The communism of Karl Marx would probably be actually the best for everybody as a whole. But what he didn’t figure into was human nature, and that’s what corrupts it.
I was a fan of the Marx Brothers. One of them had this character where he pretended not to be able to talk, but then he wrote this autobiography called ‘Harpo Speaks!’ He wrote about how he quit school at nine years old to become a professional.
My heroes, growing up, were people like Andy Kaufman and Groucho Marx and people that very rarely drop the persona.
We say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx and Lenin and Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung, and anybody else who ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that a revolution is a class struggle.
I always find it actually funny that the analysis is that the characters I play in comedies are the manchild, the adolescent, characters that refuse to grow up. And yet, if you look back in the history of comedy all the way back to the Marx brothers, that’s a big part of comedy.
My Dad hated his job. He sold overcoats, but he wanted to make movies. He had a failed career working with the Ritz Brothers – they were like the Marx Brothers, only a tier below. I always had a picture in my mind of him in a straw hat.
I saw ‘A Night at the Opera,’ this Marx Brothers film, when I was, like, six years old. I just became obsessed, you know?
In 1944 James Arthur and Minnie Susan were added to the Marx household.
Real socialism is inside man. It wasn’t born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can’t say it is finished.
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