of a DVD audio commentary. Clearly, Blount loves the Marx Brothers, as do I. However, there are plenty of digressions and an odd fascination with the French subtitles that take away from a coherent examination of what makes this movie unique among their oeuvre.
I did learn tidbits here and there about the brothers along with details on the making of the film, but it needed some more heft and less about unimportant digressions.
I did learn tidbits here and there about the brothers along with details on the making of the film, but it needed some more heft and less about unimportant digressions.
June 10, 2019
A short breeze of a read. I checked this out of my local library for a conference presentation on Harpo Marx. Not especially illuminating if one is already well-versed on Marx Bros lore, but still great fun. I knocked this book out in a couple of hours and I'm a relatively slow reader.
December 23, 2019
Funny stream-of-consciousness account of one of the funniest movies ever made. A lot of the background borrowed heavily from a couple of the other Marx-centric books I've read this year but, still, this was a nice deep dive into a classic comedy.
May 2, 2023
The background on director McCary and the supporting actors, and the contrasting of the movie with the original script, was great. Telling us what’s happening on screen and making up puns to put in Chico’s mouth was not.
July 8, 2017
Love the Marx Brothers, couldn't get through this.
September 22, 2017
En bra genomgång och hyllning!
December 22, 2019
Quick enjoyable read!
May 2, 2020
Blount's ramble through "Duck Soup" was remarkably padded, unstructured and, dare I say it, even dull. That said, he appreciates the Marxes' greatest movie and delights in watching it in a theater full of kids who think it's a riot. Also, referring to the suicidal Woody Allen character who sees "Duck Soup" and finds reason to live, Blount asks the devastating question: "Can we imagine the reverse case, of any Marx brother finding a reason to live in 'Hannah and Her Sisters'?"
May 13, 2023
I just couldn’t catch a rhythm. It was had to remain interested and I hoped it would be humorous, it really wasn’t
March 31, 2024
Basically Blount is watching the movie and telling us about it and pausing to tell Marx Brothers anecdotes that most rabid fans already know. It is a short book and a quick read.
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