
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 5, 1990                   TAG: 9003032652
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BOB STRAUSS LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES                                 LENGTH: Medium

STOOGE FORMULA ENDEARS, ENDURES

As the Three Stooges' influence on politics, commerce and interpersonal relationships becomes more apparent every day, it is easy to overlook just how much of an impact their brand of crass, cruel comedy has had on the medium that spawned it.

Slapstick was a movie staple long before Moe first bopped Curly. Dumb behavior was making filmgoers laugh when Shemp was saying "goo goo" and old hat by the time he coined "ooh, ooh." Funny hair got chuckles before Larry got his first haircut.

But nobody combined sight gags, sadism and stupidity in quite the way the Stooges did under the direction of Jules White. The combination has an apparently irresistible appeal to juvenile males; and they were, after all, the first old movies most of us ever saw.

That street-silly Stooge attitude, more than the gentler physical humor of Laurel and Hardy, is what catapulted Abbott and Costello to box-office heights in the '40s and '50s. And the Stooges have provided raw material for better-paid (to say nothing of better-respected) performers ever since.

From the eerily similar-looking "Silent Movie" trio of Mel Brooks, Marty Feldman and Dom DeLuise to "Time Bandits' " bungling, history-changing dwarfs, comedians have insured themselves laughs by making Stooge moves.

The "Saturday Night Live"/"Second City" crowd has gotten the best mileage out of retreaded Stoogery.

The late John Belushi, from his "Animal House" debut on, combined Moe's meanness with Curly's loose-cannon unpredictability.

John Candy arguably owes his movie career to his Curly-like mudwrestling manner in "Stripes."

Chevy Chase's whole comic persona rests on the Stoogish combination of put-down and fall-down humor.

And what are you gonna call the Ghostbusters, if not Stooges with high-tech pretensions?

While the Monty Python crew might owe more to Britain's dry, highbrow traditions, there has never been a sequence more Stooge-like than Michael Palin's destructive, backfiring attempts to kill that little old lady in "A Fish Called Wanda."

Even Oscar winners like "M*A*S*H" and "Amadeus" owe debts to the pervasive influence of Howard, Fine and Howard. And at least one Oscar-winning actor, Jack Nicholson, appears to be actively cultivating the porcupine hairstyle.

The most obvious, affectionate homages to the Stooges can be found in the "Lethal Weapon" series. Mel Gibson's crazy cop delightfully discombobulates criminals with his Curly routine. And last summer's sequel added a third wheel to the Gibson-Danny Glover team in the form of Joe Pesci's motor-mouthed mob accountant. It remains the cleverest reworking of the Stooge formula to date.

by CNB