Great dynasties of the world: The Marx Brothers
Ian Sansom www.theguardian.com
Ian Sansom on the comic clan who grew up in a happy, hectic house
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the Guardian
The Schönbergs lived at 179 East 93rd Street, in the Yorkville neighbourhood of Manhattan, an area then inhabited mostly by immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe. Fanny and Levy were from Dornum, in East Frisia. Their daughter Minnie married a man she met at a dance, Samuel Marx, a tailor, from Mertzwiller, in Alsace; the family called him Frenchie. Minnie and Samuel had five sons: Leonard, born 1887; Adolph, born 1888; Julius, born 1890; Milton, born 1892; and Herbert, born 1901. Their firstborn son, Manfred, had died aged just seven months in 1886.

Years later, Adolph recalled their early years. "There were 10 mouths to feed every day ... five boys ... cousin Polly, who'd been adopted as one of us; my mother and father, and my mother's mother and father. A lot of the time my mother's sister, Aunt Hannah, was around too. And on any given night of the week, any number of relatives from both sides of the family might turn up."

It was a happy, hectic household. Adolph played the harp; Leonard was a ladies' man; Milton was light on his feet and wore rubber-soled shoes; Julius was a bit of a grump. And so they became Harpo, Chico, Gummo, and Groucho. They named Herbert after a performing chimp – Zeppo. They were, of course, the Marx Brothers.

Back in Germany, their grandfather, Levy Schönberg, had been a bit of a schnorrer, and a badchen. A schnorrer is a kind of a beggar, but a beggar with chutzpah. And a badchen is a professional jester and entertainer. Levy's wife, Fanny, would play the harp and Levy would perform magic tricks and ventriloquism. According to Stefan Karfer, in his biography of Groucho Marx, what Levy lacked in skill he made up for in "energy, audacity, and speed". By the time he arrived in the New World, he was running out of all three. So the mantle passed to their son, Adolph Schönberg, uncle of the Marx Brothers, who styled himself Al Shean and became a popular vaudeville singer. Inspired by their uncle, and managed by Minnie, the Marx Brothers took to the stage as a musical act.

By the 1920s, they'd added comedy, and their shows transferred to Broadway. Their first feature-length films, The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930), filmed at Paramount's Astoria Studios in New York, were basically raucous romps, though "too joyous for cavilling", in the film critic Pauline Kael's words. With Monkey Business (1931), the brothers moved to Hollywood, and started working with the producer Herman J Mankiewicz. He helped to make their japes into movies.

Gummo, the eldest brother, had dropped out of the act long before the brothers made it to Hollywood. He became a theatrical agent. After the first five films, Zeppo, the youngest, also dropped out, and went to work with Gummo. The Marx Brothers' two greatest films, A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937) star just the remaining three brothers, though it remained a family business, with Gummo taking care of legal and financial matters.

Simon Louvish, in his biography of the Marx Brothers, Monkey Business (2000), relates the success of the act to the family dynamic established back on East 93rd Street. "On and on the siblings bicker, vying for parental attention as they tutsi-frutsi each other, like Chico and Groucho, or collaborating, like Chico and Harpo, in their own secret childhood language; Zeppo, the little brother, frozen out; Gummo, the fifth, spare wheel."