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Vespucci had traveled to Greece for two weeks and wrote several letters to the Sardine amounting to thirty pages. When my friend was aboard the Brindisi-Corfu-Patras ferry, he had an interesting encounter with several of the ship’s passengers.
We were leaving Corfu for the final part of the journey. It was nine in the morning. The sea was calm, although I noticed a few people leaning overboard. Inside, several of us were having coffee and cakes when a conversation on funny people in movies and television ensued.
An Australian, Alan, declared that the Marx Brothers were the funniest in show business.
Gene and Karen (a New Zealand couple): They’re the best American comedians.
Nobody said anything immediately, but the next comment nearly had everyone joining those at the railing outside.
Bill (from Indianapolis): The Three Stooges are pretty good.
He might have said that he approved of rape or argued that the KKK were a misunderstood bunch of idealists.
Karen: They’re stupid.
Werner (a German): The Stooges are fascists. They believe in violence when they want to have their way.
Alan: Abbott and Costello were funnier than them.
The Australian might as well have said that the Rolling Stones weren’t only worse than the Beatles but they couldn’t measure up to the Dave Clark Five.
Vespucci: That’s a bit of a stretch.
Gene: Curly was funny.
Karen: You always said you hated them.
Gene: I hated Shemp. Do you like them. Vesp?
Vespucci: Nobody with a decent sense of humor could prefer them to the Marx Brothers.
Bill: (ignorant silence)
*
The majority humiliated the dissident. Democracy at work.
Worse, I privately agreed with Bill that the Stooges were funnier. I never did have the courage of my convictions. Besides, there seemed no advantage to agreeing with Bill. Alan, Gene, Karen, and Werner could have left the coffee bar and branded me a Stooge lover, an authoritarian by association, unsophisticated at base level. In gatherings of worldly travelers, many more would prefer the Marx Brothers because a liberal, intellectual aura envelops them. Their jokes seemed more “intellectual.”
A contemporary parallel would have been the following debate: was Monty Python’s humor better than Benny Hill’s?
I have associated with both pro-Stooge and Pro-Marx strata. Stooge people believe the Marxians are pretentious and delusionally superior. Marxians, that Stooge lovers are rednecks. I couldn’t afford to have this latter label and expect to hit on the Scandanavian women later in the voyage.
Stooge-Marxian, redneck-sensitive college student, conservative-liberal. These are the terms of cultural wars for the continental backpackers.
Yet, dualistic forms are trapdoors in the corridors of certainty. We trap ourselves into the conviction that we have firmly believed was the result of thinking opinions through or having an unassailable rationale from the start.
The Stooges themselves exemplify this type of thinking. Three men strive in their 20-minute short films for better lives, money, jobs, and social roles beyond their ken. Characters like Moe, Larry, Curly, and Shemp we’ve never seen more pathetic as they vainly try to be accepted socially.
Hoi Polloi best shows their struggle to attain the social graces. Two rich men debate the perennially tiresome duality: heredity versus environment. The Stooges are used to test the theories.
The enviroment-ist bets that he can make gentlemen from Stooges. This means that they must eat soup with a spoon rather than bringing their head to the bowl (worse: bringing the bowl to the lips).
They must also acquire a literary sensibility:
“Does the dear have a little doe?” reads Larry.
“Yeah, two bucks,” Curly nyuks.
They will observe fine manners in the company of women. No wolf whistles or robbing their jewelry.
After a month, the education is complete. The Stooges have become gentlemen. The impressed, if incredulous, hereditary-ist must pay off the bet.
Then, at a party, the facade collapses. A pie-fight breaks out. In the world of the Stooges, pie-throwing is the basic unit of social immaturity.
Nor can they leave their low social niche as long as they put ketchup on pancakes, slap faces, poke eyes, pound heads, kick butts. Moreover, much of the Stooge behavior mirrors lives crippled by castration complexes.
Moe, the leader, tries to draw his troupe out of socially stunted ways into a smoother, more mature existence. He can’t face the hopelessness of his task and becomes a bullying authoritarian. Larry’s the easily dominated petit bourgeois with the strongest castration anxiety.
Curly, though, brings out Moe’s greatest violence and takes the most savage beating in the history of comedy. He’s the autocrat’s worst nightmare; the return of the repressed in buffoon’s clothing.
Moe’s will to maturity won’t fly. Curly, a pure proletarian, purely puerile, cannot, should not, change.
Wishy-washy Larry gets crushed between two great forces.
Moe=the leader.
Il Duce.
Der Fuhrer.
Moe resembles The Great Dictator, not Charlie Chaplin!
Werner intuitively knew this.
The Sardine's essays, articles, and stories have appeared around the Internet in the last few years at 3 A.M., Facets, Eclectica magazine, Fiction Funhouse, The Fiction Warehouse, 5_trope, and several film journals. Who and what he is probably will be revealed at various points through the articles appearing at this site. The first fifteen installments of his saga can be viewed at the old Unlikely Stories.