It has been awhile since I had seen an episode of The Three Stooges. Most of my memories of the Stooges are associated with my father, who first introduced me to the trio when I was a child.
While I would say that the clip of the stooges we watched in class was not as well received as previous videos, such as chris rock's or izzard's, I was laughing at the stooges because they still remind me of when I was first introduced to slapstick comedy.
It has been more than 40 years since any stooge-related trio has performed, but after having watching the video of the stooges in class the other day, I started thinking abou how they set the platform for many popular comedy characters today who share many of the same characteristics of moe, larry, and curly.
What do the stooges do? Get involved in odd jobs, in which they utterly fail, comedy ensues, and then they move onto a new job, whether in the same episode or in later episodes.
Now think about what Family Guy's Peter Griffin does. In addition to the non-stop slapstick comedy he provides (falling down stairs, reading comic books while driving, flatulence), Griffin is constantly assuming different jobs. He used to work at a toy factory, later worked at a beer factory, owned a restaurant, became captain of a fishing boat (pretty much the exact same thing that happened in the stooges video), and formed a vigilante group of friends identical to the A-Team. Of course, as with the stooges, Griffin has failed at all business ventures, always to find yet another job.
While Homer Simpson has been able to keep his job at the nuclear plant, as incompetent of an employee as he is, he still exhibits the slapstick comedy seen by the stooges. Homer will hit his head and hand with a hammer while trying to hit a nail, strangle Bart while Bart does the same back, etc.
Although the three stooges were not the first comedy group to tackle slapstick comedy, slapstick comedy cannot be mentioned without thinking of the stooges' contribution to the field. I believe that without the success of the stooges, many of the characters we love today for their slapstick comedy would not be as popular as they are today, also possible that they would not have been created in the first place.
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Though three no longer seems to be the magic number, I think that you could take a look at the movies for slapstick in the gross-out category. For example, Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in the Dumb and Dumber film enact some slapstick into their acting, though perhaps not as much as the stooges do. Also, older films like the ones we will discuss today tended to string together slapstick bits,and it may seem that the individual slapstick bits are less "incorporated" into the plot of the film than they are in more recent films. How or why might this change have taken place?
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