So going into this movie, I was afraid that it would be one of those aggressively unfunny movies, like Mel Brooks or whatever.

In fact, it is much, much worse than any of those.

Like, you know how in Mrs. Maisel, they contrast her routine with the schticky bullshit of the rando background comics, with their unfunny one-liners? Now imagine a whole movie made up of those unfunny one-liners. Now let me tell you that you don’t have to imagine, because that’s exactly what this is.

There’s not even an attempt made to make the jokes work in context. Like, Groucho Marx will be at an inauguration ball, and just out of nowhere he’ll make a joke about paying his dentist. It’s not driven by the situation or the conversation, he’s just like working through the Unfunny Comedians Joke Book page by page. It’s so fucking terrible.

Oh, also there’s singing, with multiple song and dance numbers that are aggressively unfunny on their own.

But as bad as all that is — and it is very bad — the worst is Harpo, who is playing some kind of weird psychopath character, who keeps assaulting other people in really horrid ways, including at least one straight-up sexual assault.

And so it’s tempting to explain this movie’s otherwise-inexplicable historical popularity by saying that humor doesn’t age well, and there’s certainly an element to which that’s true, but at the same time, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are both much funnier than this.

Maybe this was one of the early comedic talkies and much of the nation had just literally never heard a joke before, and the experience of hearing one was inherently novel? So like the polished silent movies hold up better than the early talkies in the same way that polished SNES 2D games are more playable today than the raw early-3D PS1 games.

I don’t know. I don’t really have a good explanation. But I will say that it’s impossible to watch this movie today with anything other than a sense of encroaching horror. It’s barely over an hour, but it felt like long aeons before the end finally arrived.

ALSO: The weirdest fucking thing in this movie is that Groucho Marx doesn’t even have a moustache, he just has one grease-painted on. Did he never even have a real one?!?