That's Not Funny!!! (anymore)

Amos and Andy are, in several ways, like the Marx Brothers. They began on the vaudeville circuit before moving to radio and television. The characters portrayed specific racial and ethnic stereotypes. Groucho was Jewish, Chico Italian, and Harpo Irish (an association considerably more evident in the vaudeville manifestation of the Marx Brothers than in the later forms where he is more of a mime/clown figure). And most importantly, both comedic teams portrayed a sense of racial and ethnic anxiety within the milieu of Northern, white, mainstream culture. Amos and Andy emigrated to Chicago in the Great Migration and their comedy was as much about North and South as it was about black and white. The Marx Brothers repeatedly found themselves confounded by the mores of high society, be it in A Night at the Opera or A Day at the Races. Why, then, can we still see the Marx Brothers on television, while Amos and Andy are capable of inducing a visceral reaction powerful enough to keep them under lock and key? While we cringe at a white man in blackface, is it any less troubling to see a German Jewish man portray the libidinous Italian Catholic Chico (originally named "Chick-o" for is love of "chicks")?

Because in several salient ways, Amos and Andy are also very different from the Marx Brothers, and it is these differences that have determined their place among posterity. The Marx Brothers' humor did not vary dramatically from traditional vaudeville. It was largely linguistic and local. It was a series of set-ups and punch-lines that did not attempt any large story arc between episodes. Ely points out that Correll and Gosden had intentionally tried to distance themselves from traditional stage humor, instead crafting jokes based on consistent character traits and plot developing contours. While this allowed for the humanization of the more admirable characters, it insisted on a kind of realism which by default also included the not-so-admirable characters.

The Marx Brothers played their jokes against straight characters who were almost always Anglo-Americans and so beholden to polite society and bourgeois propriety that they were deaf to the absurdity of the conversation before them. They were interlocutors detached from society as a whole, so intensely alien that their words seemed to have no effect on the world around them. So anarchic is the Marx Brothers style, and so broadly satirical is their humor, that it is not constrained to any specific place and time. Duck Soup, for instance, is a critique of politics and war, while Animal Crackers is a send up of the mystery genre. Amos and Andy, however, were firmly grounded in the historical reality of the Great Migration. As such, they were not only deferential in the face of whites, they were often fearful. Instead of taking the historical moment as an object of scrutiny, the pair engaged relatively realistic surroundings in a way that was relevant to the times. As was too often the case in early 20th century America, Amos and Andy ended up being the butt of the joke. Their interactions with whites, rather than subverting conventional social forms, reinforced them.

There is no doubt that the legacy of racism is more present in the American consciousness than that of ethnic discrimination. Jews, Italians, and Irish were not subject to Jim Crow, and they were relatively established members of society by the time of the bus strikes and sit-ins in the South. In answering why Amos and Andy are still controversial today, while the Marx Brothers are generally considered to be innocuous, one must give a richer answer than simply "racism." One must also take into consideration the fact that the Marx Brothers thrived on fantastical mayhem, surreal absurdity, and whip-fast dialog which sailed over the heads of their interlocutors. Amos and Andy, however, were inherently bound up in history. They were born in the moment of the Great Migration and doomed to die in the Civil Rights Movement.