#60 ‘Duck Soup’

Anarchy, Anthems, and the Birth of Weaponized Nonsense

Duck Soup (1933) is the Marx Brothers at their most distilled and deranged: 68 minutes of manic brilliance where logic is a casualty, war is a punchline, and governance is handed to a man with a painted-on mustache and a complete disregard for continuity. It’s anarchic, subversive, and still somehow more coherent than actual politics—a film that dresses fascism in a top hat and then hurls banana peels under it.

Groucho Marx stars as Rufus T. Firefly, the newly appointed dictator of Freedonia, a fictional nation whose only consistent trait is its incompetence. He insults everyone, fires his cabinet on a whim, and wages war because someone calls him an upstart. He’s the original political troll: brilliant, petty, and utterly uninterested in decorum. The film doesn’t ask you to sympathize with Firefly. It dares you not to cheer for him as he dismantles statehood with one-liners.

Then there’s Chico and Harpo, the agents of chaos. Chico speaks in accents that would get him canceled today, but with enough piano-playing charm to slide under the radar. Harpo, silent but deadly, honks and hammers his way through scenes like a court jester on bath salts. Zeppo is also there, technically. The film doesn’t need him, and neither do we.

Plot? Barely. Something about Freedonia being in debt, a wealthy widow funding the regime, a rival nation named Sylvania, and a war no one understands. But Duck Soup doesn’t care about plot. It cares about puncturing plot—stabbing it with puns, setting it on fire with slapstick, and feeding the ashes to a marching band.

The mirror scene is still one of the most precise comedic sequences ever filmed—two men, two Grouchos, one nonexistent reflection. No words. Just pure visual poetry in the language of absurdity. The film uses physical comedy like a scalpel, slicing away at the pretense of structure, diplomacy, and sanity itself.

And yet, for all its chaos, Duck Soup is pointed. It mocks nationalism, militarism, and the very idea that authority should be respected. Its musical numbers are militaristic parodies, its courtroom scenes are kangaroo circuses, and its final act—where the Marx Brothers literally launch food at the enemy—is both hilarious and uncomfortably prescient.

Women, of course, exist solely to be flirted with or funding the farce. Margaret Dumont once again plays the wealthy dowager with the patience of a saint and the reaction time of a taxidermy exhibit. Her character is the perfect foil: earnest, refined, and perpetually bewildered—exactly how the patriarchy likes its punchlines.

Yes, it’s a product of its time. Yes, some of the ethnic humor has aged like milk in a heatwave. But Duck Soup remains a rare beast: a comedy that’s both timeless and ruthless, refusing to pick a side except the one that laughs last, loudest, and with a banana peel in hand.

4 out of 5 shredded constitutions
(One for the mirror scene. One for Groucho’s verbal carnage. One for Harpo’s horn-based terror campaign. One for the political satire still relevant 90 years later. The missing star? Smuggled out of Freedonia by a duck in a trench coat.)