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Herbert Marx (February 25, 1901–November 29,
1979) is best known as Zeppo Marx, the name he
used when he performed with his brothers, The Marx
Brothers.

There are different theories to where Zeppo got
his stage name: Groucho Marx|Groucho once said
that the name was derived from the Zeppelin, a new
invention at the time of his birth. However, it is
more commonly suggested that the name derived from
that of another vaudeville performer named Mr.
Zippo. It is possible that both are true and that
some pun|punning was involved. (Another story
tells of the time the Marxes were pretending to be
gentleman farmers in order to avoid conscription
into World War I. The brothers would refer to each
other by "hayseed" names like Zeke and Zeb; Zeb
became Zeppo.)

Zeppo appeared in the first five Marx Brothers
movies, as a straight man and romantic lead,
before leaving the team. He had sufficient comic
abilities to have stood in for Groucho when the
brothers performed on stage, and he was reputed to
be very funny offstage; but he never invented a
comic persona of his own that could stand up
against those of Groucho Marx|Groucho, Harpo
Marx|Harpo and Chico Marx, even though the role he
used to fill would continue to exist in the
brothers' remaining films.

Offstage, Zeppo had great mechanical skills and
was largely responsible for keeping the Marx
family car running. Zeppo later owned a company
which machined parts for the war effort during
World War II including the clamps used to hold the
Hiroshima bomb inside the Enola Gay. He also
founded a large theatrical agency with his brother
Gummo Marx, and invented a wrist watch that would
monitor the pulse rate of cardiac patients and
give off an alarm if they went into cardiac
arrest.

On April 12, 1927, Zeppo married Marion Benda. The
couple would adopt one child, Timothy, in 1944.
They would later divorce on May 12, 1954. On
September 18, 1959, Zeppo married Barbara Blakely.
Zeppo and Blakely would divorce in 1973. (Blakely
would later marry singer Frank Sinatra). 

The last of the Marx Brothers by 1979, he died of
lung cancer.

==Zeppo defended==

In recent years, a surge of adamant Zeppo
supporters have risen to challenge the notion that
he did not develop a comic persona in his films.
Gerald Mast, in his book The Comic Mind: Comedy
and Movies (University of Chicago Press: 1979),
notes that Zeppo's comedic persona, while
certainly more subtle than his brothers', is
certainly present: :"He added a fourth dimension
as the cliché of the romantic juvenile, the bland
wooden espouser of sentiments that seem to exist
only in the world of the sound stage. ... He is
too schleppy, too nasal, and too wooden to be
taken seriously" (282, 285).  

Danél Griffin, film critic for the University of
Alaska Southeast, elaborates on Mast's theory:
:"Zeppo’s parts were always intended to be a
parody of the juvenile role often found in sappy
musicals of the 1920s-30s era. Sometimes, he would
just have a few lines, and he would otherwise be
reduced to standing in the background with a big
smile on his face. In these roles, he was a
lampoon of the infamous extra, always grinning
widely as a needless decoration, and always stiff
and wooden. In other films, Zeppo would have a
more significant role as the romantic lead, but he
would still always be stiff, wooden, and, yes,
with a big smile on his face. Either way, he could
never be considered a real straight man. He was a
sappy distortion of the real thing, and sort of
the gateway through which we connected with the
other Brothers. We perceived him as the “normal,
good-looking” one of the bunch, but was he
really? Wasn’t there something about that line
from The Cocoanuts, 'You can depend upon me, Mr.
Hammer,' that was a little too...happy? Roger
Ebert called Zeppo 'superfluous,' and that is the
point of his character in the six Paramount films.
He was the straight man only in pure Marxian
sense—while his Brothers spat on movie clichés,
he imitated them, proving in his own way to be
quite a brilliant comedian."
(http://uashome.alaska.edu/%7Ejndfg20/website/nigh
tattheopera.htm Link)

In her book Hello, I Must be Going: Groucho & His
Friends, Charlotte Chandler defends Zeppo as being
"the Marx Brothers' interpreter in the worlds they
invade. He is neither totally a straight man nor
totally a comedian, but combines elements of both,
as did Margaret Dumont. Zeppo's importance to the
Marx Brothers' initial success was as a Marx
Brother who could 'pass' as a normal person. None
of Zeppo's replacements (Allan Jones, Kenny Baker,
and others) could assume this character as
convincingly as Zeppo, because they were actors,
and Zeppo was the real thing, cast to type" (562).

Allen W. Ellis writes in his article Yes, Sir: The
Legacy of Zeppo Marx (The Journal of Popular
Culture, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2003):
:"Indeed, Zeppo is a link between the audience and
Groucho, Harpo and Chico. In a sense, he is us on
the screen. He knows who those guys are and what
they are capable of. As he ambles out of a scene,
perhaps it is to watch them do their business, to
come back in as necessary to move the film along,
and again to join in the celebration of the
finish. Further, Zeppo is crucial to the absurdity
of the Paramount films. The humor is in his
incongruity. Typically he dresses like a normal
person, in stark contrast to Groucho's greasepaint
and 'formal' attire, Harpo's rags, and Chico's
immigrant hand-me-downs. By most accounts, he is
the handsomest of the brothers, yet that
handsomeness is distorted by his familial
resemblance to the others—sure, he's
handsome, but it is a decidedly peculiar, Marxian
handsomeness. By making the group four, Zeppo adds
symmentry, and in the surrealistic worlds of the
Paramount films, this symmetry upsets rather than
confirms balance: it is chaos born of symmetry.
That he is a plank in a maelstrom, along with the
very concept of 'this guy' who is there for no
real reason, who joins in and is accepted by these
other three wildmen while the narrative offers no
explanation, are wonderful in their pure
absurdity. 'To string things together in a
seemingly purposeless way,' said Mark Twain, 'and
to be seemingly unaware that they are absurd, is
the mark of American humor.' The 'sense' injected
into the nonsense only compounds the nonsense"
(21-22).  

==External links==
* imdb name|id=0555688|name=Zeppo Marx