Zeppo Marx was from East Frisia in Germany; and his father was a native of France, and worked as a tailor. As with all of the Marx Brothers, there are different theories as to where Zeppo got his stage name: Groucho said in his Carnegie Hall concert in 1972 that the name was derived from the Zeppelin airship. Zeppo's ex-wife Barbara Sinatra repeated this in her 2011 book, "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank". His brother Harpo offered a different account in his 1961 autobiography, "Harpo Speaks!," claiming (p. 130) that there was a popular trained chimpanzee named Mr. Zippo, and
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