YMMV / Marx Brothers

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Groucho really mentally insane or is he Obfuscating Insanity? This also applies to Chico and Harpo, to an extent.
• Audience-Alienating Era: When the brothers went to MGM, the senior creative executive, Irving Thalberg, was their biggest supporter at the studio. After he died during the production of A Day at the Races, the brothers lost their best advocate while the rest of the management turned on them, denying them the creative control and personnel they needed, and their films were never the same.
• Broken Base:
  • One of the most hotly debated topics among fans is whether or not Harpo sings during the "Sweet Adeline" bit at the opening of Monkey Business.
  • There's also the argument regarding exactly when their MGM films stopped being any good, or whether they simply didn't make any good movies after leaving Paramount.
• Crosses the Line Twice: A real life example. When the brothers were introduced to Tallulah Bankhead at a dinner party, Chico (notorious not only for his womanizing but for being rather crude at that) was warned not to make any obscene comments to her. Near the end of the party, Chico walked over to her and said, as politely as possible, "Y'know, I'd really like to fuck you." Her response? "And so you shall, you old-fashioned boy."
• Covered Up: A rare non-song example: Nowadays A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races are better known as the titles of Queen albums than as Marx Brothers movies.
• Fandom Rivalry: Often with the fans of The Three Stooges.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Looney Tunes and Monty Python are probably the closest comparison, with some of Woody Allen's early films also bearing a resemblance.
  • Harold Ramis actually quipped about Caddyshack that they intended to make a poignant-coming-of-age film and then accidentally made a Marx Brothers film.
• Stuck in Their Shadow: Groucho and Harpo have always been the most prominent names in the group. If you're lucky, some people may remember Chico's name too. The one who everybody forgets is Zeppo, though admittedly he only appeared in their movies until Duck Soup (1933) and was basically the Straight Man to his brothers, which made him less memorable anyway. (In fact, nowadays he's only known because he was the straight man of the team, to the point where the most "boring" member of any group act will often be called "the Zeppo".) But perhaps even more obscure than Zeppo is their fifth brother, Gummo, Zeppo's predecessor in the "straight man" role, during their vaudeville years in the 1910s. Gummo left the act in 1918 after being drafted into the Army during World War I (only to never see any action because the armistice was signed shortly afterwards), having never much cared for the theater scene anyway. Both Zeppo and Gummo ended up going into the talent agent business after leaving the spotlight.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Harpo's Benny Hill-esque gag of randomly chasing women around would never fly today.
  • Chico's portrayal of an Italian immigrant, Harpo's original "Irish bruiser" character from his vaudeville days, etc. Hey, it was the '30s!
  • There's the scene in The Big Store where they have black actors literally picking their cotton in-store. Again, this was Fair for Its Day, as the brothers often went out of their way to hire black performers and risk having their films blacklisted in the South. A Day at the Races has, for no particular reason, a large-scale production number with about fifty Afro-American performers led by the amazing Ivy Anderson.
• Vanilla Protagonist: Zeppo was invariably overshadowed by his much hammier brothers. Without him, they wouldn't look so hammy by contrast.

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