The Anatomy of Harpo Marx. Wayne Koestenbaum

process, even if your jaw hurts.

      BRAGGING ABOUT HARPO I brought my baby brother to school as my third-grade “show and tell” exhibit, and now I want to show off Harpo’s greatness, to watch your face as you notice his adorability and aptness. Always question the investments of the pointing finger. Harpo is my subject, but my subject is also attestation, demonstration, the wish to point out Harpo, to make you experience adulation. We were a family of show-offs. My older brother showed off the idiosyncrasies of great cellists; under his tutelage I listened to records of Zara Nelsova, Pierre Fournier, Janos Starker, and Gregor Piatigorsky. My big brother also showed off TWA; he bragged about its superiority to Pan Am. Harpo is my TWA.

      FATTY’S MAGIC PANTS The thuggish tenor whips Harpo’s butt. Harpo clasps it, mouth open in a pained O. (Harpo mimics pain but never seems to feel it: Bugs Bunny’s cartoon agony.) Harpo’s antics highlight the butt, always on the verge of getting spanked. I recall Fatty Arbuckle, a buttock-oriented fool, star of Fatty’s Magic Pants, an 8mm film I once owned. Minta Durfee, an actress less famous than Mabel Normand, co-starred. (Minta Durfee thus becomes someone to rescue, to idealize.) I liked Fatty’s pancake pallor, and the tendency of his pants to fall down. Over Christmas vacation, in 1967, I watched Fatty’s Magic Pants thirty times. I counted. I wanted to show off my interest in Fatty’s fate. I wanted to prove the sacredness of Fatty’s Magic Pants. I could best prove its magnificence by watching it thirty times and by announcing to everyone that I had watched it thirty times—a feat I’m still announcing.

      Notice this progression: (1) Watch the film about a fat man whose pants fall down. (2) Watch it thirty times. (3) Brag about having watched it thirty times.

      I neutralize Fatty’s shame, but I also frame it: I enclose it in the container of accomplishment, of indefatigable viewing.

      AMORAL INTENSIFICATION A male dancer rips the cloak off a gypsy lass, and Harpo (amorally intensifying) tears off her skirt to reveal knickers. Flashback: in sixth grade I stood below a short-skirted classmate climbing a ladder, and I took a snapshot of her underwear. Earlier, we’d fought on the playground, and the teacher, breaking up our brawl, had criticized my unmanly battle-ploys: biting, kicking. Harpo, in his autobiography, explains why he quit school in the second grade: class bullies picked on him. He didn’t want to tell the teacher, and so he escaped out the classroom window and never returned.

      Harpo runs up and almost touches—not wishing to be singed—the dancer’s bare midriff. He’ll grab any unguarded sweet. Midriff might not arouse him. He might merely want to tickle it, to test its genuineness, to rid himself of a hovering contagion.

      Harpo routinely intensifies: he tears the skirt off one gypsy, and then another and another. Having found a good trick, why not repeat it, exhaust it? Thus, amorally intensifying rhythms of arousal—more, more, more—become metaphysical questions. Why do I want more? Why do I love the process of wanting more more than I want the “more” itself?

       III

      THE PLEASURE OF SEEING A MAN NOT KNOWN FOR SEXINESS EXHIBIT A SUDDEN SEXY STIGMATA: THEORETICAL DIGRESSION ON SCISSORS, THEIR PARADOXICAL DOUBLENESS I enjoy masculinity doubling itself, especially when it’s not very masculine to begin with. Example: Harpo has lost his socks. We see his sexy calves. He inserts himself between two half-unclad dancer bodies—male and female—and, framed by their limbs, as if by a scissor’s twin blades, he whistles and waves to the audience. Newly born, he emerges between the woman’s legs and approaches the male dancer’s naked chest. Harpo plunges into a triangle formed by two other bodies and desexualizes them. He lightens their appearance of athletic effort by indicating, playfully, “I’m here”—a silent insistence, directed at us.

      Scissors consist of two blades attached at midpoint. Scissors pose as One but signify Two. Scissors cause Solomonic separation (I cut thee in twain). Harpo epitomizes the One, but his weapon is a Twofer.

      HARPO’S CUTENESS AS INCOHERENT ADDENDUM: THE SWINGING STAR’S DEMAND Is it strange to call a glimpse of Harpo’s muscles an “incoherent addendum”? They flash by. They don’t contribute to the story. No one mentions them. But I imagine a mother noticing her child’s well-fed healthiness, his immunity to rheumatic fever or meningitis: I imagine a Jewish mother’s consciousness of the child as food, like edible Hansel and Gretel. Muscular calves (visible when Harpo climbs a rope) can’t be faked, can’t accommodate the wishes of others, can’t impersonate or pander. I see Harpo’s calves from his mother’s point of view.

      Harpo, like a monkey, swings in space, just as the tenor begins singing: the scene juxtaposes Verdi’s cultured melody with Harpo’s animal freedom, his lawless suspension. Harpo believes that the rope will hold him. Distortion: how big is this universe, this spacious field, in which Harpo madly swings? What is a swinger?

      Harpo performs, with his body, the musical leaps that the tenor performs onstage: a silent fool’s physical eruptions parrot operatic paroxysms. Harpo catapults toward us, as if into our arms. Thus, he makes a demand. The star, assaulting the audience, without warning, insists on being received. As compensation, the star—an ambience—provides a holding environment, a container, around the beset, impinged-upon beholder.

      HARPO ON THE LAM: HIS BODY ALWAYS TELLS THE TRUTH Unfashionable, to claim that a body “tells the truth.” And yet Harpo’s body authentically defies society and family, the mad demands of the other, of conversation.