Full Marx

`Love flies out the door when money comes innuendo." A typically Groucho-ish line from Monkey Business sums up Stefan Kanfer's biography - the first in almost 20 years - of one of the greatest comic performers of the last century, which makes much play of the parallels between Groucho the comic persona and Julius the man.

Certainly, Groucho's relationship with the women in his life - three wives and two daughters - supports Kanfer's thesis that Groucho's on-screen persona of money-grabbing incompetent and impotent lecher had its roots in his own position as a middle child, starved of the maternal affection and emotional security he craved from his formidable mother, Minnie, who created, packaged and promoted her sons as The Marx Brothers. Chico was the eldest, his mother's favourite, an inveterate womaniser and gambler for the whole of his life. Harpo seems to have had the sweetest disposition and most contented life.

But Julius was always the dissatisfied one, which may explain why he speaks so eloquently across the generations. Where the Italian clown Chico and the idiot-savant Harpo now look like leftovers from a vanished era, Groucho still seems of our time, despite the flickering black-and-white pictures and scratchy sound. His roots may have been in the spit-and-sawdust of vaudeville, but his offspring, good and bad, are to be found in every comedy club and satire show across the English-speaking world.

Since they had to wait for the advent of the talkies before their act could translate to the screen, the Marx Brothers were all in their 40s by the time they became movie stars, and their best work was produced within the space of a half-decade. The early films for Paramount, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, were straightforward versions of their 1920s Broadway hits, becoming more cinematically sophisticated with Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup. The heights of stardom were reached under the tutelage of Hollywood's "boy wonder", Irving Thalberg, who applied an MGM sheen to their antics in A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. Thalberg has been blamed for diluting the formula with superfluous romantic subplots and musical numbers, but as the book makes clear, the Brothers' own energy and interest was in decline by then. If the vaudeville years were Act One, and the movies Act Two, on this side of the Atlantic we are less familiar with Act Three, in which Groucho became one of the first big stars of the television era, hosting a comedy quiz show, You Bet Your Life. Like many a comedian since, he found financial security if not job satisfaction on TV, which perfectly suited his ad-libbing talents.

Unlike Harpo and Chico, who died in the early 1960s, Groucho lived long enough to be rediscovered by a younger generation, which empathised with his anarchic cynicism and saw an echo of its own political concerns in the anti-war satire of Duck Soup, a commercial flop on its release but now generally regarded as the greatest of all the films (Woody Allen, in Hannah and her Sisters, describes its existence as a good reason to go on living).

Unwisely, perhaps, Kanfer concentrates more on the man than the work, although he does allocate an excessive amount of space to hefty chunks of script from the movies, as well as quoting from them at other points. As a result, many of the best-known lines: "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. What he was doing in my pajamas I don't know" or "I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception", crop up more than once - not a great strategy when writing about comedy. Julius's personal life - the failed marriages, the bitter squabbles with his children, and the drawnout court battles over his estate which followed his death - is charted in exhaustive (and, in the case of the court battles, exhausting) detail. Despite all this, the man behind the moustache remains elusive. In his greasepaint, Groucho proclaimed the absurdity of any rational belief system or moral structure, so perhaps it's not surprising that the details of his own life seem so banal and, well, meaningless.

Hugh Linehan is Entertainment Editor of The Irish Times