Intervention Upon Narrative in "Duck Soup"

In Duck Soup feel less that the Marx Bros. are intervening upon narrative as much as narrative is intervening upon them. Coming from Vaudeville, the Bros. were much more accustomed to the free-form revue format, featuring gags, sketches, and musical numbers loosely connected to one another through association from one to the next, with "context" existing as just another gag to be used or ignored as the situation required (for instance, it could be used as a means of self-reference common in this form of theater). Duck Soup plays in just the same fashion, except teh context is suddenly a limiting thing, that demands the players follow a central (if utterly flimsy) plot line through to the end. It seems, at times, like a struggle to contain all of their anarchic energy within the confines of the frame, which was no doubt a limiting thing for them creatively (though certainly a boon financially).