Love and marriage. Horse and carriage. Peanut butter and jelly. George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. And Edna Ferber. And George and Ira Gershwin. And Irving Berlin. And Morrie Ryskind. And Ring Lardner. And John P. Marquand. And Howard Teichmann. And the Marx Brothers. And, of course, Moss Hart.

George S. Kaufman (1888-1961), probably the greatest American comic playwright of the '30s and '40s, wasn't called "the Great Collaborator" for nothin'. With his acerbic wit and sardonic take on everyone's sacred cows, Kaufman bounced off in zany creative partnerships with some of the greatest talents of the era He was vastly more experienced - the hugely influential drama editor of The New York Times, the Pulitzer-winning, veteran playwright of many Broadway hits, the sought-after director of such gigantic successes as The Front Page, and a founder of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table - when he was approached by the young, unknown Moss Hart (1904-1961) to collaborate on a farce about the arrival of the 'talkies' in Hollywood, a play that became a smash hit, Once in a Lifetime (1930). Kaufman and Hart went on to partner for a full ten years of hit after hit, ending amicably as Hart moved on to write scripts and become a successful director himself.

Despite the difference in age, the two men had similar backgrounds and their families are probably echoed in the oddball Sycamores of this play. They were both the sons of lower middle-class urban Jewish families who lived on top of each other in crowded apartments. Hart's father was a New York cigar-maker, thrown out of work when the mechanical cigar roller was invented. The boy's eccentric Aunt Kate became his ticket out of the dreariness of his family, as Aunt Kate surreptitiously took young Moss out of school every Thursday to attend Broadway matinees. (Years later, Hart learned that his crazy aunt also set fires backstage at the theatres they visited!) Kaufman came from Pittsburgh where his family "managed to get in on every business as it was finishing and made a total of $4 among them." Both as teenagers left school to work in the garment trade and each man had done his writing apprenticeship in the great Jewish laugh factories of the day - Kaufman in vaudeville and Hart in the Borscht Belt resorts of the Catskills. They remained good friends for life and died in the same year, 1961.

Like so many of the world's greatest clowns and comics, they were both morose men with conflicted personal lives. Kaufman in person was lugubrious and laconic, with legendary one-liner timing. He married at 29 and, after the birth of a daughter, both he and his wife went their separate ways romantically. But they remained personally and professionally devoted until her death in 1945. Kaufman became a noted ladies man and philanderer. Hart was a homosexual man, desperate to be straight. He pursued therapy and suffered long bouts of depression. In 1946 he married actress Kitty Carlisle, with whom he had two children, while he continued his closeted life. As these two creative geniuses worked on You Can't Take It With You in 1936, Hart was deeply depressed, while Kaufman was at the center of a salacious public scandal about explicit revelations of an affair with actress Mary Astor. It was also, of course, the middle of the Great Depression.

So? Do you cry? Or do you make 'em laugh? Like the great clowns before them, Hart and Kaufman went for life's comedy and wrote You Can't Take it With You. The play ran for 837 performances, won the Pulitzer Prize, became a hit movie, and is the most frequently revived of all the works of either man.

The plot is simply a manic, monumental culture clash between those two opposing, but oddly intertwined, forces of American civilization - conservative capitalism and individualistic anarchy.

On the one hand, we have the capitalist Kirbys, who are practically cartoon caricatures. There's poor Mr. Kirby, rich, self-important, and unhappy, given to indigestion and wasting money on expensive, marginal hobbies like growing orchids that take years to flower. His own father and decades of being a Wall Street fat cat have stomped all the youthful romance out of his soul so thoroughly that, as his wife reveals, he even talks about the Stock Exchange during marital sex. And there's poor Mrs. Kirby, conventional and even more unhappy, living a bewildering life framed by summers in Bar Harbor, winters in New York, and unquestioning adherence to social expectations. Her honeymoon was "boring," her husband hangs out in the bathroom, her sex life takes a back seat to Wall Street. No wonder she follows spiritualism! Any other world but this one! One feels that just a touch of connection or tenderness would change everything for her.

On the other hand, there's the house of the Sycamores, teeming with eccentrics, casual about obligation, and operating in some kind of economic no-fly zone. The family includes: The drop-out Grandpa with his snakes in the living room - the artsy mother, moving randomly from painting (badly) to writing plays (badly), randomly bringing home a drunken, would-be actress casually encountered on a bus - the father in the basement, making fireworks (illegally) with his assistant, who is the random choice of the ice-man who stayed for eight years - the childish younger daughter, Essie, dancing her ballet dreams (badly) and Ed, her equally naïve husband, randomly printing and distributing pithy political slogans without comprehending their meaning - the maid and her paramour, probably the most sensible members of the household - various Russian émigrés, outspoken political refugees from the USSR, making their odd way in the New World economy.

They live in a comically chaotic fantasy version of "off the grid," working in a black-market economy. Paul and Mr. DePinna sell fireworks at some sort of open-air fair. Essie creates candies in her kitchen and Ed delivers them to houses around New York. Everyone benefits from income yielded by the ownership of Grandpa's property, but no one pays any income taxes. Taking their cues from Grandpa, the Sycamores have "relaxed" about life and work. The result is "fun" but no one's work has real value. What they have in abundance, however, is affection for one another and at least tolerance for the foibles of everyone else.

So, where's the middle ground that makes for the comic resolution? Like all true romantic comedies, it's in the young love between Tony Kirby and Alice Sycamore. And as in all romantic comedies, they are something new and better than the older generation, but don't know it until they find out during the play. Tony is the genuinely nice guy who discovers he wants more than an office and a title. Alice is the daughter with a head for business who really wants Tony and the world outside. It takes risky, determined dealings from Tony, the son of the non-risk-taking Kirbys, and Alice's willingness to flee from the family embrace of the all-embracing Sycamores before the two families find their common beliefs and the lovers can be united. Love, as always, finds that it's better to bet on the present than to try to take it with you in some indefinable future.

For further reading:

Hart, Moss. Act One: An Autobiography. New York: St Martin's Press, 1959, trade paperback reissue, 1989. A best seller, still in print, and one of the best theatrical memoirs of the past century.

Teichmann, Howard. George S. Kaufman: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Atheneum, 1972.