Stooges

I think I read somewhere that George W. Bush enjoys The Three Stooges. It makes sense. He’s a compassionate conservative and also has a soft spot for people who can’t do their jobs right.

For a group of men who could never do their jobs right, the Stooges somehow managed to find work during the Great Depression. At one time or another they were tailors, ice men, plumbers, chefs, law men, musicians, construction workers, boxing impresarios, and traveling salesmen, to name a few.

The other day I watched the boys (Larry, Moe, Curly) serve as gas-station attendants. A snazzy open-topped sedan pulled in, bearing three professorial gentlemen in the back seat. Each man wore a black top hat and each was appointed with monocle and urbane facial hair—goatees or van dyke beards. To their credit, the Stooges tried like the devil to give these academics good service, but perhaps they were trying too hard. Hats got knocked from heads, for instance, and monocles got shattered, and rivers of oil got sprayed onto faces.

Then soon, through an unorthodox turn of events, Curly was rotating on a spit. Either the special effects were better for that particular episode than they were for the thousand others, or Curly was actually rotating above a fire. He went round and round until his partners finally rescued him. He next bounced on the grass and made that signature noise that I cannot spell, while smoke emanated from his rump.

The Stooges don’t easily amuse me in my old age, but as a kid I watched them in the kind of blissful state that today is found only on Tibetan hills and in the audiences of Norah Jones concerts. I even wrote a Stooges episode and recruited my buddies to perform it with me for our sixth-grade class. The act of writing this script brought great agony. I spent days and days hunched over a Big Chief tablet, making James-Dean faces as I tried to decide whether Moe should poke out Larry’s eyes or rip luxurious tufts of his hair, and whether Shemp should drink motor oil or turpentine.

When they saw the manuscript, my buddies were alarmed that I had chosen Shemp over Curly.

Curly is the world’s favorite Stooge, but I happen to think Shemp is superior to his brother. Curly is more of a one-trick pony. He does everything loudly and largely. Shemp, on the other hand, can play big and he can play small. Plus, there’s much more to his face—more to empathize with. When Curly takes a carpenter’s saw to the skull, you know it’s fake. When Shemp takes the blade, your thoughts and prayers go out to his agent. In short, Curly is sometimes amusing, but he cannot pack Shemp’s lunch. And if he could, I suppose that lunch would consist of a coat of brown paint slathered between two slices of white bread.

Anyway, when my script was ready, our teacher let us kids caravan across the parking lot to the church basement, where we rehearsed on the stage without adult supervision. Soon the old custodian happened by. He had a history of saying little and saying it softly, but our antics sent him into a rage. The coot waved his industrial broom and demanded we return to our classroom at once.

Later, our teacher said the janitor told her we were horsing around on the stage.

“Yes,” I said. “We were rehearsing ‘The Three Stooges,’ not William F. Buckley’s ‘Firing Line.’”

The truth is, I did not say that, but I wish I had.