Animal Crackers
by George S Kaufman, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Morrie Ryskind

The scene is the Long Island estate of Mrs. Rittenhouse, a wealthy patroness of the arts with a marriageable daughter.

Her celebrity weekend guest is the renowned Captain Jeffrey Spaulding, the African Explorer (Groucho).

He arrives (“Hooray, hooray, hooray!”) with his secretary, Horatio Jameson (Zeppo), followed by a pair of “musicians”: Ravelli (Chico) and the Professor (Harpo).

What follows is typical Marxian lunacy, involving a stolen painting, a surreal bridge game, a Broadway gossip columnist named Wally Winston, a financial wizard formerly known as Abie the Fish Peddler, and a climatic burlesque of Marie Antoinette and the Three Musketeers.

What transcends this errant nonsense are the verbal arabesques of Captain Spaulding (“Last night, I shot an elephant in my pajamas.

How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.”) and the first-rate slapstick of Ravelli and the Professor.