Artaud, the Marx Brothers and Deleuze Artaud's note on the Marx Brothers near the end of The Theatre and Its Double is an early example of a French avant-garde response to American popular comic cinema. As with later such responses, he takes the films much more seriously than the American public does, saying that the end of Monkey Business is "un hymne à l'anarchie et à la révolte intégrale", not just the easy and straightforwardly comic humour that is all the Americans see. To understand this work, "il faudrait ajouter à l'humour la notion d'un quelque chose d'inquiétant et de tragique, d'une fatalité (ni heureuse ni malheureuse, mais pénible à formuler) qui se glisserait derrière lui comme la révélation d'une maladie atroce sur un profil d'une absolue beauté." There may in fact be subtle reasons for these two different perspectives, which will explored later. Artaud was of course a major influence on the second generation of French philosophers after the Second World War, in particular Derrida and Deleuze. The latter only devotes about three quarters of a page to the Marx Brothers in the first of his two books on cinema, concentrating on problems of propositionality and meaning which he had explored in Logic of Sense, but there are also many affinities between their work and that of Lewis Carroll, which of course takes one back to the same philosophical work, while Carroll and Artaud are brought closely together in series thirteen. Groucho and Chico's language is as saturated with puns as the end of the ninth chapter ("The Mock Turtle's Story") in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, while the anarchy that Artaud describes is very much to be found in the kitchen scene in the sixth chapter ("Pig and Pepper") in the same book. There are also frequent asymmetrical interactions or exchanges between series of signs, objects and places in the Marx Brothers' films. Here one thinks of the tea party in the seventh chapter ("A Mad Tea-Party") of Carroll's book, although Deleuze's use of the work of Beckett is even more relevant here, in particular the stones and the pockets sequence in Molloy. Carroll's kitchen scene actually makes one think of a piece of avant-garde theatre or performance art, and The Theatre and Its Double is arguably the seminal text for this type of work. The note on the Marx Brothers was the first of two notes added at the end of the book, the second one being on a production by Jean-Louis Barrault (who was trained as a mime), where he improvised "les mouvements d'un cheval sauvage, et qu'on a tout à coup la surprise de le voir devenu cheval", clearly a moment of Deleuzian becoming. The first note was initially published in La Nouvelle Revue