Those Stooges

Mr. B. thinks they’re funny. The new Three Stooges in their new movie, that is. I haven’t seen it and won’t. I watched enough of the original trio on television in the 1960s. I laughed, now and then. But I quickly tired of their stupidity and Moe, the one with the Prince Valiant bangs, was really mean.

Turns out they were even more pathetic than I realized at the time:

“The Stooges embody another pathos—that of the half-Americanized, lumpen proletariat prosteh yid. Stunted, exploited, self-brutalized, they enact and reenact and re-reenact the trauma of those wretched refuseniks who never recovered from steerage.”

The original movie Stooges had the moxie but not enough brains to become Jewish gangsters. The real-life Jews who pretended to be them? Who knows.