Marx Brothers Quotes & Sayings

I'd always heard stories about how Harpo Marx was the most talkative of the Marx brothers. I found it interesting that someone you never got to hear speak in films would never not speak in real life. — Harmony Korine

Hess or no Hess, I'm going to watch the Marx Brothers. — Winston Churchill

Life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do. — Woody Allen

Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you: he really is an idiot. I implore you, send him back to his father and brothers, who are waiting for him with open arms in the penitentiary. I suggest that we give him ten years in Leavenworth, or eleven years in Twelveworth. — Groucho Marx

When you start in the childhood period, when you begin to form a comic sense, it was the radio comedians - from the last days of radio and the first days of television. And Spike Jones. And the Marx Brothers. They represented anarchy. They took things that were nice and decent and proper, and they tore them to shreds. That attracted me. — George Carlin

The Marx Brothers isn't subtle, and that's hilarious. — Martin Freeman

What really got my goat at MGM were comedians like The Marx Brothers who never wrote their own jokes. — Buster Keaton

I hear you're looking for a sexy blonde to play with the Marx Brothers. Would you like to see me. I'm blonde and I'm sexy. — Marilyn Monroe

In the house in Beverly Hills where our four children grew up, living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the old tenement on New York's East 93rd Street we Marx Brothers called home. — Harpo Marx

If you think of the 1930s in film as the decade of Gable and Lombard, Cagney and Harlow, Stanwyck and the Marx Brothers, think again. The biggest star - No. 1 in the 1936, '37 and '38 exhibitor polls - was a three-time box-office champ before she was 10. Shirley Temple, singer, dancer, and prime exemplar of Movie Cute, owned the '30s. — Richard Corliss

I grew up on Jerry Lewis and Abbot and Costello, the Marx Brothers. — Drake Bell

I think we grew up thinking that the funniest things on TV were the old, serious movies. I always liked the Marx Brothers, but the thing that always made us laugh were movies like Zero Hour. That's what inspired us. — David Zucker

The genius of the Marx Brothers is for parody. They never are themselves. They exist too abundantly to be content with being that - they must go on, by the rapidest of transitions, to being something else. Groucho, in my opinion the bright star among the three, is never anything but the thing he is at the moment pretending to be. — Mark Van Doren

Anything really well-made has the effect of making you want to do what you do-better. Abrams has always made very beautiful books. It's exciting to see this same excellence applied to the presentation of comics. Abrams ComicArts shows comics are stepping out of vaudeville and into Carnegie Hall-but the Marx Brothers will always be welcome! — Jon J. Muth

The first comedians I became fascinated with were the Marx brothers. I couldn't get enough of them. Later in life, I thought, "Well, maybe it's because they were so rebellious and they were just flipping the bird to society and all the rules we're supposed to follow." They were saying that none of it is fair. — Judd Apatow

Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or 'rational' space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine. — Marshall McLuhan

I was a fan of the Marx Brothers. One of them had this character where he pretended not to be able to talk, but then he wrote this autobiography called 'Harpo Speaks!' He wrote about how he quit school at nine years old to become a professional. — Nile Rodgers

I grew up and I was weaned on the Marx Brothers. They were sort of my all-time favorite. My parents showed me their movies when I was very young. And as I got older, I became a Charlie Chaplin fan, and I love Buster Keaton. — Joshua Malina

Naturally, I asked him what it'd been like to live through Pinochet's coup and the fall of Allende. Naturally, he regarded me with an expression of utter boredom; then he said:
'Like a Marx Brothers' movie, but with corpses. Unimaginable pandemonium. — Javier Cercas

My Dad hated his job. He sold overcoats, but he wanted to make movies. He had a failed career working with the Ritz Brothers - they were like the Marx Brothers, only a tier below. I always had a picture in my mind of him in a straw hat. — Steve Sabol

When I was a little kid, my parents would show me Marx Brothers' films and westerns and stuff like that. That's where all my desire to be an actor comes from and probably most of my understanding of acting comes from for sure. — Alden Ehrenreich

The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl. — Irving Berlin

You're a great brother. You give us a heart attack worrying about your heart attack, which you didn't even have the decency to have! — Groucho Marx

According to that book, only one Marx contributed an unforgotten pun to the Round Tablers' vaunted word games. It wasn't Groucho, who must have been furious. Nor was it Harpo, who for all we know sat at the table naked. Nor was it Chico, who had more dangerous games elsewhere. It was Gummo. Evidently Gummo had a seat at that table at least once, and he made it count. Everybody knows that Dorothy Parker, challenged to make a sentence with the word horticulture, quipped as follows: "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." But who knew that Gummo, taking on euphoria, came up with this: LEFT TO RIGHT: Harpo, Zeppo, Chico, Groucho, and Gummo, 1957. "Go outside and play," Minnie told the brothers. "Which ones?" they asked. And she said: "Euphoria."* — Roy Blount Jr.

I always find it actually funny that the analysis is that the characters I play in comedies are the manchild, the adolescent, characters that refuse to grow up. And yet, if you look back in the history of comedy all the way back to the Marx brothers, that's a big part of comedy. — Will Ferrell

We live in a world packed with desensitising forces, that strip the world of magic. The world is full of negativity, but we fight back with positivity. We're inspired by oceans, forests, animals, Marx Brothers films. We can't help but project uplifting vibrations, because we love each other so much and get off on playing together. — Dave Thompson

Dat's a some joke, Hey Boss. — Chico Marx

I always preferred Harpo to Groucho Marx. — Lee Evans

Growing up, I loved drama and fantasies. I hated the Marx Brothers. I took all that confusion seriously. — Anne Meara

I've got to say, I've probably seen a lot more of the Three Stooges than of the Marx Brothers. — Spike Jonze