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People who work in comedy know the "Rule of Three."
That is, when writing jokes or creating
a comedic movie,
TV show, play, or even a skit, the idea is to establish a situation, confirm it, and then overturn it.
If you look for it, you'll see it all the time: "A priest, a minister,
and a rabbi walk into a bar
..."; "An Englishman, an
Irishman, and a Scotsman were arguing
..."; "A genie grants a man
three wishes ..."
With that rule so well-known, it makes us wonder why there are so few
three-man comedy teams. There's the Ritz Brothers
(who few remember nowadays), the Marx Brothers (who originally were a quartet. anyway),
the Three Stooges
-- and that’s about it.
We were reminded of this apparent paradox today in noting that October 5
marks the birthday of our favorite Stooge, Larry Fine.
Every Stooge fan has his favorite. (We use the pronoun "his" deliberately
here, since it's well known that women just don't get -- or even like -- the
Stooges.) Some prefer the outright lunacy
of Curly; some think Shemp
is the ne plus ultra of wackiness; there are undoubtedly those who
think the antics of Joe
or Curly Joe
cannot be bettered; and we're sure Moe
brings delight to many for his attempts to bring order out of chaos.
But Larry is, for us, the essential Stooge. His "normalcy" (at
least in terms of Stoogedom) provides the necessary grounding between Moe's sadism and Curly's flights of fancy. The Trinity of Stooges has been compared to Sigmund
Freud's theory of the unconscious (no, honestly),
what with Moe's controlling force representing the ego,
Curly the uncontrollable id, and Larry, the superego
that strives for organization and peace.
Larry Fine himself was an unassuming man. He was born Louis Feinberg in Philadelphia in 1902, and after a childhood accident (burning his
arm with acid), he took up the violin,
a choice that led to a career in vaudeville, where a chance meeting with comedian Ted Healy
(who had originally hired the Howard Brothers -- Moe, Shemp, and Curly -- to accompany him on stage) led him to join Healy's act as the third
Stooge, a role he would hold for the next four decades, until a debilitating
stroke forced him to retire.
Larry's contribution to the act is invaluable. He provides an entry point for
the viewer, allowing us to put Moe's harshness and Curly's craziness into
context. Without him, Stooge fanatics would be left only with an
authoritarian beating up on a lunatic. And every so often, Larry will say or do
something so off the wall that it confirms his own existence as a Stooge.
Director Peter Farrelly has been threatening to make a new "Three Stooges" movie for years. While this may not seem a good
idea at first blush (Benicio Del Toro as Moe? Sean Penn
as Larry?), his views
on Mr. Fine give Larry-philes reason for hope (while also providing a fine
epitaph): "Growing up, first you watched Curly, then Moe, and then your
eyes got to Larry. He's the reactor, the most vulnerable. Five to fourteen,
Curly; fourteen to twenty-one, Moe. Anyone out of college, if you're not
looking at Larry, you don’t have a good brain."
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