About the Book
The Anatomy of Harpo Marx is a luxuriant, detailed play-by-play account of Harpo Marx’s physical movements as captured on screen. Wayne Koestenbaum guides us through the thirteen Marx Brothers films, from The Cocoanuts in 1929 to Love Happy in 1950, to focus on Harpo’s chief and yet heretofore unexplored attribute—his profound and contradictory corporeality. Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo’s body—its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, “cute” pathos, and more. In a virtuosic performance, Koestenbaum’s text moves gracefully from insightful analysis to cultural critique to autobiographical musing, and provides Harpo with a host of odd bedfellows, including Walter Benjamin and Barbra Streisand.
About the Author
Wayne Koestenbaum is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of thirteen books of criticism, poetry, and fiction, including a biography of Andy Warhol, and the acclaimed The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
I. Early Ecstatic Emptiness
The Holy Fool Flees Language’s Stink Bomb: The Cocoanuts (1929)
Pinky, the Pointing Scapegoat, Lags Behind: Duck Soup (1933)
The Mad Mohel’s Goo-Goo Eyes of Monomaniacal Attunement: A Night at the Opera (1935)
Poppy Power; or, The Thick-Enough Art of Zombie Dumbfoundment: Animal Crackers (1930)
II. Later Astonishments
Fake Dead Jew as Cute Zoo-Idiot: Room Service (1938)
Passé Punchy’s Humiliated Buddy Huddle: At the Circus (1939)
Freeze Rusty’s Anal Rage in a Cozy Void: Go West (1940)
Lonely Wacky’s Incremental Lines of Flight: The Big Store (1941)
The Bubble-Blowing Demarcator Tickles Totality: A Night in Casablanca (1946)
Bulge, Glaze, Pause, Shock; or, The Bushy-Haired Ragpicker’s Burnt Offering: Love Happy (1949)
III. The Idiot Tumbles Back to the Beginning of Time
The Undeliverable Ice of Pinky’s Mom-Mouth: Horse Feathers (1932)
The Kippering, Bopping, Shushing, Bear-Hugging, Beard-Pulling Bustle: Monkey Business (1931)
The Pretzel Glimmer-Eye of Stuffy’s Stuttering Surge: A Day at the Races (1937)
