Woiise Guys
Painting your tongue is never a good idea. Same with falling down stairs or poking your fingers in a friend's eyes. But that was the genius of the Three Stooges, and with the Farrelly brothers making a Stooges film, their slapstick is enjoying a revival that has men, and women, nyuk-nyukking all over.
Against the cold, dark night, the Orpheum Theatre in Foxborough glows almost as brightly as the Nativity scene on the town green. Christmas has come and gone, and the refurbished auditorium is showing a holiday marathon of seven Three Stooges short films. A comfy and decorous home for regional theater, the Orpheum is alive tonight with so many whistles, clucks, and nyuks that its lobby sounds like steerage class from another, far goofier dimension.
Somehow, in many venues, marathon showings of the Stooges have become holiday staples, as ubiquitous as Bing Crosby and tasteful television advertising used to be. This is the third year that the Orpheum has run its Stooge-a-thon. In fact, the Stooges have been so omnipresent since their films began running on television that the marathon attracts grandparents, and parents, and grandchildren.
"It's comedy that you don't get in today's comedy," says Bill Cunningham, the Orpheum's manager. "It's physical, and yet it's graceful, too."
Let us be honest. "Graceful" is a relative term here. Certainly, Curly was as graceful as a man can be while dressed up in senorita drag and lip-synching "Voices of Spring" with a banana in his mouth. And no one quite pokes an eye with Moe's effortless elan. And Larry, sort of, rather, occasionally, plays the violin. And all of them, even the unjustly ignored Shemp, dance as well as can any men who appear to be stepping through hot oatmeal. Graceful is as graceful does, even when you've accidentally made a sandwich with varnish and not bologna.
And, yes, their films are full of things you don't want your children to imitate - like utterly retrograde attitudes toward women and black people. And painting your tongue. Painting your tongue is not a good idea. Ask the woman working the concession stand this night at the Orpheum, who was watching a Stooges short once with her brother, and Moe accidentally painted Curly's tongue, and the two of them thought it was a great idea, and then they found out it wasn't.
Bedecked in Stooges finery, including black baseball jackets festooned with the names of the boys, Bill Soderquist and Dave Carter were two of the first people to arrive. Both came to the Stooges through the endless repetition on Channel 38 of the 190 shorts that the Stooges made for Columbia Pictures after joining the studio in 1934. Each of them has built a Stooges room in his house, about which their kids often tease them, and they don't care.
"It's good, clean fun," says Soderquist. "That's all they are, and that's why they've lasted as long as they have."
The lights go down, and it's strange to see the Stooges on the big screen, like actual movies, even though that's the format for which the films were made. They are now masquerading as professors at Mildew College, and they are doing a little number called "Swingin' the Alphabet," and in the theater, grandparents, and parents, and grandchildren are singing along.
"Be-ay-bay, be-e-bee, be-eye-bicky-bye, bee-oh-bo, bicky-bye-bo-bee-oo-oo, bicky-bye-bo-bu."
So, even knowing what we know, and even if you're someone who once got your tongue painted, can we at least admit they're funny?
Before we get to the breadth of their influence, and the media theory about their popularity, and the academic forensics - one favorite, "Images of Lawyers and The Three Stooges" (22 Oklahoma City Law Review, 247-56, 1997), notes that law firms in the films invariably have names like "Cess, Poole, and Drayne" - and before we talk about everything in the movies that has given three generations of anxious parents the vapors, can we at least recognize that the various slaps, bops, and tweaks are enough to make a body chuckle? That a man who flies through the air and lands on the spike of a Prussian helmet is at least worth a giggle? That a society that allows Ashton Kutcher to make movies and thinks Adam Sandler is Cary Grant should be able to spare the odd guffaw for three men sneaking into a desert seraglio dressed as Santa Claus?
And, anyway, breathes there a man with a soul so dead, who never to himself hath said: "I'm a victim of coicumstance"?
'Sometimes, it's the de-livery and not just the context," explains Michael Schlesinger, vice president of
It was 70 years ago last spring that they left vaudeville for good and signed with Columbia Pictures to make short comedy films. The first one, Woman Haters, an appallingly unfunny mess done completely in rhyme, was released on May 5, 1934. Since, the Stooges have run like wormwood through American popular culture. The Marx Brothers were smarter, and Abbott and Costello were briefly more popular, but it is the Stooges who have endured, year after year. Their work adapted perfectly, as movies gave way to television, just as it had when vaudeville gave way to the movies. They were postmodern before there was a word for it. They weren't so much subversives as they were infiltrators: a huge sleeper cell in the culture, hoarding seltzer bottles for another strike.
"A lot of it is access," Schlesinger says. "The Stooges have always been around, either on TV or on video, as opposed to people like Abbott and Costello, who really haven't had the repertory exposure in the past few years."
The Stooges are everywhere, popping up at the oddest times and in the oddest places. It's impossible to contemplate The Simpsons, for example, without hearing the faint nyuk-nyuk of history behind them. The Simpsons Archive, an exhaustive fan website, cites 19 specific references to the Stooges from the show, including Springfield hospital's Three Stooges Ward. Elsewhere, Mel Gibson paid tribute to the Stooges long before he ever paid tribute to the Gospels, producing a made-for-TV biopic and using Stooges routines as interrogation techniques in the Lethal Weapon movies. And it was a lifelong Stooges fan, US Army colonel James Hickey, who commanded the troops that pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole last year.
The colonel is "always doing the Three Stooges act," Hickey's wife told USA Today. The Stooges, who helped defeat the Nazis (You Nazty Spy!), the Japanese (No Dough Boys), and the godless commies of the state of Anemia (Fuelin' Around) do their bit in the War on Terror and do it, undoubtedly, for duty and humanity.
And now, we apparently are on the brink of yet another Stooges revival. Schlessinger's package is still touring theaters around the country. Meanwhile, Bobby and Peter Farrelly are hard at work trying to get their long-awaited Stooges script into shape. (Russell Crowe, apparently, is still in the running to play Moe, a role that could otherwise go to another Academy Award winner, Benicio Del Toro). The Farrellys are self-evidently children of the Stooge age, as anyone who's seen any of their films would understand completely. (That scene in which Cameron Diaz invents the DNA-based hair gel? If not for the Production Code in the 1930s, imagine what the Stooges would have done with it.) The Farrellys grew up in Rhode Island watching the reruns on television, as did Michael Chiklis, the Emmy-winning star of The Shield, who played Curly in Mel Gibson's television movie, The Three Stooges, five years ago. Chiklis found himself facing the same burden that Will Smith felt while making a movie about Muhammad Ali and, for all we know, the same one that Raymond Massey carried while doing Abraham Lincoln.
"You feel a tremendous amount of pressure to deliver," Chiklis explains. "This is an icon that people just absolutely love. I definitely felt it, but it was really the only pressure I felt. I wasn't going to do it unless it was a really well-developed script. I knew it would be, because Mel Gibson was producing it, and I know how he feels about them."
This is a vast reach for what was originally a fairly run-of-the-mill knockabout vaudeville troupe, albeit one with such a tangled professional genealogy that it seems to belong to slapstick Plantagenets. Moses (Moe) Horwitz and his older brother, Samuel (Shemp), teamed up with Louis Feinberg (a.k.a. Larry Fine) as a supporting troupe for a legendary vaudevillian (and equally legendary drunkard) named Ted Healy in an act called Ted Healy and His Stooges.
By all accounts, Healy was a dreadful boss and a worse human being, and the details of his death after a brawl are still under some dispute. (One version has him being beaten by actor Wallace Beery and a New York mobster.) Anyway, the Stooges tried to leave him in 1930, and Healy sued them for the use of his routines. The Stooges won the lawsuit, but they came back to Healy in 1932, only with-out Shemp, who was fed up and left to try his hand in feature films. He was replaced by the youngest Horwitz/Howard brother, Jerome, who, after failing his first audition, shaved his head and began calling himself Curly.
Finally, in 1934, the Stooges left Healy for Columbia, once again amid a hail of writs. Healy signed on three replacements, billing them as the Super Stooges. Messrs. Howard, Fine, and Howard sued him, and then settled when Healy's new troupe agreed to stop refer-ring to themselves as Stooges. Randall Coyne, who wrote the law review article that examined how lawyers were portrayed in the Stooges films, speculates that "perhaps the Stooges' zest for ridiculing the legal profession stemmed from numerous, personal, and often bitter encounters with lawyers and the legal system." More likely, their zest for ridiculing the legal profession was pretty much the same as their zest for ridiculing practically anything, but who knows?
Larry, Curly, and Moe worked together until Curly suffered a stroke in 1946. He was replaced by Shemp, who spent 10 years with the group until dying of a heart attack in 1955. Then, Shemp's place was taken by the unspeakable Joe Besser, a whiny grotesque whose Stooge contract specifically said he was not to be hit, and whom most Stoogephiles regard in the same way that presidential historians look upon James Buchanan.
In total, the Stooges made 190 "short subjects" with Columbia. Curly appeared in 97 of them, Shemp in 77, and the ghastly Joe in 16. Each 20-minute short cost around $27,000. While this made the films mere afterthoughts at the movies, it rendered them perfect for commercial television, which wasn't even launched until five years after the Stooges made their first short for Columbia.
"One 20-minute [film] fits comfortably into a half-hour," explains Schlesinger. "Three of them fit into an hour. Back in the '50s and '60s, local stations still programmed for kids in the after-noon, and the Stooges were perfect for that."
One of those stations was WSBK (Channel 38) in Boston, which began as a ground-breaking UHF operation in the dim times before cable. The Stooges became one of the staples of Channel 38's regular programming both on weekday afternoons and in a long block on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Last month, the station announced that it was dropping some of its weekend paid programming and bringing back the Stooges. And thus did Brighto and Panther Pilsner beer begin to turn back the forces of weight loss, hair loss, and Ron Popeil.
"They really were the foundation for our original quirkiness," recalls Dan Berkery, formerly the longtime general manager of WSBK. "People said, 'Hey, I like these doofuses.' The best ratings we originally received were for the Three Stooges. . . . In 18-to-34-year-old men, we were doing 2s and 3s, and Channel 4 was doing 3s for its 11 o'clock news. They anchored the building blocks of our station." In fact, it was on Channel 38 that Michael Chiklis, growing up in Lowell and Andover, met the Stooges. "My brother and I," he says, "we'd judge our days by the Stooges. A three-Curly day was the best. One Curly and two Shemps was maybe not as good. It was a bad day if there were no Curlys."
As we shall see, there is something of a Shemp reappraisal going on in the field of Stooge studies, and we shall also see that there actually is a field of Stooge studies, which was probably inevitable, given the American impulse to take things apart just to see how they work. See, for example, A Plumbing We Will Go, in which the Stooges, working as plumbers, somehow manage to crosswire a mansion's plumbing with its electrical work, causing water to fill light bulbs and, eventually, come pouring out of a television that's showing a shot of Niagara Falls.
NIAGARA FALLS!
Slowly, we turn . . .
To academia.
"Oh, woiise guys!"
And . . . goils?
Soitenly.
Kathleen Chamberlain is a professor of English at Emory & Henry College in Virginia. Her study of the Stooges has included an essay in a film reader as well as presentations at academic conferences. Chamberlain has long pondered the question of the great divide between men and women in their love for the Stooges -- a divide, it should be said, that does not extend to Chamberlain. "They're funny as hell," she says. "You take the average MIT astrophysicist and show him Curly, falling down a flight of stairs, and he'll crack up, and that's true of an awful lot of people from all walks of life.
"Normally, people will give me the response 'Well, women don't like the Three Stooges.' I think it's less than people think, but the stereotype is based on some truth. Part of it is that women can't articulate why they don't like it. Some women think they make women look bad. They don't exactly make anyone look good. I went through and empirically counted the shorts in which women appear, and a good half of them have women in them, as girlfriends, fiancees, widows, but part of it is that the Stooges are a self-contained male world. Women flit in and out, but they aren't integral, kind of like SpongeBob."
Chamberlain also is part of the ongoing attempt to restore respect to Shemp, who, after all, not only had been one of the original Stooges back in their days with Ted Healy but also was the only one of them with a career outside the troupe. (NBC sportscaster Bob Costas, a Shemp man himself, often refers to him as "the utility Stooge.") Shemp appeared in a number of feature films, including a W. C. Fields classic, The Bank Dick.
Where Curly's comedy was spectacularly visual, Shemp's was more verbal, although hardly any more subtle, as witness his numerous duck-on-skates attempts to woo the luminous Christine McIntyre. In Who Done It?, a detective farce in which he also aims the accordion extension of an old box camera at McIntyre in a way that would have kept Sigmund Freud scribbling for a month, Shemp and McIntyre carry on a gloriously nutty conversation about paintings while she's trying to spike his drink.
"I think he's underrated," Chamberlain says. "He can't be higher rated, because he'll never top Curly."
Don Morlan, a professor emeritus at the University of Dayton, goes even further. "I think he was the most talented of them all," he says, "as far as comic talent goes."
By the time Morlan was old enough to haunt the Cooper Theatre in his hometown of Brazil, Indiana, Shemp had taken over for Curly after the latter's debilitating stroke. (It's possible that, before Morlan was born, Ted Healy and the Stooges had come to Brazil to perform at The Lark, a vaudeville house on Route 40 downtown.) Morlan would persuade his parents to let him stay to watch the Stooges shorts over and over again. He maintained his enthusiasm for the Stooges all the way through his career at Dayton, where, in 1992, his dogged research revealed that it was the Three Stooges, before the Republican Party, before most of Hollywood, and before even Charlie Chaplin, who first took on Adolf Hitler.
"I taught propaganda analysis," Morlan explains, "and I got interested in pre-World War II propaganda - anti-Nazi propaganda and the isolationist movement within the United States - and I'd still been a Stooge fan all my life." For years, the first satirical swipe at the Fuhrer was accepted to be Charlie Chaplin's brilliant turn as Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator, released on October 15, 1940. However, as Morlan demonstrated in a paper he delivered 13 years ago, the Stooges' You Nazty Spy! beat Chaplin's film to theaters by nine months. In Spy, made for just over $18,000, Moe plays Moe Hailstone, dictator of Moronica. Curly plays a dead-on Hermann Goering, and Larry channels some sort of weird combination of Goebbels and Von Ribbentrop. Significantly, given the role German industrialists played in bankrolling the Nazis, Hailstone is selected to be dictator by Mr. Ixnay, a local swell, who tells him that "He makes speeches to the people, promising them plenty, gives them nothing, and takes everything. That's a dictator."
Curly, however, sees through the pitch. "Mmm, a parasite," he says. "That's for me."
At the time, with American politicians trying to make peace with Hitler, and the American business community (including the Hollywood studios) trying to do business with him, there were a number of powerful people with a stake in playing nice with the Nazis, and moviemakers were timid about criticizing the regime. Morlan recounts one US senator's concern that passive movie audiences might be subjected there in the dark to "a speech designed to make you believe that Hitler is going to get you if you don't watch out." He believes that the Stooges got under the radar because their films were never taken seriously enough.
"Before Pearl Harbor," Morlan says, "when dramas tried to portray the Nazis, Congress and the America Firsters blasted them. We weren't at war. But they kind of ignored comedies. The Stooges were all Jewish, and the movie industry was heavily Jewish-oriented, and it was [longtime Stooges producer] Jules White's idea." It is said that the film even put the Stooges on a hit list drawn up by der Fuhrer himself.
Given all that, there was more than a little courage in having Moe stand up with floppy hair and a square mustache and declaim to the citizens of Moronica, who were, after all, all of us: "We must throw off the yoke of monarchy and make our country safe for hypocrisy!"
Say what you will about them. Their targets were never small.
In the Sweet Pie and Pie is a Curly that was released in 1941, a year after Moe seized power in Moronica. It was another foray into the issue of class, which is always a subversive thing to do in a country in which "class warfare" is one of the harshest political pejoratives, and in which the issue is so profound a heresy that the country generally deals with any question of class structure by denying that it has one. Apprentices during the worst of the Depression, the Stooges knew better, and here, raucously and heedlessly, they got to war (again) with the very foundations of class, poking them in the eye, smacking them in the face, utterly deconstructing them and then drowning the debris in righteous meringue.
It seems that three heiresses -- Tiska, Taska, and Baska Jones -- need husbands in order to collect their inheritance. Their lawyer fixes them up with the Stooges, who are condemned murderers with only one day to live. (In a scene that presages Woody Allen's play-by-play of an assassination in Bananas, their execution is to be carried live on the radio.) Unfortunately for the broadcast, and for the heiresses, the three are pardoned on the gallows, and the sisters Jones find that what was supposed to be a temporary arrangement has become quite permanent. In a last-ditch effort to, well, ditch their husbands, the three women demand that the Stooges become gentlemen.
The lessons do not go well. In a sequence grafted onto this film from an earlier one, Geneva Mitchell, who portrays a dance instructor, tells her charges, "Watch my steps and do exactly as I do."
Alas, a bee drops down the back of her dress, which causes some frenzied thrashing, which the Stooges doggedly replicate until the three of them and their teacher leap out a window and into a fountain.
At last, the scheming heiresses decide to throw a party at which their husbands will embarrass themselves in a roomful of swells and skulk away in shame, surrendering to the starchy imperatives of the upper crust. Instead, a pie fight erupts, and it is the Odessa steps of pie fights. It is the burning of Atlanta of pie fights, a sticky apotheosis of Stoogedom on any number of levels, including the purely hilarious. Sony's Schlesinger admires the pure craft of the scene.
"You have to be good at throwing a pie," he explains. "If you miss, or you hit someone in the ear, you've got to clean him up, launder his clothes, and then do it again, and, remember, they were shooting these things on a four-day schedule.
"There was a real art to doing that [scene] properly. "There are a lot of long takes. There's that wonderful shot of Curly, preparing to throw a pie. He gets hit, prepares again, gets hit again, and finally hits himself in the face with his own pie. He sticks his tongue out, and he gets hit with another pie, and it's all one shot."
It is the pie fight in which a hapless lion hunter gamely attempts to finish his tale - "I raised my rifle and fired!" - only to have all his climactic moments punctuated with another pie in his face. It is the pie fight in which the matronly Mrs. Gottrocks, who, moving with the majesty of a luxury liner, briefly borrows Curly's "Oh, you wanna play rough, do you?" before letting fly. By the end, the soiree has run completely amok, and the boys and their brides end up allied against the shifty lawyer - paging professor Coyne - who winds up on the business end of every pie that's left, and looking like a float in the Rose Parade.
Of course, love triumphs, but a more basic point has been made. Given the motive, means, and opportunity, there is some essential part of our common humanity that will throw a pie. Present the Dalai Lama with the right circumstances and a chocolate custard, and you'll have to hope that the UN Security Council knows how to duck.
It was a media century, and, in our heads, we cast ourselves in our solitary productions. Our parents cast themselves in their own private movies, and we cast ourselves in our own private television shows, and our children are probably casting themselves in their own private video games. We wrote our own screenplays, every day, in little ways, and we learned how to look at our lives from the outside, as though we were directing them and not living them. It was a media century that encouraged the vicarious in so many things, and no wonder, then, that the Three Stooges lasted the way they did, even when movies gave way to television and even now, in memory at least, as television yields ground to a thousand cyberworlds.
They endured because they were our stunt men, buffeted by forces that seemed beyond anyone's control. They fought through the Depression and World War II in their movies, and they fought through the Cold War and that supernova of meshugas that has come to be known as The Sixties, when their careers were revived by television. They took the slaps and the eye gouges and the bops on the head for all of us, and they fought back a little, if only with custard pies and seltzer bottles.
"They do represent what appears to be an anarchic universe in which people seem to be pawns," says Kathleen Chamberlain. "If we see the Three Stooges managing to have everything come out all right, it gives people a sense of power. They challenge most of the power stereotypes that control ordinary persons. That's especially heartening for children, the most powerless of the powerless."
Now, in another uncertain, headlong time, it's not unreasonable to expect them to come back, riding to the rescue, if we're smart enough to summon them again.
"Calling Dr. Howard! Dr. Fine! Dr. Howard!"
They'll be along presently, three men on a single bicycle, taking the blows for all of us and dishing a few of them back for duty, of course, but for humanity as well.
Charles P. Pierce is a member of the Globe Magazine staff and a Shemp man. E-mail him at magazine@globe.com.
