This is one of those zany Marx Brothers’ films that defy description. The story has something to do with winning a football game, but you’d be hard-pressed to follow the plot through the maze of non-stop jokes and gags the Marx Brothers are noted for. Some of the adjectives reviewers have used to summarize the movie include “wackiest, corniest, dumbest, most outrageous, and craziest.”

Now, 78 years later, we have Chicken Feathers, a living human comedy playing out in the State of Nevada. Democratic Senator Harry Reid’s opponent in the 2010 midterm election, Republican Senate candidate Sue Lowden, has proposed a barter system individuals can use to pay their medical bills.

In Ms Lowden’s plan, a patient could offer to paint a doctor’s house or tender a chicken, plucked and cooked I imagine, in return, say, for a Botox treatment or an erectile dysfunction consultation. The universe of barter is virtually unlimited.

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), the Democrats have leaped on this with a vengeance, opening a website called Chickens for Checkups, satirizing Ms Lowden’s suggestion.

But when you stop to think about it, her proposal makes sense, at least in a rural state like Nevada. Most of the state’s population is concentrated in two areas, Las Vegas and Reno. The balance is scattered over about 110,567 square miles in which the primary means of earning a living is mining, ranching, or farming.

Salaries and wages in rural counties aren’t the highest in the state, and given the vagaries of farming and ranching, cash is often hard to come by until the crops are harvested or the cows gathered. Rendering payment in the form of a steer, a chicken, a snowflake of hay, or a gold nugget thus makes perfect sense.

However, in the metropolitan areas, the barter system may be less desirable. Patients forced to seek treatment in a major hospital may be too embarrassed to drive a truck load of clucking chickens the length of Las Vegas Boulevard.

That doesn’t mean all occupations in Vegas or Reno aren’t candidates for the barter system. Call girls have a desirable commodity to offer straight male MD’s. And crooked blackjack dealers can easily dole out a series of Blackjacks to the physician across the table.

And how about comp tickets to top dinner shows followed by five scorpion bowls for each table. True, these aren’t chickens, but physicians are just like ordinary people. Some like chickens, others prefer horse feathers.