Harpo Speaks!

"Yes he does. I was always keen on the Marx brothers as comedians. Their films are still very funny and very fast. Other comedies, even from only 20 years ago, seem slow – the human mind finds quicker routes to get to jokes. But the Marx brothers still seem fast. There’s something amazing about them. Groucho was the famous one, but Harpo is a very interesting character. This is the perfect showbusiness autobiography. It goes from anecdote to anecdote somewhat, but they’re all good anecdotes. In One on One he meets Rachmaninov, who had earlier met Tchaikovsky, and then George Bernard Shaw. He was chatty and knew how to tell jokes. The book is very jaunty. It’s separate from his art, because you can’t really equate a mime artist with a writer. Well he never spoke in the films, he only played his harp and joked around. So the title, Harpo Speaks , is the initial oddity of it – that he has a voice, and a life outside of the films. He left school very young, at 12 or so, and he had a slight chip on his shoulder of everyone being cleverer than him. The book is ghost-written, but I think that ghost-written books are rather unfairly looked down on. You could easily call it an oral history. All it is is someone dictating to somebody else. I have a friend who said that his sister, aged about 12, was playing in Central Park once and Harpo Marx made an inappropriate grab for her. So maybe his character in the films isn’t his character at all, and he has a much more sinister side to him! But certainly the character he plays is full of japes and practical jokes, a kind of silent Larry David figure."