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Also this issue: Jackass
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August 8-14, 2002
cover story
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Pain as pastime may be in again --society has had a love-hate relationship with ouch-ertainment since the advent of the opposable thumb (the better for gouging eyes out or holding pain-inducing instruments). But no discussion of the topic should take place without at least some mention of The Three Stooges -- the original purveyors of cinematic pain.
Though long dead, The Stooges -- kings of the old two-reelers -- remain perhaps the most popular names in pain.
Taking vaudevillian physical comedy to new heights, The Stooges became so synonymous with pain that Jennie Horowitz, mother of Moe, Curly and Shemp, once pitched a fit seeing how the boys hurt each other so, according to the book The Three Stooges: An Illustrated History, from Amalgamated Morons to American Idols, by Michael Fleming, due for release by Broadway Books this week.
"She's sitting there and sees them beating each other onscreen, and she proceeded to get up," Fleming recounts. "She had an umbrella and she began waving the umbrella at the screen and screaming in Yiddish...."
All that poking and prodding and pratfalling did take its toll.
Moe broke his ribs. Larry had his nose broken when the wooden handle of a rubber mallet hit him on the schnoz. And then there was the time that Larry had a fountain pen embedded in his forehead, "which created a bloody mess," according to Fleming's book.
Stooge comedy was so violent that sometimes even the Stooges refused to take part. While shooting "Three Little Pigskins," Larry, for instance, refused to do a scene in which he, Moe and Curly play football players who run down the field, only to stop for a photograph then get trounced by the other team. According to Fleming, the Stooge doubles, as well as the photographer, were hospitalized with broken limbs and internal injuries.
Those associated with making Stooge two-reelers were keenly aware of the violence and concerned about its effect.
Perhaps the most famous bit of Stoogian business was the eye poke, perfected by Moe, who was so quick at it that viewers could not see his fingers hitting Curly, Larry or, later, Shemp, two inches above the eye. Despite that, when Edward Bernds took over as the Stooges' director he forbade the eye poke. Sort of, according to Fleming, whose book is the greatest compendium of Stooge-utia ever compiled.
"I objected to the violence," Fleming quotes Bernds. "When I was assigned to direct the first one, I wanted to have a talk with [Moe] and I said that I didn't like it, that the idea that if one kid anywhere damaged another kid's eyes, I'd die. And he kind of agreed with me. It was forbidden in the ones I did, except once in a while in the heat of the action they would revert to it."
To hardcore Stooge fans, like yours truly, the violence was merely an interlude between funny lines, including one of my all-time favorites, uttered by Curly, of course, that somehow made it by the censors.
"If at foist you don't succeed, keep on sucking till you do suck seed."
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