Month: November 2024

Happy heavenly birthday to Harpo Marx!

This novel was inspired by the legendary scene in Duck Soup in which Harpo is caught in the president’s Mansion of Freedonia by Groucho and pretends to be his mirror image. The bit got an equally historic revival on an I Love Lucy episode where the kooky redhead tried to pull the same con against Harpo in his hotel room. In Hack’s version, Boris and Jonny break into the Freedonia White House to get Ricky Ricardo to cast them in his nightclub act, only to have to act out the bit once more when Harpo comes across them in the President’s bedroom. The deception inevitably falls apart and ends with Harpo sodomizing Jonny with his iconic squeeze horn cane while Freedonian President Rufus T. Firefly, Lucy Ricardo and Boris look on while laughing hysterically.