George S. Kaufman

The Library of America celebrates the playwright's birthday with a short piece on his working with the Marx Brothers ('We wrote two shows for them which, by the way, is two more than anybody should be asked to write'), and a very old video with a very funny Kaufman. 'We learned that when an audience does not laugh at a line at which they’re supposed to laugh, then the thing to do was to take out that line and get a funnier line. So help me, we didn’t know that before. I always thought it was the audience’s fault, or when the show got to New York they’d laugh.' More...