The Aristocrats! Horny Comedy as a Revolutionary Act
Mozart and the Marx Brothers have more in common than you think
I thought the Marx Brothers invented high-brow/low-brow screwball comedy until I attended the Metropolitan Opera's current production of "The Marriage of Figaro”.
Mozart clearly beat them to it by 150 years.
The historical context makes this connection remarkable. Mozart's 1786 opera, based on Beaumarchais' play, was so politically incendiary that Louis XVI banned the original text outright. The French Revolution was just three years away, and here was a work showing servants outsmarting aristocratic masters, exposing nobility's supposed natural superiority as a lie.
For those unfamiliar, the opera centers on Count Almaviva's attempts to exercise "droit du seigneur"—his supposed right to sleep with Susanna on her wedding night—despite having previously renounced this feudal privilege.
This bawdy plot provides both comedy and a direct attack on aristocratic entitlement.
In Figaro's second act finale, with doors slamming and characters hiding in bedroom closets, and jumping out of windows, the direct line becomes clear connecting this 18th-century masterpiece to cinema's greatest comedies: the Marx Brothers' "Animal Crackers" (1930) and Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game" (1939).
All of these works use desire as comic fuel and tool for exposing social hypocrisy.
All three confine their action to compressed timeframes where normal social rules temporarily dissolve, revealing how arbitrary these hierarchies truly are.
EYEBROWS VS. THE ELITE
The opening of "Animal Crackers" is one of my favorite in all of cinema. It features Groucho singing "Hello, I must be going" — an aria of sorts that immediately establishes the film's heightened reality. Groucho is supposedly Captain Spalding, "an African explorer" invited to Mrs. Rittenhouse's estate for a weekend party. He's clearly an obvious fraud who doesn't belong among the snooty Rittenhouse set, but he has no interest in conforming.
Released in August 1930, "Animal Crackers" arrived as Americans were realizing the market crash wasn't temporary but catastrophic. The Marx Brothers themselves embodied the immigrant experience that many Americans feared. As sons of Jewish immigrants, they represented precisely the kind of ethnic outsiders unwelcome in "proper society."
Their antics at Mrs. Rittenhouse's Long Island mansion aren't just funny—they're class warfare disguised as entertainment. The film's premise—a valuable painting being stolen and replaced with a copy during a high-society gathering—perfectly metaphorizes the emptiness behind upper-class pretension. The brothers expose the arbitrariness of value (both artistic and social) as they swap real and fake paintings with manic energy, revealing that the elites can't tell the difference.
What distinguishes their comedy is its precision.
Beneath the apparent mayhem lies meticulous craft—Groucho's wordplay, Harpo's physical comedy, and Chico's ethnic humor operate as coordinated assault on genteel society's pretensions. For Depression-era audiences, watching immigrant outsiders infiltrate high society offered cathartic release. The Marx Brothers suggested that perhaps the elites weren't superior after all, just better dressed and more practiced at pretension.
HUNTING PARTIES AND HIDDEN DESIRES: RENOIR'S WEEKEND TRAP
Renoir's "The Rules of the Game" connects directly to both Mozart's Figaro and the Marx Brothers through its weekend at an aristocratic country estate. Released in July 1939, just weeks before Hitler's invasion of Poland, it depicts a ruling class consumed by petty liaisons and hollow rituals while blind to the catastrophe looming on the horizon.
The film's most famous line—"The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons"—delivered by Octave (played by Renoir himself) suggests a moral equivalence that undermines aristocratic privilege. If everyone has their reasons, the structures regulating desire remain arbitrary and often cruel.
This revolutionary idea echoes from Mozart to the Marx Brothers: social hierarchies aren't natural but artificial constructs that serve the powerful.
Like Mozart before him, Renoir was deeply concerned about his society's drift toward catastrophe. While Mozart composed "Figaro" just three years before the French Revolution, Renoir created his masterpiece as Europe approached war. Both works confine their action to a single aristocratic estate, center on sexual transgressions across class lines, and create a pressure cooker where social pretensions inevitably collapse.
Where Mozart uses overlapping vocal lines for his ensemble chaos, Renoir employs revolutionary deep-focus photography that allows us to witness aristocrats and servants conducting parallel intrigues within the same unbroken frame.
The film's characters embody different positions in this rigid class system: André Jurieux, a heroic aviator who has just completed a transatlantic flight; Christine, the Austrian-born wife of the wealthy Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye; Octave (played by Renoir himself), a failed conductor who moves between social worlds; and various servants including the gamekeeper Schumacher and the poacher Marceau.
The aristocrats publicly celebrate André's aviation achievement, yet when he publicly expresses genuine emotion—his unrequited love for Christine—they're embarrassed by this breach of decorum. The Marquis de la Chesnaye, despite his own extramarital affair with Geneviève, proudly unveils an elaborate mechanical music box with automated figures—a perfect symbol for aristocratic preference for controlled artifice over authentic expression.
This mechanical music box connects directly to Mozart's precisely constructed musical ensembles—both represent perfect order that will inevitably collapse into precisely choreographed chaos.
When first released, the film provoked such hostility from French audiences that some reportedly tried to set fire to the theater, recognizing themselves in Renoir's unflattering mirror.
After its disastrous premiere, the film was cut from 94 to 81 minutes, before being banned completely by the French government as "demoralizing." The film's weekend timeframe, like the "day of madness" in Figaro, creates a space where social roles temporarily dissolve. The hunting party, costume ball, and nighttime chases through the château's corridors allow authentic desires to emerge from behind social masks.
Their games continue until reality intrudes in the form of an accidental death—much as France's fantasy of security would end with military defeat less than a year later.
There is no better way to understand the French occupation than watching “The Rules of the Game”
PRECISION UNLEASHES CHAOS
In the duet above, Mozart creates a revolutionary moment of exquisite subterfuge. Susanna, the servant, appears to submit to the Count's advances while secretly setting a trap for him. The music's seductive beauty belies its subversive content—a servant manipulating her master through feigned desire. The duet's perfect formal structure—with its tender phrases and intertwining voices—makes its revolutionary content all the more powerful.
On the surface, social hierarchy remains intact, but beneath the beautiful melody, power has already inverted. This same principle governs the opera's garden scene, where characters in disguise pursue forbidden desires in darkness, creating a liminal space where servants temporarily command and masters must obey.
The genius of Mozart, the Marx Brothers, and Renoir lies in their shared understanding of revolution's paradox: true subversion requires not just radical content but rigorous form.
Each creator compresses revolutionary potential into a suspended moment—Mozart's "crazy day," the Marx Brothers' weekend party, Renoir's hunting retreat—where normal social physics temporarily suspend, revealing the arbitrariness of hierarchies that present themselves as natural.
These artists understand that form doesn't diminish radical content but amplifies it. By confining revolution to a single evening or weekend, they create a pressure cooker where tension between order and chaos plays to its inevitable conclusion. They don't reject structure; they transform it from within, using formal brilliance to deliver revolutionary content with precision that makes it impossible to dismiss.
LAUGHTER AS SUBVERSION
Mozart’s upstairs/downstairs lineage extends much further through decades of brilliant films that use compressed timeframes, desire-driven plots, and formal sophistication to expose social hypocrisy:
Ingmar Bergman's "Smiles of a Summer Night" (1955) transforms the weekend party into midsummer's eve when the sun never fully sets and social boundaries temporarily dissolve. Bergman uses this suspended moment to expose bourgeois sexual hypocrisies as four couples redistribute themselves according to authentic desire rather than social convention.
Hal Ashby's "Shampoo" (1975) unfolds over a single election day and night in 1968, using hairdresser Warren Beatty's sexual roundelay among Beverly Hills elite to expose the hollow center of Nixon-era politics. The film's Election Day setting creates a suspended moment where private desires contradict public values.
Robert Altman's "Gosford Park" (2001) revives Renoir's upstairs/downstairs structure for a weekend shooting party, using murder mystery conventions to explore class divisions in pre-WWII Britain. Altman's overlapping dialogue creates sophisticated audio counterpoint reminiscent of Mozart's ensemble pieces.
Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite" (2019) compresses class warfare into a single rainstorm that exposes the hidden infrastructure supporting wealthy comfort. Like Renoir before him, Bong uses the architecture of the house itself to represent class stratification, while the storm creates a suspended moment where servants' and masters' worlds catastrophically collide.
What unites these works across centuries is their understanding that by suspending normal time, even temporarily, we can glimpse possibilities beyond conventional social arrangements.