The institution of higher education is held up for ridicule and satirized mercilessly in Horse Feathers (1932), a madcap burlesque of university life starring The Marx Brothers. In it, Groucho Marx is Professor Wagstaff, the president of Huxley College, Chico plays an ice salesman/bootlegger, Harpo stars as the local dogcatcher and girl chaser, and Zeppo, cast as Wagstaff's son, provides the love interest. The central premise - Wagstaff plots to increase the college's enrollment and boost its reputation by staging a winning football game - is really just an excuse to include pot shots at everything from pompous professors to dull-witted students to sports fanatics. Along the way, there is a parody of the boating accident from Theodore Dreiser's novel, An American Tragedy, wild sight gags like Harpo posing as a human coffee dispenser, and such signature songs as "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It" and "Everyone Says I Love You" (Woody Allen would pay homage to this six decades later when he chose it for the title of his 1996 musical comedy). The film continually flaunts its ramshackle structure and at one point during Chico's piano solo, Groucho breaks the wall between actor and viewer to remark candidly, "I've got to stay here but there's no reason you folks shouldn't go out into the lobby till this thing blows over."

The Marx Brothers' fourth film, Horse Feathersis usually ranked second to their surrealistic masterpiece, Duck Soup (1933), by fans and critics and has the same manic energy and anarchic, freewheeling tone as the latter film. Yet, despite Groucho's brilliant sense of comic timing and inspired clowning from Chico and Harpo, a great deal of the film's success is due to the contributions of screenwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (who also co-wrote the musical numbers) and S. J. Perelman who provided the Marx Brothers with a non-stop stream of hilarious one-liners, double entendres and literary in-jokes.