Marx Brothers since he did not join the act until Gummo had departed. As with Groucho, three explanations exist for Herbert's name "Zeppo": Maxine Marx reported in "The Unknown Marx Brothers" that the brothers listed their "real" names (Julius, Leonard, Adolph, Milton, and Herbert) on playbills and in programs, and only used the nicknames behind the scenes, until Alexander Woollcott overheard them calling one another by the nicknames. He asked them why they used their real names publicly when they had such wonderful nicknames, and they replied, "That wouldn't be dignified." Woollcott answered with a belly laugh. Woollcott did not meet the
Zeppo Marx Zeppo could even try such a thing as taking down the heading and the salutation and leaving out the letter because it didn't sound important to him. It takes a Marx Brother to pull something like that on a Marx Brother and get away with it. In the same book, Adamson noted Zeppo's position as the campy parody of the juvenile romantic in his analysis of "Horse Feathers". This tongue-in-cheek observation bolstered the theory of Zeppo's stiffness as a deliberate comic persona: Each Marx Brother has his own form of comedy. Zeppo is at his funniest when he opens his