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. 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 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 the end, Huxley wins, and Baravelli, Pinky and Wagstaff all marry Connie. They saw their way through the floor in time to rush to the field and eventually increase Huxley's score through their antics. Meanwhile, Baravelli and Pinky try to kidnap the athletes but wind up trapped in an apartment. Connie then steals the signals from Wagstaff by attempting to seduce him. Meanwhile, Jennings buys the football signals from Baravelli but discovers they are the wrong signals. Wagstaff discovers he hired the wrong athletes and tells Pinky and Baravelli to kidnap the real athletes. Pinky and Baravelli, meanwhile, try to deliver ice several times to Connie's house but continually drop the ice blocks out of the window. He leaves and Frank arrives, after which Wagstaff arrives to convince Connie to give up Frank. Jennings goes to see Connie Bailey, Frank's college widow with whom he is in cahoots, and tells her to get the football plays from Frank. Wagstaff mistakes the two men for football players and hires them for the big game against Darwin, then signs them on as students at Huxley. Pinky, who is Baravelli's mute partner as well as a dog catcher, gets into the club and makes a nuisance of himself. Wagstaff arrives and gains admission to the speakeasy through repartee with Baravelli the iceman and bootlegger. At the speakeasy, Jennings, a representative of Darwin, buys the two athletes. Frank insists that the college needs a good football team to beat the opposing team from Darwin University, and informs his father that he can buy two football players at a speakeasy downtown. Frank tells his father that Huxley has had a new college president every year since 1888, which is also the last year the school won a football game. After the song and speech, Wagstaff admonishes his son for dating only one college "widow" in twelve years, whereas he himself dated three college widows and attended three different colleges in twelve years. Wagstaff's inaugural speech is incoherent, and at one point, he bursts into song, after calling attention to Frank, who is sitting among the students with a girl on his lap. Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff takes over as president of Huxley College in order to help his son Frank graduate, as he has been attending Huxley for twelve years.