A Harp-Luck Story With a Plucky End : Carrol McLaughlin, the only person with estate permission to play Harpo Marx’s music, will open a Fullerton series with a piece by the comedian’s son.

Carrol McLaughlin has to buck the stereotype that harp music is as staid and somber as an undertakers’ convention. She even dresses up like a famous funnyman to make her point.

That’s right. This harpist’s repertory features compositions that Harpo Marx used to play, and she sometimes dons a get-up to transform herself into the curly-haired brother.

“I’m the only person with permission from the Marx Brothers estate to play Harpo’s music,” said McLaughlin, who will launch the Community Concert Assn. of North Orange County’s 48th season with a solo concert in Fullerton tonight.

There won’t be any Harpo costumes this time, but McLaughlin will play Harpo’s arrangement of Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine,” in addition to classical works by Bach, Spohr and Paginini (including Variations on Paginini’s famous 24th Caprice, some jazz and rag-time.

She’ll also perform “Textures,” a 1985 virtuosic jazz piece by Bill Marx, Harpo’s son, a musician and composer with whom she has frequently toured since interviewing him for a magazine article more than a decade ago.

After the magazine interview, “Bill handed me a harp concerto he had written for his father, and he said, ‘Why don’t you learn this?’ ” McLaughlin recalled in a recent phone interview from her Tucson home. “I practiced it and called him back and said, ‘I learned the piece, where do we play it?’ Things just sort of went from there.”

McLaughlin, who has toured the world and is a professor of harp at the University of Arizona, says she works from exact transcriptions of Harpo’s music. Regardless of what’s on the program, however, she prefers a “lighthearted” approach. She often tells audiences, for example, that she and her harp, Bertha (as in Big Bertha, the enormous gun used by the Germans in World War I), form a musical duo that travels the world together.

“I truly love giving concerts, and I think I express that on stage, so usually the audience has as much as fun as I do.”

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Other artists in the Community Concert Assn.’s 1993-1994 season are violinist Dmitri Berlinsky (Jan. 17), pianist Irina Chukovsky (March 7) and Ruth Hastings & Co., a trio performing the revue “Broadway to Hollywood: In Concert” (April 8).

All concerts are at 8:15 p.m. at Fullerton First United Methodist Church, 114 N. Pomona Ave., Fullerton. Admission to the four-concert series is by membership only, available at the door.

Memberships, which include Community Concert Assn. reciprocity privileges at concerts in Bellflower, Long Beach, Ontario and Whittier, are $25 for adults, $12 for students, $62 for families of two adults and any number of children. Information: (714) 871-6632 or (714) 871-1808.