Slapstick Lost

Recently I was browsing the movies section of my local library. The pickings were slim, not that I'm complaining. After all, I'm grateful for whatever I can check out for free from my library. This time I came up with an old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes flick (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) and a tape with three old Three Stooges shorts, all of them classics starring Curly Howard. The Holmes movie was predictable and passable, but when I got to Moe, Larry, and Curly, I ran into a wall.

As I watched the slapstick trio perform their stunts, I began to ask myself what I ever saw in them. They weren't funny at all; there was no depth to anything in the films. Finally, I had to shut off the tape because I couldn't stand it any more.

As a kid, I liked the Three Stooges. But it was a period in the fall of 1975 when I stopped being a fan of theirs and became a fanatic. Miami's then independent TV station WCIX/Channel 6 would offer a mid-afternoon hour-long show of Three Stooges shorts on weekdays. And I would sit there watching them all, cackling to high heaven in the process. I remember thinking then what talented artists the Three Stooges were and how they had such a pulse on what was really funny. What happened during the last 34 years?

Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that for something to be funny, it had to have some kind of intellectual or satirical value to it. I lost the capacity to perceive humor in simple, fun slapstick comedy. Sure, those old Three Stooges comedies were terribly flawed at times (sometimes playing up to racial stereotypes of that era). But they did have their hilarious moments. Example: the "boys" once had a job delivering ice to a ritzy home, situated at the summit of a long series of steps. Curly repeatedly struggled up the stairs lugging a big block of ice, only to have a tiny, dripping cube remaining when he reached the top. Doing this over and over again may have seemed pointless, but it was all in the timing and HOW it was done. The Stooges injected their infectious personalities into their comedy, and I think that, on some subconscious level, I regarded them as friends.

So I'm going back to that tape and trying to see things a little more as I did back when simple absurdities used to crack me up a lot more.