The other night, I sat down and watched the Marx Brothers in Go West. It’s one of those that I very rarely see – I usually go for Monkey Business or Duck Soup first. It was definitely good for a laugh (I knew there was a reason why I got the entire collection on DVD), but maybe it wasn’t quite as funny as some of the better known films. I owe a lot to the Marx Brothers, by the way. The week we moved to Tacoma (right in the middle of seventh grade) and I had to adjust to a new school, they were having a film fest on public TV. It was the first time I’d seen them and they helped me laugh at a time when I didn’t feel much like it.

Nat Perrin made some interesting observations about Go West in an interview once. Perrin contributed countless jokes to the Marx Brothers over the years, particularly for Groucho. In later years, he was the one who produced The Addams Family on TV. He said, “After [Irving] Thalberg died the people who produced other features for the team thought that because the Marxes were zany comedians that anything goes. Without that strong hand, you had three comedians who paid very little attention to the story line.” Thus Go West, even though it kept to the same formula as Monkey Business, was not nearly as hysterical nor as memorable.

I know there’s a moral there somewhere. Another name that I always associate with my junior high years is Kurt Vonnegut. One of the characters in his novel The Sirens of Titan summed up his existence by saying he was “a victim of a series of accidents. As are we all.” Vonnegut’s absurdist outlook had a certain appeal when I was 13 years old, and certainly Groucho’s did, too. Now, not so much. I find at this point in life I’m at least trying to pay more attention to the story line. The idea that there really is a plot underneath it all, and that it’s not just a series of unrelated sketches (no matter how funny) is what gives me hope.