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.
The Anatomy of Harpo Marx
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From Bookforum
Just as Harpo relishes misbehaving and defying authority figures, slyly putting them into compromising positions, so, too, Koestenbaum derives great pleasure in amplifying Harpo's unspoken art. He internalizes his subject to such a degree that it's possible to read The Anatomy of Harpo Marx as a fiendish satire of conventional scholarship. — Noah Isenberg
Review
"A zesty and deeply literate joy to read."--New Haven Review
"A charming and rigorous study."--Sight & Sound Magazine
"A fittingly zany, aphoristic, and meandering study of the great mime of Marx Brothers fame. . . . Koestenbaum's approach to Harpo makes for highly animated reading."--Bookforum
"Koestenbaum provides an informed, original, and near-obsessive assessment of all things Harpo."--Publishers Weekly
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15 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In attempting to analyze every movement Harpo made on screen, Wayne Koestenbaum makes frequent literary and other cultural allusions that were so far over my head as to render much of it incomprehensible. Or he sees things that remind him of his childhood and family and goes off on tangents, or reads sexual or scatalogical connotations into Harpos actions (he keeps pointing out visions of Harpos buttcrack). Or he makes references to his sexual history which I consider TMI. Worst of all, in breaking everything down, he totally drains Harpos actions of their humor. In "Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo", Joe Adamson wrote "When he isn't exaggerating the familiar, his actions have no explanation at all. And they don't want one." That's all the analysis I need.
5 of 11 people found the following review helpful
By Doc
Format:Paperback
Where to start with this extraordinarily bad book? The author is an academic, so you know from the start it's a poor fit with the joyous anarchy of Harpo. So what you end up with is page after page of over-intellectualising, dry-as-dust analysis of something that is only meant to be entertainment. It's like a blind person trying to analyse colour. It sucks the fun out of every moment of Harpo on screen with a dreary and pointless pontification. It beggars belief that someone though this was a good idea. At times I wondered if there was some secret joke to the whole thing. But no, sadly it is exactly what it purports to be, a tiresome and long-winded scrutiny of something that defies, rejects and laughs in the face of intellectual interpretation. Marx Brothers fans should stay well clear. Humourless people who enjoy prolixity may find something to like. If you want to enjoy Harpo and look for hidden meaning, do yourself a favour. Just watch the movies over and over.
3 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
When Harpo plays with scissors and snips off Groucho's feather pen, the author calls it "castration". When Harpo sticks his feet in his competitor's vat of lemonade (my favorite Harpo bit ever), the author says the "blasphemous Jew pollutes the holy water". He refers repeatedly to "Harpo's vagina". Just because one CAN think up poetic, scholarly garbage doesn't mean one should put it on paper, let alone do so and drag the profoundly delightful and funny and sweet Harpo Marx into it. And his admirers. Harpo doesn't deserve this and neither do the rest of us.
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