[In the following essay, Mason examines Kaufman's use of fools and clowns, with particular focus on his use of the Marx Brothers in his comedies.]

Theater suggests two coextensive worlds. An actor is both himself and the character he plays; a stage is both a platform and an illusion. While all art engages in the creative interpretation of the human condition, theater actually re-enacts life, introducing the constant, tantalizing risk that the distance and the distinction between art and life will diminish to the vanishing point.

The farceur revels in reducing that distance to an excruciating minimum, forcing the audience to accept a double vision that will never quite come into focus. All theater employs artifice, contrivance and convention, but while comedy and tragedy might ask their audiences to suspend disbelief, farce embraces the separation between object and representation. Farce challenges the spectator, vacillating between an apparent depiction and a travesty—between what seems to be and what lurks, leering gleefully, just beneath the surface. The farceur acts on the knowledge that probability necessarily implies an improbability which carries a license for wild nonsense.

Both the form and the content of George S. Kaufman's farces derive from his recognition of the incongruous distance between actuality and imagination, his narratives incarnating the unlikely as he embraces farce's liberation from the merely apparent reality of the ordinary world. He deals in opposites—he mingles the frank theatricality of farce with the realistic production style that prevailed on the commercial Broadway stage during his career, and his attitude towards humanity alternates between sentiment and cynicism. The form and content of his work are interdependent, for while Kaufman's farce expresses his ironic vision of life, the vision itself is farcical because it makes light of the limitations of the ordinary world.

Kaufman conveyed his double vision most clearly in two kinds of farce that he wrote from 1921 to 1930, depicting his American Everyman alternately as a fool and as a clown. The most characteristic examples of the fool farce are Merton of the Movies (1922, with Marc Connelly), the tale of a dreamer who travels to Hollywood to become a silent-screen star; The Butter and Egg Man (1925), the story of a gullible young man who believes that investing in a Broadway show is a sure thing; and Once in a Lifetime (1930, with Moss Hart), the history of a charmingly inept vaudevillean's rise to the top of a film studio. The clown farces include the scripts that Kaufman, with Morrie Ryskind, wrote to display the caricatures that Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx had developed during fifteen years in vaudeville—the original Broadway versions of The Cocoanuts (1925) and Animal Crackers (1928), and the screenplay for A Night at the Opera (1935). Since The Butter and Egg Man is the only play Kaufman wrote without a collaborator and The Cocoanuts was his first vehicle for the Marx Brothers, each play may serve as the model for its kind.

OF FOOLS AND DREAMS

The story of The Butter and Egg Man is a variation of the archetypal tale of a young man who travels to the big city to win fame and fortune. Peter Jones arrives in New York with an inheritance that is not quite large enough to help him fulfill his dream of buying and managing a hotel back home in Chillicothe, Ohio. He has heard that investing in Broadway theater will make him rich in record time, so he introduces himself to Mac and Lehman, a pair of ex-vaudevilleans who seek backing for a script they control. He tries to treat the partners' extravagant promises with what he considers to be shrewd skepticism, but his resistance crumbles when he meets Jane, their sweet young secretary, and he gives the sharpers nearly all of his money in exchange for a forty-nine per cent share of the production. The plays opens out of town and it is clear to everyone but Peter that the script is a disaster. During the post-mortem conference, Lehman insults Jane, and Peter's sense of gallantry moves him to take an option on the entire production. He opens the play on Broadway, where it is, astoundingly, a smash hit, but he discovers that he is the object of an airtight plagiarism suit—the script turns out to be a shameless theft from a published short story. With the help of Fanny Lehman, the producer's wife, he sells the entire production back to his former partners, reaps a gigantic profit, and returns to Chillicothe with Jane to buy his hotel and live happily ever after.

Peter is an exemplary Kaufmanic fool, a natural hick whose ingenuousness first leaves him vulnerable to the city slickers and then enables him to defeat them. He is truly innocent, as pure and untouched as on the day he was born. Neither education nor experience have marred him, so he remains naïve and artless, eternally childlike, and forever honest and trusting.

Virtue is Peter's keystone. He believes that morality and ethics are simple and absolute, applying with equal strength and validity to all men in all situations; it never occurs to him that values might be complex, relative or situational. He believes that all men achieve success—as he hopes to do—through righteousness, dedication and hard work. He assumes that everyone else shares his faith in the power of good, and he takes for granted that others' motives towards him are benevolent and unselfish. His innocence makes him highly gullible, and it is difficult for him to imagine skulduggery or malice. He trusts Mac and Lehman because he wants to trust them, because skepticism and suspicion are completely alien to him. That his partners might find him ridiculous, that they might not respect him, that they would lie and cheat without qualm, that they befriend him only as a last resort to raise money—none of this occurs to him.

The catalytic episode in any Kaufmanic fool's life occurs when he stumbles upon a dream, finds that he cannot realize it at home, and decides to undertake a journey to a strange land, an Oz, a world that seems all fantasy and delight. Peter finishes act I alone in the producers' office, taking in the exotically unfamiliar atmosphere, admiring the photographs on the wall, and finally settling into the swivel chair and propping his feet up on the desk. He looks at a business that is marked by its anxiety and uncertainty, and he sees only the romance and the glamour, believing that to produce a show is to have a hit, for a flop is inconceivable to him.

Every fool learns that in order to realize his dream he must become part of the institution that dominates the new world, but the established members of the institution treat his overtures with suspicion or contempt. Peter discovers that the theater demands certain rites of passage before it is willing to accept him; the director and the leading lady consider Peter to be a rank outsider, beneath their notice, until he becomes the only owner of the property. After his fool's lucks turns a disaster into a smash, only a combination of farcical coincidence and foolish inspiration allows Peter to escape from the plagiarism suit with his prize intact. He wins because he is ignorant and innocent; those he befuddles are accustomed to the onslaughts of their own kind and they are vulnerable to the fool's ingenuousness. His triumph is the defeat of craft and sophistication by intuition, innocence, and faith.

There are two important women in the fool's life. The first is the ingenue, Kaufman's wholesome girl next door. Jane matches Peter in virtue, but she has learned a little from experience and she unobtrusively guides him when his intuition goes awry. When her talents aren't equal to the demands of the situation, in walks a character we might call the ‘sophisticated lady’. Clever, experience and perceptive, Fanny Lehman is a survivor who expects the worst of everyone, so the fool's well-meaning helplessness startles her protective instincts into action. She passes out of Peter's life when the quest is finished, but Jane marries him and becomes the typical life of Kaufman's cynical version of the American dream.

The fool's quest and his beliefs combine to lead him into adopting certain endearing attitudes towards himself. First, he cannot imagine his own failure; he believes that to attempt is to succeed. Second, he never questions the source or the validity of his dream, even if he finds it in rumor, the contrived fiction of the movie screen, or the seductive advertisements in the back pages of a cheap magazine. Third, he is absolutely unable to perceive his own comic potential, making him a susceptible target for the laughter of others.

Even without the contrasting presence of the clown, the fool displays Kaufman's irony. The fool succeeds not because he is exceptionally brilliant or talented, nor because he is skilled or trained in any special way. He succeeds because he is himself; sheer existence is sufficient cause for reward. His career celebrates the common man and affirms the American dream of the simple backwoods boy who makes good, a myth which includes a contradiction, because while it applauds individual effort it also denies the uniqueness of the hero. It supports the belief that all men are created equal, that no one is better than anyone else, and that the best sort of citizen is the ‘regular guy’ who does not stand out from the crowd. The myth demands a hero without remarkable qualities—something for nothing. The fool's career resolves the contradiction because his very commonness makes him uncommon. His achievement also vindicates the American belief that a man can be free without violating the system, and that any little boy from humble origins can become President if he perseveres and doesn't upset the status quo.

Yet even while Kaufman neatly resolves these contradictions, the structure of the farce awakens the uneasy suspicion that the playwright mocks the American dream. The disciple and paragon of the dream is a fool—it may be that only a fool can place his faith in the dream and succeed according to its principles. While the tragic hero faces destruction because he is exceptional, the farcical fool enjoys success because he is ordinary; instead of tragic catharsis, Kaufman gives us a farcical slap in the face. The fool is an unsettling mirror held up to the complacently smiling gaze of Kaufman's audience—each spectator suddenly wonders whether or not he is seeing a reflection of himself. Kaufman may be offering a disquieting choice: to remain un-foolish and settle for less than a dream, or to become a fool and win.

OF CLOWNS AND NIGHTMARES

The clown is the fool's opposite: experienced where he is innocent, crafty where he is artless, cynical where he is trusting, committed to shattering the rules rather than living by them, a sly devil who would rather cheat than work. While the fool works within the system and ingenuously charms his way to the top, the clown takes control, creating the world anew at every moment, shattering the status quo and completely confusing the other characters. While the fool inspires our affection with his endearing smile, the clown is a frightening juggernaut. The fool makes us feel superior, for he is a man who lacks even average gifts, a rustic without even minimal polish and worldly wisdom, delightful because he is so clumsy and so inept; but the clown moves too fast, startling and bewildering us with his unexpected and inexplicable choices. Either fool or clown may be mad, but the fool's madness has more to do with happy, innocent idiocy than with manic terror. The fool is a collage of quite natural flaws, while the clown is artificial because he is too perfect a machine.

The clown is an emblem of disorder, or at least of an order that is separate and estranged from our own familiar order. He is free from restraint, a spirit of revelry and license. He scoffs at absolute values and questions everything, showing no willingness to adhere to any set principle or law. He is a vice figure in an amoral time, not a spirit of evil but a nihilist who espouses nothing but the mischief and chaos he so joyfully creates. Kaufman's clown is a grotesque travesty of mankind, a character who, like the farce itself, presents the appearance of reality without becoming that reality.

Each of the clown farces employs a tight structure, building from a simple situation that provides a foundation for character and story. The Cocoanuts is set in an hotel in the midst of a land boom in Florida, offering a location public enough and a situation open enough to allow the authors to move characters in and out with a maximum of flexibility and a minimum of justification. The phenomenon of the hotel leads the characters into certain associated formal behavior patterns, products of etiquette and custom that are almost rituals, offering a predictability that the clowns can shatter.

The cast includes a set of conventional characters—a gullible dowager, a couple of villains, a clumsy detective, and a pair of lovers—whose simplicity and artificiality leave them vulnerable to the clowns' tricks and susceptible to the playwrights' manipulation. The dowager is Mrs Potter, who seeks to maintain her status in society by arranging an acceptable match for Polly, her daughter. She chooses Harvey Yates, not knowing that he and Penelope, his secret paramour, are fortune hunters—the villains of the play—who covet the Potter millions. Groucho is on the scene as the manager of the hotel (named ‘The Cocoanuts’), and he hopes to persuade Mrs Potter to invest in some chancy real estate. Chico and Harpo arrive to try to make a killing in land speculation, with a detective named Hennessey hot on their trail, an unwitting symbol of authority who offers an easy target for farcical assault on order. Finally, there are the lovers, Polly and a charmingly ambitious young architect named Bob Adams, whom Mrs Potter scorns because he is temporarily employed as a clerk. They are an innocent, attractive, sentimental pair who recall the fool and his ingenue in their search for domestic tranquility.

Kaufman begins each of his clown farces by using the dowager as the catalyst as she attracts attention from the lovers, who need her approval or recognition; the villains, who covet her money or resent her social prominence; and from Groucho, who pretends to aid her social aspirations while actually making a fool of her. The action of The Cocoanuts follows a pattern of countervailing intrigues between the villains, the lovers, and the clowns. Harvey and Penelope steal Mrs Potter's necklace and hide it in a stump at Cocoanut Manor, Groucho's land development. Harpo finds the jewels during the land auction, and Hennessy arrests Bob for the theft because the young man has just bought the lot containing the stump. The clowns trick Mrs Potter in order to get the money for Bob's bail, and Harpo gives him a scrawled map of Cocoanut Manor that shows the location of the stump and the jewels. Polly tricks Harvey into drawing a similar map, and the lovers discover that the handwriting is the same on both. At the dinner celebrating Polly's engagement to Harvey, Bob produces the matching maps to prove that Harvey was the thief. The play ends happily as the villains quit the scene, the lovers plan to marry, and Groucho learns that a millionaire intends to make him a handsome offer for Cocoanut Manor.

Situation, character, and story are all subordinate to the buffoonery or lazzi of the clowns. Through verbal and physical mayhem, the clowns offer zany, alternative behavior patterns that assault the polite formality of the conventional characters. The lazzi range from Groucho's witticisms to Chico's non sequiturs to Harpo's taxi horn. Some offer slight development of character or story, while others digress wildly from the action, as when the Brothers turn Hennessey's investigation into a minstrel show, complete with music and ‘Mr Bones’, when the hapless detective gives them the traditional opening line, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, be seated!’ Still others have no relationship at all to the plot, as when Groucho interrupts the show to perform a brief vaudeville sketch. The ultimate form of lazzi shatters not only the conventional characters' expectations but also the audience's belief in the stage illusion, as in Animal Crackers, when Groucho protests, ‘Why, you can't arrest them. That's the hero and the heroine.’¹

BEYOND LANGUAGE

Through the Marx Brothers, Kaufman turns language into a madly comic weapon against the conventional characters, who are trapped in cliché, formula and banality. Kaufman creates a parody of a love scene so Groucho can make fun of Mrs Potter's desirability and femininity, of himself as a lover, of Bob and Polly as the genuine lovers, of the audience's expectations concerning love interests on stage, and of love scenes in general.

GROUCHO:
Well say that you'll be truly mine, or truly yours, or yours truly, and that tonight when the moon is sneaking around the clouds, I'll be sneaking around you. I'll meet you tonight by the bungalow, under the moon. You and the moon. I hope I can tell you apart. You wear a red necktie so I'll know you. I'll meet you tonight by the bungalow under the moon.
MRS. Potter:
But suppose the moon is not out.
GROUCHO:
Then I'll meet you under the bungalow.(2)

The clowns also use pun mercilessly, pushing it to the limit when Groucho goes beyond mere words to reassemble sounds according to his whim.

Guatemala every night or you can't Mala at all. Of course, that takes a lot of Honduras. (Animal Crackers, 1, 2, 41)

The clowns raise the stakes by moving beneath language, working on the meaning it is intended to convey, and fracturing the logic of thought. Early in The Cocoanuts, Groucho addresses a crowd of underpaid bellboys:

I want you to be free. Strike off your chains. Strike up the band. Strike three, you're out. Remember, there's nothing like liberty. That is there's nothing like it in this country. Be free. Now and forever, one and indivisible, one for all, and all for me and me for you, and tea for two. Remember, I have only my best interests at heart, and I promise you, that it's only a question of a few years before some woman will swing [sic] the English Channel. I thank you.

(p. 209)

Kaufman uses word associations and the rhythms of phrases to turn Groucho's oration into a parody of political rhetoric, destroying the relationship of word to idea and permitting him to gull the bellboys into cheering the man who refuses to raise their wages.

Once meaning and language are divorced, Kaufman can twist them in different directions, forming a convolution or perversion of their original relationship. In this next passage, Chico and Harpo arrive at the front desk:

CHICO:
Hello. We sent you a telegram. We make reservache.
GROUCHO:
Oh. Welcome to Cocoanut Manor. What do you boys want? Garage and bath?
CHICO:
We go together him.
GROUCHO:
You go together him?
CHICO:
Sure me.
GROUCHO:
Would you mind coming in again and starting all over?

(The Cocoanuts, p. 213)

The clowns use their lingo to maintain their control over the situation, and the conventional characters are completely unable to follow them. The key quality is indirection—while most people value language that communicates simply, clearly and directly, the clowns prefer to say one thing while meaning another.

While the clowns impose their meta-language on the world they invade, the fool discovers that the world of his dreams demands that he learn a jargon, or target language, in order to succeed. At the beginning of The Butter and Egg Man, Mac and Lehman demonstrate their control of the situation by displaying their linguistic facility.

LEHMAN:
Anybody comes in on this trick'll clean up! I can do it for fifteen thousand. I'd take twelve.
MAC:
You'd take one.
LEHMAN:
You don't say? Let me tell you this, sweetheart, there ain't going to be no bargains, not if I have to throw it in the ash-can! This show's a pipe, and any bird that comes in is going to make plenty.(3)

This jargon depends heavily on slang, and it is boldly colloquial, idiosyncratic and crudely expressive. Peter discovers that his accustomed speech patterns brand him as a greenhorn, so he must master at least the style of the jargon, if not its content, in order to remove it as a barrier to his success. At first the new slang bewilders him—when Lehman informs him that ‘I'm doing a wow,’ Peter has to ask for a translation. Later in the play, he has retained enough fragments from several overheard conversations to be able to assemble a speech that will fool the uninitiated, even though he's not quite sure of what he's saying.

Everything happens to this girl—she marries a fellow, only she's going to have more sympathy. … It's going to make millions of dollars—thousands. It's going to be the biggest thing that ever was in the theatre … and it's going to have Hongkong [sic] in it! A great big scene instead of where it's a trial! It's wonderful—it's a hop joint and he turns out to be her father and she comes back at him with the strong talk and so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so.

(p. 166)

Peter captures just enough vocabulary and rhythm to produce the effect he seeks. Meaning is absent or fractured, so the jargon becomes a hastily-constructed mask that changes who he seems to be, not who he is.

CRAFTSMAN AT WORK

Although Kaufman's expertise shines most clearly through his re-creation of various lower forms of spoken American English, he is equally adept at creating farcical situation. He uses realism as the basis, creating a world that mimics—but does not become—the ordinary world. He begins with an apparently solid foundation of familiar materiality—walls, doors, everyday paraphernalia and recognizable people—in order to encourage his audience's conventional expectations and to lull them into a false sense of security. Then he distorts his creation, veering towards the improbable and introducing a logic that only resembles that of the ordinary world. If Kaufman departs from reality completely, he robs the audience of their point of reference and forfeits his ability to seduce their belief, while if he sustains a perfect or even apparent identity with the ordinary world, he must follow ordinary rules and sacrifice his control. To maintain that control is to be free from the predictable and the plausible, so the impossible is rife—rascally clowns escape the clutches of the law, and a fool finds the money he needs in the nick of time.

To its inhabitants, the farce-world appears to be as capricious and as unreliable as Alice's Looking-Glass World; not only does it refuse to follow the laws of the ordinary world, it declines to be consistent within its own context. It is inimical one moment and friendly the next, becoming an ineffable or hostile mechanism to the characters who are trapped within its closed system. It is the product of the tension between its realistic basis and the farcical artifice that dominates the action.

Kaufman mocks traditional farcical devices even while he uses them, again conveying two points of view. Harpo finds Mrs Potter's missing jewels with none of the suspense and anxiety that characterize Sardou's use of the trick in A Scrap of Paper. When the clown leads the matron to the tree stump, he points out not only the necklace but also the ease of the discovery and the folly of playwrights who build entire plots around such gimmicks. If one of Feydeau's dupes is caught in the hall without his trousers, reaching for the door just as it swings shut and locks, then he is simply an unwilling victim of the farceur's machinery. But in Kaufman's door-slamming scene, when the three clowns rotate positions between the hallway and the two adjoining rooms, befuddling the hotel guests and joyfully slamming doors as they dive in and out of their hiding-places under the beds, they are the farceur's accomplices, and they act with full awareness of their theatrical mischief. Lady Teazle may hide behind the screen merely to escape detection, but Kaufman's clown hides under the bed both to annoy the conventional characters and to create a parody of concealment, coincidence, and the rapid, mechanical pace that is farce's hallmark.

With relation to character, the classic farcical device is mask. For many of his creations, Kaufman offers two masks—the one the individual sees and the one that others see—making each role an exercise in dissonance and incongruity. The inept character has little self-awareness and he insists on the self-image he cherishes even when circumstances deny its validity. A mask acts as a disguise only when the wearer recognizes the distance between appearance and actuality; when the wearer's incomprehension turns that distance into a chasm, it becomes a trap. Pour le Bain, a sketch that Kaufman wrote with Howard Dietz in 1931, describes a society woman's discomfort when shopping for bathroom fixtures. Her mask of gentility so confines her that she cannot even bring herself to ask for a toilet by name; the mask stands between her and her needs. In the case of the clowns, character is mask. Groucho's character has little or no personality beneath the garish mustache, eyebrows and glasses; he is as fixed in his zaniness as the mask is in its features. The fool, on the other hand, creates and dons a mask in order to deceive others into believing he is someone he is not. His conscious masquerade raises him above simplicity and artlessness towards the realm of roguery. As long as Peter Jones knows he wears a mask, he is safe from its inherent trap, but when he loses sight of the distinction between his true self and his appearance, he begins to lose both Jane and the fortune he seeks. Kaufman uses the mask to explore the folly of those who wear them in the ordinary world.

THE VEILED COMMENTARY

With the mask, the playwright holds folly up to inspection but not to punishment. Does Kaufman embrace the cynical view of man as essentially foolish and given to error, or does he accept the sentimental vision of man as essentially weak but progressing inevitably towards goodness and perfection? He vacillates between the two, sometimes using one to undercut the other. In this moment, he attacks man's folly, using his acid wisecracks to ridicule and deride certain characters. In the next, he presents a warm picture of man striving for self-improvement and placing his trust in the generosity and benevolence of others. In a single play, he may offer an unashamedly sentimental couple whose romance holds the play together, while providing a contrast with a decidedly unsentimental couple whose unsurprised, experienced attitude dilutes the sweetness of the hero and heroine. The clown is the sharp instrument of cynicism, but the fool is the apotheosis of the sentimental dream.

Kaufman may present man as a weak, inept, and sentimental fool, but he approaches his folly with humorous tolerance. Kaufman never loses sight of man's absurdity—that is his cynicism. He prefers to use the fool as a focal point of laughter, and although the audience may laugh at the fool's mistakes, they also laugh with his victories. Kaufman tempers his cynicism with sentiment in that his fools survive their missteps and win the prizes they seek. The fool may be a boob, but he's improving just the same.

Kaufman's combination of cynicism with sentiment leaves little room for the spirit of saturnalia and revelry that farce often offers. Cynicism declines to believe in celebration, while sentiment crushes it with prudery. Another playwright might find in sexuality a chance to explore the themes of birth and the renewal of the world, or an opportunity to present a wild, joyous, physical release at the end of the play. In Kaufman's work, sexuality loses the capacity for abandon. Beautiful women become untouchable, comfortless sex symbols, while others turn away from sensuality and formalize it into their social roles as wives and helpmates, defining themselves in terms of their men's success and taking a firm but discreet hand in the course of events. Sentimental, middle-class values insist on the wife helping the husband along the road of self-improvement, so there is little time for the wild affirmation of life that is Bacchanalia.

In the end, Kaufman is a pessimist. His farces end happily, but they neither affirm life nor offer genuine answers to real-world problems. There is no sense that the fool's victory carries any implication or message for those of us in the ordinary world. His fools solve or avoid the dilemmas confronting them, but their solutions work only within the controlled environment of the farce. He sees too clearly the absurdity in the world, and if one accepts absurdity, then one relinquishes the right to expect the consistency of cause-and-effect that social cures require. Kaufman does not believe in solutions, and his work seldom seriously questions the system or its values.

Joseph Wood Krutch criticized Kaufman for failing to adopt a single, coherent point of view, but Kaufman's ironic vision—the very vision that makes his work possible—prevents him from doing so.⁴ Kaufman sees man as fool and hero, clown and dupe, so he cannot for more than a passing moment commit himself to one or another model of human nature. At one point Kaufman sees the world as a rationalist mechanism that submits to man's tinkering, a device that rewards craft and sophistication. At another point he sees the world as an organism that remains ineffable to the scientist but which encourages the trusting wanderings of that strange Romantic hero, the Kaufmanic fool. He cannot commit himself to a single interpretation because he looks at the world and sees its farcical reflection beside it, an image that reproduces the original with startling accuracy but without achieving or desiring genuine identity.

Notes

1. George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, Animal Crackers, ts, Sam H. Harris Collection, William Seymour Theatre Collection, Princeton University Library, 11, 1, 36.

2. George S. Kaufman, The Cocoanuts in Donald Oliver, ed., By George (New York: St Martin's Press, 1979), p. 219.

3. George S. Kaufman, The Butter and Egg Man (New York: Boni and Liveright, 264)

4. Joseph Wood Krutch, ‘The Random Satire of George S. Kaufman’, The Nation, 137 (1933), 157; and review of First Lady, The Nation,141 (1935), 694.