Marx Brothers Trivia
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60 free Marx Brothers trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Marx Brothers trivia quiz starts where the brothers did: five sons of a Yorkville tailor pushed on stage by their mother Minnie, renamed by a monologist during a poker game, banned from vaudeville over a trip to Britain, then rescued by Broadway. From there it covers the Paramount years (The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup), Irving Thalberg's MGM reinvention with A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, and the reluctant final films. Along the way you will need to know who Freedonia went to war with, which brother smuggled diplomatic messages taped to his leg in Moscow, why W.C. Fields faked a broken wrist, what a 'sanity clause' is, how Groucho's quiz show gave away fifty dollars, and which rock band named two albums after Marx films. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on the team, the individual brothers and their films, and each explanation adds one further fact. Good for classic comedy fans, film students and quiz nights that want more than 'which one never spoke'.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Groucho Marx's famous moustache made of in the brothers' films?
Greasepaint
Greasepaint. By the usual story he arrived late at a theatre with no time to glue on his false moustache, smeared one on instead, and found it so much easier that he never went back.
Q 02In a Duck Soup routine, a disguised intruder pretends to be Groucho's what?
Reflection
Reflection. The routine looks like pure Marx invention, but it was an old one: Charlie Chaplin and Max Linder had both filmed gags like it years earlier.
Q 03Which instrument was Chico Marx's solo speciality in the brothers' films?
Piano
Piano. Chico had earned his keep at the keyboard in nickelodeons and saloons before he joined his brothers, and his trick playing became a fixture of their films.
Q 04What was Groucho Marx's real first name?
Julius
Julius. He said he was named after an Uncle Julius, and the stage name took years to stick: reviewers were still calling him Julius when the act reached Broadway in 1924.
Q 05Harpo Marx was born Adolph but changed his first name to what?
Arthur
Arthur. He made the switch by the First World War at the latest, so it had nothing to do with Hitler, who was still unknown when Adolph Marx dropped the name.
Q 06Who gave the brothers their stage names during a poker game?
Monologist Art Fisher
Monologist Art Fisher dealt out the names with the cards in Galesburg, Illinois. He was borrowing a comic-strip fad for names ending in -o, and one strip already had a character called Groucho.
Q 07According to the usual story, why was Leonard Marx nicknamed 'Chico'?
He chased women, or 'chicks'
He chased women, or 'chicks', so the nickname was first spelled Chicko. A typesetter is said to have dropped the k by mistake, and the shorter spelling stuck.
Q 08Milton Marx's nickname 'Gummo' supposedly came from his habit of wearing what?
Rubber-soled shoes
Rubber-soled shoes, or gumshoes, though the brothers never agreed on why. Groucho said Gummo simply liked them; Harpo said he prowled around backstage like a gumshoe detective.
Q 09Which country's accent did Chico Marx put on for his stage and screen character?
Italy
Italy. By legend he borrowed the accent from his barber, and it stuck for life: in the films he answers to names like Ravelli, Chicolini and Fiorello.
Q 10Groucho Marx's first family singing act toured vaudeville as the Three, then the Four, what?
Nightingales
Nightingales. Harpo was pulled in at the last minute to make the fourth for a Coney Island booking, and by his own account wet his pants on stage at his debut.
Q 11In which Texas town, by Marx Brothers legend, did a runaway mule interrupt the show and turn the act to comedy?
Nacogdoches
Nacogdoches. As the brothers told it, the crowd drifted back from watching the mule, a furious Groucho rhymed the town's name with 'roaches', and the audience roared with laughter instead of walking out.
Q 12Which famous comedian reportedly faked an injury rather than follow the Marx Brothers on a vaudeville bill?
W.C. Fields
W.C. Fields was then a juggler and, by Groucho's account, found nobody wanted to watch juggling after the brothers, so he told the manager his hand had 'noxis on the conoxis' and left for New York.
Q 13In a famous Marx Brothers scene from 1932, what password gets Groucho past Chico into a speakeasy?
Swordfish
Q 21Which actress played the wealthy widow foil to Groucho in The Cocoanuts and seven of the brothers' films?
Margaret Dumont
Margaret Dumont was often called the fifth Marx Brother. Groucho loved to claim she never understood a single one of his jokes, a story that later writers have filed under myth.
Q 22'Hooray for Captain Spaulding', later the theme of Groucho's quiz show, was written for which show?
Animal Crackers
Animal Crackers. Groucho's African explorer is carried into a Long Island party on a sedan chair, announces in song that he must be going, and the guests answer by singing his praises.
Q 23Where did the Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts by day in 1929 while playing Broadway at night?
Swordfish. Chico hints that the password is a fish, Groucho keeps guessing wrong, and Chico then gives it away himself by snapping that nobody gets in without saying it.
Q 14Which Marx brother left the act for the army in 1918?
Gummo
Gummo. The family had bought an Illinois farm in the hope that farming would keep the brothers out of the draft, but the army took him anyway, and the war ended within weeks.
Q 15What was the title of the Marx Brothers' unreleased 1921 silent film, of which no copies survive?
Humor Risk
Humor Risk cast against type: Groucho played the villain and Harpo, depending on the account, a detective or a romantic lead named Watson. By most accounts it was shown once, to an unimpressed matinee crowd in the Bronx, and shelved.
Q 16In A Day at the Races, what is Chico pretending to sell when he cons Groucho into buying racing tips?
Ice cream
Ice cream. Crying 'tootsie-frootsie ice cream', Chico sells Groucho one tip in code, then book after book that he needs to decode it.
Q 17What was the Marx Brothers' first Broadway hit, which opened in May 1924?
I'll Say She Is
I'll Say She Is was built on leftovers: a producer wanted an act to put in front of scenery from earlier flops, and Groucho claimed not one piece of it really belonged to the show.
Q 18Which critic of the Algonquin Round Table became Harpo Marx's lifelong friend after raving about the brothers in 1924?
Alexander Woollcott
Alexander Woollcott. The friendship ended up on stage: the comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner caricatured the critic as its overbearing house guest and Harpo as his madcap friend Banjo.
Q 19Who wrote the music for the Marx Brothers' Broadway show The Cocoanuts?
Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin wrote the songs and George S. Kaufman the script, though Kaufman is said to have protested first that he would rather write a show for the Barbary apes than for the Marx Brothers.
Q 20In The Cocoanuts' map routine, which word does Chico keep mistaking for a question?
Viaduct
Viaduct. Groucho is talking him through a map of Florida building lots, and each time he points out the viaduct to the mainland Chico demands to know why a duck and 'why a no chicken'.
Astoria Studios, Queens
Astoria Studios, Queens. The early microphones picked up every rustle, so each sheet of paper seen on screen had to be soaked in water to stop it crackling on the soundtrack.
Q 24Which studio made the Marx Brothers' first five films, from The Cocoanuts to Duck Soup?
Paramount
Paramount. The run ended with Duck Soup, now counted among the great film comedies but a box-office disappointment at the time, and the team's contract was not renewed.
Q 25Which 1931 film was the first Marx Brothers movie not based on a stage production?
Monkey Business
Monkey Business. With no stage script to lean on, the brothers turned to new writers, and Groucho's reported verdict on their first draft was 'It stinks'.
Q 26Which Marx Brothers film satirised the American college system and put the brothers on the cover of Time?
Horse Feathers
Horse Feathers. Groucho plays a new college president who decides the way to save his school is to buy two professional football players, and hires Chico and Harpo by mistake.
Q 27What is the name of the fictional country Groucho leads in Duck Soup?
Freedonia
Freedonia. When the mayor of the real town of Fredonia, New York, complained that the film was tarnishing its name, Groucho wrote back: change the name of your town, it is hurting our picture.
Q 28What is the name of Groucho's character in Duck Soup?
Rufus T. Firefly
Rufus T. Firefly gets the job only because the nearly bankrupt country's richest widow will not lend it another cent unless he is put in charge.
Q 29Which Oscar-winning director made Duck Soup?
Leo McCarey
Leo McCarey. A veteran of Laurel and Hardy comedies, he is credited with the title too: Duck Soup had already been the name of a Laurel and Hardy short in 1927.
Q 30Which MGM producer signed the Marx Brothers in the mid-1930s and gave their comedies stronger stories?
Irving Thalberg
Irving Thalberg. He also sent the brothers out on stage tours to try their new scenes on live audiences before filming, so that only the jokes that got laughs reached the screen.