By Jonathan Kiefer
August 3, 2006

Technically, Operation Groucho was over more than a month ago. But only last week, after a whimsical making-of documentary surfaced on the local humor site BadMouth, could the happening find its proper audience. “BadMouth has been getting thousands of hits a day, which hasn’t happened for a while because the site’s been a little dormant,” said John Marcotte, the Groucho and BadMouth mastermind, in a weekend phone call. Marcotte had been diverted from his usual high jinks by the arrival of a new daughter, but as he explained, “Operation Groucho was my I’m-back-in-a-big-way type of thing.”

It concerned the evidently contentious aesthetic scheme of the intersection between Folsom Boulevard and 65th Street, which juxtaposes a large LED display reading “F65” with Davis artist Stephen Kaltenbach’s Greek-ruin-esque sculpture, an oversized, severed head called “Matter Contemplates Spirit.”

“We always thought it was an odd place for that statue. I’m not sure it matches the environment,” Marcotte went on, echoing, if more politely, what Robert Berry lamented in these pages last year as “a mixture of Salvador Dali and RadioShack.” Less politely, perhaps, Marcotte also took action. Harkening back to Marcel Duchamp’s mustachioed “Mona Lisa” of nearly a century ago, he temporarily appended Kaltenbach’s sculpture with a set of custom-made Groucho Marx glasses, complete with bulbous nose, bushy black mustache and eyebrows.

1. “Tricks of the Trade”
2. Iron Monkey
3. snoop dogg & me

Watch and learn as the Badmouth crew gives a statue an extreme humor makeover in broad daylight!

1. groove is in the heart
2. snakes on a plane
3. “Tricks of the Trade”