Groucho, Gummo, Minnie (mother), Zeppo, Frenchy (father), Chico and Harpo, at about the time of their act "Fun in Hi Skule" of 1913.

Early life

Born in New York City, the Marx Brothers were the sons of Jewish immigrants from Germany. Their mother, Minnie Schönberg, was from Dornum in East Frisia; and their father, Simon Marrix (whose name was changed to Sam Marx, and who was nicknamed "Frenchy") was a native of Alsace, now part of France, and worked as a tailor. The family lived in the then-poor Yorkville section of New York City's Upper East Side, between the Irish, German and Italian quarters.

The Marx brothers

The brothers were:

The brothers were from a family of artists, and their musical talent was encouraged from an early age. Harpo was hopelessly untalented on the guitar and piano (he boasts in his autobiography that he only knew two songs, and that he could only play them with one finger); however, he became a dedicated harpist, which gave him his nickname. Chico was an excellent pianist, and Groucho played the guitar and sang.

They got their start in vaudeville, where their uncle Albert Schönberg performed as Al Shean of Gallagher and Shean. Groucho's debut was in 1905, mainly as a singer. By 1907, he and Gummo were singing together as "The Three Nightingales" with Mabel O'Donnell. The next year, Harpo became the fourth Nightingale. By 1910, the group was expanded to include their mother Minnie and their Aunt Hannah, and the troupe was renamed "The Six Mascots".

Another famous entertainer became part of the family when Jack Benny married Sadye Marks (aka Mary Livingstone), their cousin.

 Comedy

One evening in 1912, a performance at the Opera House in Nacogdoches, Texas was interrupted by shouts from outside about a runaway mule. The audience hurried outside to see what was happening. When they returned, Groucho, angered by the interruption, made snide comments about the audience, including "Nacogdoches is full of roaches" and "The jackass is the flower of Tex-ass". Instead of becoming angry, the audience laughed. The family then realized they had potential as a comic troupe.

The act slowly evolved from singing with comedy to comedy with music. Their sketch ("Fun in Hi Skule"), featured Groucho as a German-accented teacher presiding over a classroom which included students Harpo, Gummo, and Chico. The last version of the school act, titled Home Again, was written by Al Shean. About this time, Gummo left to serve in World War I, reasoning that "anything is better than being an actor!" Zeppo replaced him in their final vaudeville years, the jump to Broadway, and then to Paramount films.

During World War I, anti-German sentiments were common, and the family tried to conceal their German origin. To avoid the draft the brothers started a farm near Countryside, Illinois, but soon found it not to their liking. During this time Groucho discontinued his "German" stage personality.

By this time "The Four Marx Brothers" had begun to incorporate their unique style of comedy into their act and to develop their characters. Both Groucho and Harpo's memoirs say their now famous on-stage personas were created by Al Shean. Groucho began to wear his trademark greasepaint moustache and to use a stooped walk. Harpo stopped speaking onstage and began to wear a red fright wig and carry a taxi-cab horn. Chico spoke with a fake Italian accent, developed off-stage to deal with neighborhood toughs, while Zeppo adopted the role of the romantic (and "peerlessly cheesy," according to James Agee) straight man.

The on-stage personalities of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo were said to have been based on their actual traits. Zeppo, on the other hand, was considered the funniest brother offstage, despite his straight stage roles. As the youngest and having grown up watching his brothers, he could fill in for and imitate any of the others when illness kept them from performing. "He was so good as Captain Spaulding [in Animal Crackers] that I would have let him play the part indefinitely, if they had allowed me to smoke in the audience," Groucho recalled. (Zeppo did impersonate Groucho in the film version of Animal Crackers. Groucho was unavailable to film the scene in which the Beaugard painting is stolen, so the script was contrived to include a power failure which allowed Zeppo to play the Spaulding part in near-darkness.)

By the 1920s the Marx Brothers had become one of America's favorite theatrical acts. With their sharp and bizarre sense of humor, they satirized institutions such as high society and human hypocrisy. They also became famous for their improvisational comedy in free form scenarios. A famous early instance was when Harpo told a chorus girl to run across the stage in front of Groucho during his act with him chasing to see if Groucho would be thrown off. However, to the audience's delight, Groucho merely reacted by calmly checking his watch and commenting, "First time I ever saw a taxi hail a passenger". When Harpo chased the girl back the other direction, Groucho adlibbed, "You can always set your watch by the 9:20".

Under Chico's management, and with Groucho's creative direction, the brothers' vaudeville act had led them to become stars on Broadway, first with a musical revue, I'll Say She Is (1924–1925), followed by two musical comedies, The Cocoanuts (1925–1926) and Animal Crackers (1928–1929). Playwright George S. Kaufman worked on the latter two shows and helped to sharpen the Brothers' characterizations.

Without makeup, wigs, or glasses, all of the Brothers were similar-looking, including their receding hairlines. Zeppo could pass for a younger Groucho, and played the role of his son in Horse Feathers. In Duck Soup, with Groucho, Harpo and Chico all made up in Groucho's greasepaint eyebrows and mustache, and his style of glasses, and with their heads covered by nightcaps, the three looked virtually identical, enabling them to carry off the "mirror scene" effectively.

Origin of the stage names

The stage names for four of the five brothers were coined by monologist Art Fisher during a poker game in Galesburg, Illinois, based both on the brothers' personalities and Gus Mager's Sherlocko the Monk, a popular comic strip of the day which included a supporting character named "Groucho". The reasons behind Chico's and Harpo's are undisputed, and Gummo's is fairly well established. Groucho's and Zeppo's are far less clear. Arthur was named Harpo because he played the harp, and Leonard became Chico (pronounced, and originally spelled, "Chick-o") because of his affinity for the ladies ("chicks").

In his autobiography, Harpo explains that Milton became Gummo because he crept about the theater like a gumshoe detective. Other sources report that Gummo was the family's hypochondriac, having been the sickliest of the brothers in childhood, and therefore wore rubber overshoes, also called gumshoes, in all kinds of weather. Groucho stated that the source of the name was Gummo wearing galoshes. Either way, the name relates to rubber-soled shoes.

The reason Julius was named Groucho is perhaps the most disputed. There are three explanations:

• Julius' temperament. Maxine, Chico's daughter and Groucho's niece, said in the documentary The Unknown Marx Brothers that Julius was named "Groucho" simply because he was grouchy most or all of the time. Robert B. Weide, a director known for his knowledge of Marx Brothers history, said in Remarks On Marx, a documentary short included with the DVD of A Night at the Opera, that among the competing explanations he found this one the most believable. Steve Allen, in "Funny People," says that the name made no sense; Groucho might have been impudent and impertinent, but not grouchy—at least not around Allen.

• The grouch bag. This explanation appears in Harpo's biography, was voiced by Chico in a TV appearance included on The Unknown Marx Brothers, and also offered by George Fenneman, Groucho's sidekick on his TV game show, You Bet Your Life. A grouch bag was a small drawstring bag worn around the neck in which a traveler could keep money and other valuables so that it would be very difficult for anyone to steal them. Most of Groucho's friends and associates stated that Groucho was extremely stingy, especially after losing all his money in the 1929 stock market crash, so naming him for the grouch bag may have been a comment on this trait. Groucho, in chapter six of his first autobiography, insisted that this was not the case:

I kept my money in a 'grouch bag.' This was a small chamois bag that actors used to wear around their neck to keep other hungry actors from pinching their dough. Naturally, you're going to think that's where I got my name from. But that's not so. Grouch bags were worn on many chests long before there was a Groucho.

• Groucho's explanation. Groucho himself insisted that he was named for a character in the comic strip, Knocko the Monk, which had inspired the craze for nicknames ending in O. In fact, there was a character in that strip named "Groucho." However, he is the only Marx or Marx associate who ever defended this theory, and as he is not an unbiased witness, few biographers take the claim seriously. Groucho himself was no help on this point; during his Carnegie Hall concert, when he was discussing the Brothers' names and when it came to his own, he said, "My name, of course, I never did understand."

Herbert was not nicknamed by Art Fisher, since he did not join the act until Gummo had departed. As with Groucho, three explanations exist for Herbert's name, "Zeppo":

• Harpo's explanation. Harpo said in Harpo Speaks! the brothers had named Herbert for Mr. Zippo, a chimpanzee that was part of another performer's act. Herbert disliked the nickname, and when it came time for him to join the act, he put his foot down and refused to be called "Zippo." The brothers compromised on Zeppo.

• Chico's explanation. Chico never wrote an autobiography, and gave fewer interviews than his brothers, but his daughter, Maxine, in The Unknown Marx Brothers said that when the Marx Brothers lived in Chicago, a popular style of humor was the "Zeke and Zeb" joke, which made fun of slow-witted Midwesterners in much the same way Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes mock Cajuns and Ole and Lena jokes mock Minnesotans. One day, as Chico returned home, he found Herbert sitting on the fence. Herbert greeted him by saying "Hi, Zeke!" Chico responded with "Hi, Zeb!" and the name stuck. The brothers thereafter called him "Zeb," and when he joined the act, they floated the idea of "Zebbo," eventually preferring "Zeppo."

• Groucho's explanation. In a tape-recorded interview excerpted on The Unknown Marx Brothers, Groucho said Zeppo was so named because he was born when the first zeppelins started crossing the ocean. He also stated this in his Carnegie Hall concert, ca.1972. The first zeppelin flew in July 1900, and Herbert was born seven months later in February 1901. However, the first transatlantic zeppelin flight was not until 1924, long after Herbert's birth.

Maxine Marx reported in The Unknown Marx Brothers that the brothers listed their real names (Julius, Leonard, Adolph, Milton and Herbert) on playbills and in programs, and only used the nicknames behind the scenes, until Alexander Woollcott overheard them calling one another by the nicknames, he asked them why they used their own rather real names publicly when they had such wonderful nicknames. They replied, "That wouldn't be dignified." Woollcott answered with a belly laugh. Since Woollcott did not meet the Marx Brothers until the premiere of I'll Say She Is, which was their first Broadway show, this would mean they used their real names throughout their vaudeville days, and that the name "Gummo" never appeared in print during his time in the act. Other sources report that the Marx Brothers did go by their nicknames during their vaudeville era, but briefly listed themselves by their given names when I'll Say She Is opened because they were worried that a Broadway audience would reject a vaudeville act if they were perceived as low class.

Hollywood

Paramount

The Marx Brothers' stage shows became popular just as Hollywood was changing to "talkies". They signed a contract with Paramount and embarked on their film career. Their first two released films (they had previously made — but not released — one short silent film titled Humor Risk) were adaptations of Broadway shows: The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930). Both were written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. Following these two feature-length films, they made a short film that was included in Paramount's twentieth anniversary documentary, The House That Shadows Built (1931), in which they adapted a scene from I'll Say She Is. Their third feature-length film, Monkey Business (1931), was their first that was not based on a stage production.

                                
                                    Top to bottom:  Chico, Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo 1931

Horse Feathers (1932), in which the brothers satirized the American college system and Prohibition, was their most popular film yet, and won them the cover of Time. It included a running gag from their stage work, where Harpo revealed having nearly everything in his coat. At various points in Horse Feathers Harpo pulls out of his coat: a wooden mallet, a fish, a coiled rope, a tie, a poster of a woman in her underwear, a cup of hot coffee, a sword; and, just after Groucho warns him that he "can't burn the candle at both ends," a candle burning at both ends. In another famous sketch, shown in Animal Crackers, Harpo drops a full banquet's worth of silverware out of his sleeve, followed by a coffeepot.

Their last Paramount film, Duck Soup (1933) — directed by the most highly regarded director they ever worked with, Leo McCarey — is the higher rated of two Marx Brothers films to make the American Film Institute's "100 years ... 100 Movies" list (the other film being A Night at the Opera). It did not do as well as Horse Feathers, but was the sixth-highest grosser of 1933.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8aKKF1-f-A
Clip from Duck Soup (wow........movies were surely different in the 30s!) -  

The film also led to a feud between the Marxes and the village of Fredonia, New York. Freedonia, of course, was the name of the fictional country in Duck Soup, and the city fathers wrote to Paramount and asked the studio to remove all references in the film to Freedonia because "it is hurting our town's image." Groucho fired back a sarcastic reply asking them to change the name of their town because "it's hurting our picture."

The Marx Brothers left Paramount because of disagreements over creative decisions and financial issues.

MGM, RKO, and United Artists

Zeppo left the act to become an agent and went on to build with his brother Gummo one of the biggest talent agencies in Hollywood, helping the likes of Jack Benny and Lana Turner get their starts. Groucho and Chico did radio, and there was talk of returning to Broadway. At a bridge game with Chico, Irving Thalberg began discussing the possibility of the Marxes coming to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and they signed, now known as "The Three Marx Brothers," or simply "The Marx Bros."

Unlike the free-for-all scripts at Paramount, Thalberg insisted on a strong story structure, making them into more sympathetic characters, interweaving their comedy with romantic plots and non-comic musical numbers, while the targets of their mischief were largely confined to clear villains. Thalberg was adamant that these scripts had to include a "low point" where all seems lost for both the Marxes and the romantic leads. In a June 13, 1969, interview with Dick Cavett, Groucho said that the two movies made with Thalberg (A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races) were the best that they ever produced.

Another idea of Thalberg's was that before filming would commence on an upcoming picture, the Marx Brothers would try out its material on the vaudeville stage, working on comic timing and learning what earned a laugh and what didn't.

The first film that the brothers shot with Thalberg was A Night at the Opera (1935), a satire on the world of opera, where the brothers help two young singers in love by throwing a production of Il Trovatore into chaos. The film (which includes a scene where they cram an amazing number of people into a tiny stateroom on a ship) was a great success, and was followed two years later by the even bigger hit A Day at the Races (1937), where the brothers cause mayhem in a sanitarium and at a horse race (this sequence includes Groucho and Chico's famous "Tootsie Frootsie Ice Cream" sketch). However, during shooting in 1936, Thalberg died suddenly, and without him, the brothers didn't have an advocate at MGM.

After a short experience at RKO (Room Service, 1938), the Marx Brothers made three more films before leaving MGM, At the Circus (1939), Go West (1940), and The Big Store (1941). Prior to the release of The Big Store, the team announced their retirement from the screen, but Chico was in dire financial straits; to help settle his gambling debts, the Marx Brothers made another two films together, A Night in Casablanca (1946) and Love Happy (1949), both of them released by United Artists.

Later years

Groucho and Chico appeared together briefly in a 1957 short film promoting the Saturday Evening Post entitled "Showdown at Ulcer Gulch," directed by animator Shamus Culhane, Chico's son-in-law. Then they worked together, but in different scenes, in The Story of Mankind (1957). In 1959, all three acted in a TV pilot, Deputy Seraph, to star Harpo and Chico as blundering angels; Groucho would appear in every third episode as their boss, the "Deputy Seraph"

The pilot was never finished when it was discovered that Chico was seriously ill with arteriosclerosis; he could not remember his lines at all, and was uninsurable. Chico and Harpo did appear together in a half-hour film shot later that year for the General Electric Theater on CBS, The Incredible Jewel Robbery, a pantomime show with the pair as would-be jewel thieves. Groucho made a brief appearance in the last scene.

From the 1940s onward, Chico and Harpo made nightclub and casino appearances, sometimes together. Chico also fronted a big band, the Chico Marx Orchestra. Groucho began a career as a radio and television entertainer. From 1947 to 1961, he was the host of the quiz show You Bet Your Life (along with a money-bearing artificial duck) on NBC.

Clip from "You Bet Your Life" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ9J4M5xN3k
 

He was also an author -- his writings include the autobiographical Groucho and Me (1959), Memoirs of a Mangy Lover (1964), and The Groucho Letters (1967).

According to a September 1947 article in Newsweek, Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo all signed to appear as themselves in a biopic entitled The Life and Times of the Marx Brothers. In addition to being a non-fiction biography of the Marxes, the film would have also featured the brothers reenacting much of their previously unfilmed material from both their vaudeville and Broadway eras. Had the film come into fruition, it would have been the first time the Brothers had appeared as a quartet since 1933.

The 1957 talk show Tonight! America After Dark, hosted by Jack Lescoulie, may supply the only public footage in which all five brothers appeared. On October 1, 1962, Groucho introduced Johnny Carson to the audience of The Tonight Show as the new host.

In 1970, the Four Marx Brothers had a brief reunion (of sorts) in the animated ABC television special The Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians, produced by Rankin-Bass animation (of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer fame). The special featured animated reworkings of various famous comedians' acts, including W.C. Fields, Jack Benny, George Burns, Henny Youngman, The Smothers Brothers, Flip Wilson, Phyllis Diller, Jack E. Leonard, George Jessel, and the Marx Brothers. Most of the comedians provided their own voices for their animated counterparts, except for Fields and Chico Marx (both had died), and Zeppo Marx (who left show business in 1933). Voice actor Paul Frees filled in for all three (no voice was needed for Harpo, who was also deceased). The Marx Brothers' segment was a reworking of a scene from their Broadway play I'll Say She Is, a parody of Napoleon which Groucho considered among the Brothers' funniest routines. The sketch featured animated representations, if not the voices, of all four brothers. Romeo Muller is credited as having written special material for the show, but the script for the classic "Napoleon Scene" was probably supplied by Groucho.

On January 16, 1977, The Marx Brothers were inducted into the Motion Picture Hall of Fame.

Many TV shows and movies have used Marx Brothers references. Animaniacs and Tiny Toons, for example, have featured Marx Brothers jokes and skits. Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) on M*A*S*H occasionally put on a fake nose and glasses, and, holding a cigar, did a Groucho impersonation to amuse patients recovering from surgery.

Also noteworthy is the fact that Harpo Marx appeared as himself in a sketch on I Love Lucy in which he and Lucille Ball reprised the mirror routine from Duck Soup, with Lucy dressed up as Harpo. Chico once appeared on "I've Got a Secret" dressed up as Harpo; his secret was shown in a caption reading "I'm actually Chico Marx."