Author Notes to

Stooges

 

My first title for this story was “The Return of Curly Howard,” also known as the Super Stooge. Aside from having laughed at the comedy of The Three Stooges over the years, I had always been struck by the invulnerable “alienness” of Curly Howard, especially by the childlike way he took an interest in physical objects and shrugged off pain and injury. In addition, the revival of standup comedy that began in the mid 1970s, with talents like Steve Martin and Robin Williams, not to mention the earlier work of Richard Pryor and George Carlin, led me to regard humor as social criticism, which in the mouths of many it was and still is, witness Jon Stewart and Chris Rock today. I saw humor as a kind of irresistible reason that catches you up with its truth before your preconceptions can kick in to censor it. Humor is swift reason, cutting through minds that resist it. I began to see humor as a weapon (in totalitarian regimes the comedians are the first to be locked up), and from there it was a quick step to imagining that an alien civilization might contact us in this way, with a weaponlike threat merely suggested, or perhaps with a purer form of communication—an invitation to an improvisational comedy jam session.

One day the legendary Charles L. Harness wrote to me about the story, which made my day: “There’s something grotesque, even fiendish, in the best comedy (Look at Chaplin’s cabin, about to go over the cliff in The Gold Rush.) But here, whether by insidious design, or by sheer exuberance—you’ve hit the exact note to reproduce the stooge virus. Oh, not right away. You sort of look the other way as you ease into it. It’s all done very smoothly. Here’s this alien, reformulated and tossed back to us as Curly-the-Stooge. Who of us can communicate with him? And how shall our communicators best shift into his wave length? Why the matter is quite obvious, quite logical. We put forward our best explicators of the universe, Sagan and Jastrow. But hold! Not qua Sagan, not qua Jastrow. Oh, dear me, no! They must offer shapes and demeanors instantly recognizable to Curly-the-Alien. Enter Moe-Sagan and Larry-Jastrow. (With you, George, ‘Suddenly, I believed.’) It’s only halfway down the page that I wakened to what you did to me. Then the belief collapses, and I have to take time off for a startled guffaw. Preposterous! Outrageous! The picture of Sagan and Jastrow as two-thirds of the Three Stooges will stay with me forever. It’s like watching the Queen Mother playing the piano in a house of ill fame, or catching St. Francis at the two-dollar window at Pimlico.

“Like all the best absurdities, everything makes perfect sense until you think about it. Reflection produces shock.

“I suspect that Freud and Jung might have argued endlessly (with themselves and each other) why ‘Stooges’ is funny. I will not join them. Good things really ought not be dissected. Anyhow, like Alice In Wonderland, on one level the tale actually isn’t funny. It’s one hundred per cent logical. Aliens receiving ancient television broadcasts would certainly perceive Curly as a survivor, emerging triumphant from every disaster. (He survives purposeful maltreatment that would never be permitted in a medieval torture chamber.) The aliens would view him as a prime example of Earth’s dominant species: Superman-Curly. So they copy him and send him back as their Plenipotentiary.

“And there are other levels here too. There’s something nostalgic, something poignant in reawakening boyhood scenes, when on long-lost Saturday mornings, my friends and I watched the Three Stooges shorts in the movie house in Fort Worth.”