“Why Are They Laughing, Julie?”

Margaret Dumont
(Born Daisy Juliette Baker)

Character Actress; Fifth Marx Brother; Wealthy Dowager
October 20, 1882- March 6, 1965


Today marks the 41st anniversary of the death of Margaret Dumont, possibly the greatest straight woman ever to appear on the silver screen. Be it W. C. Fields, Jack Benny, or, even better, Groucho Marx, this woman was a titanic foil for whatever the nearest funny man had to throw, and she did it with a corset of steel and a face of ice. She was a wonder of a character actress who rarely gets as much of the credit she deserves for the success of the Marxes’ best pictures. We haven’t seen another of her kind in quite some time. Perhaps we never will again.

Margaret Dumont played a wealthy widow on the screen, and one of the most incredible things about her life was that she really was a wealthy widow (she married and buried John Moller, a millionaire entrepreneur). But she shared an even more unbelievable quirk with her matron character.

Neither one understood that Groucho Marx was funny!

According to legend, Margaret Dumont was the perfect (almost eerily perfect) straight woman because she was completely void of a sense of humour. After each scene bursting with audience laughter she would turn to Groucho, who she refused to call Groucho, and called Julie instead (his birth name was Julius), and say, in confusion, “Why are the laughing, Julie?” Groucho sometimes would try to explain the joke. More often he would not. He loved having a straight woman who was guaranteed not to crack up, and the fact that she was perpetually the butt of jokes she couldn’t possibly understand made her the perfect sidekick.

Groucho’s character never did succeed in marrying Margaret Dumont for her money, but, in real life, the brothers did manage to steal her wig, flip her skirt, pin her bloomers to the side of a Pullman car, and a million other horrible tricks. Sometimes she would cry, she’d often get mad, but it wasn’t in her to laugh.

A formidable (yet pitiable) figure in her later years, she and Groucho maintained some sort of contact and a kind of a friendship until her death in 1965, and one can only image that if she and he were reunited in the afterlife, upon his death in 1977, she is still asking him what the joke is.

And I’ll leave it up to you to imagine his answer.