I confess that I am a long-time "fan" of The Three Stooges, although I haven’t seen the current film, and will likely wait until the DVD comes out. The official trailer appears mildly amusing, managing to recreate fairly successfully the typical antics that made me laugh so hard that I thought my kidneys were going to rupture. I admit that the Stooges’ shorts were derivative and many of the plots soporific, but when they were on, I just could not help myself. My all-time favorite Stooges short is “A Plumbing We Will Go,” when the three boys, as usual being chased by the police, commandeer a plumber’s truck and wind-up in front of a stately mansion where they are mistaken for real plumbers by the butler. Naturally, the Stooges use their warped sense of logic to turn the mansion into a disaster area. In what is probably the most memorable scene in Stooges’ lore, the high-society matron of the house is proudly showing off her new television set to guests (in 1940, only the super-rich could afford them), and everyone marveled how the picture of the Niagara Falls looked so “real”—especially when real water burst through the TV screen. The last time that I laughed so hard was during a scene in the “The Anchorman,” when the low-IQ weatherman (played by Steve Carell), innocently asks the new co-anchor if she wants to join a party in his pants, which he has been put-up to by the other newsmen. I also remember laughing uncontrollably at several scenes in “Used Cars,” especially during the pirated satellite ad sequences (such as when the “sheriff” literally blows the hell out of “high prices”).
Some people, of course, don’t find this stuff funny at all; it’s just juvenile mayhem that promotes delinquency. Some people find Woody Allen’s talky, “cerebral” post-“Annie Hall” movies “screamingly funny,” but they only bored me; I think the pratfall and sight gag-laden “Bananas” and “Sleeper” were much more entertaining films. Comedy is as much about sight as it is sound, perhaps more so. All the great comedians—Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby, Martin and Lewis, British funnymen Benny Hill and Roland Atkinson—knew that if you turned off the laugh track, the audience shouldn’t be made to work too hard to figure out what was supposed to be “funny.” Even “high-brow” British comedies like Monty Python's Flying Circus couldn’t do without sight gags; in the “Bicycle Repairman” skit, you didn’t need to hear the dialogue to know the absurdity of a world full of Supermen who couldn’t fix a bicycle. There were exceptions for me, such as ”Seinfeld,” British productions like “Are You Being Served?” and to a certain extent the American version of “The Office,” where the underlying stupidity of some of the characters makes “normal” behavior seem absurd; this was also true of radio broadcast comedians from the old days—Jack Benny, Amos and Andy, Burns and Allen, even Bob and Ray who rarely employed a laugh track (in regard to Amos and Andy, which today is considered politically-incorrect, Andy went against type--the "straight man" who was the easy mark for the scheming Kingfish).
But the Stooges were in a different category altogether. Warner Brothers’ cartoons of the period were renowned for their violence, but you never mistook it for being “real.” The Stooges’ violence (mostly inflicted by Moe) not only looked real, but it seemed non-stop and certainly gratuitous. But without the eye-pokes, stomach jabs and the knocks on the head, the Stooges would have been—on the surface—indistinguishable from countless other comedy teams. But surface details fail to tell the whole truth about the Stooges; sure they were the stupidest people to ever inhabit the Earth, but the fact that Moe—who pretended to be the “smart” one of the bunch, but was perhaps the dumbest of the three—meted out the punishment for every real and imagined slight by Curly and Larry, no matter how innocently conceived, showed you how unfair life was. The idea that life was unfair was reinforced by something else that made the Stooges different—for a reason that might surprise those who simply find their concept of comedy “stupid”: They had a clear social and political agenda, in that their targets were almost invariably stuffed shirts, the arrogant rich, egotistical artists and intellectuals, law enforcement and the institutions of civilized society in general. The Stooges were the have-nots' secret weapon to inflict righteous mayhem on the haves.
I have all the Stooges shorts from the classic “Curly” period on DVD, but I have to admit that I don’t find the violence as amusing as I did when I was kid (back when they didn’t have cable TV). But what remains entertaining is that the Stooges are the quintessential antidote to pomposity and hypocrisy. The Stooges’ comedic sensibility—unlike that of Hollywood of the 1930s, which churned-out movie stars who were the American version of pampered “royalty”—was shaped by the reality of the Great Depression. They played by rules that were in direct opposition to those set by a society that rewarded the few over the many. I’m not sure that this is the message being conveyed by the current film, but that was what a classic Stooge short was all about.
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