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The Unfinished Stooges
by Dan Sulman
Everyone now associates a pie in the face with comedy, but nobody thinks that a pie in the face is funny. How could this be?
To date, conventional wisdom has reconciled pie fact with pie theory by saying that a pie in the face used to be funny.
But new evidence, based upon recently-discovered manuscripts from the 1930s and '40s -- the so-called Golden Age of comedy -- suggests that the Three Stooges (perhaps our most notorious pie-hurlers) were not physical comedians, but rather social commentators.
Though these working scripts are difficult to make out because they are covered in pie, what we do have lends itself to a more humane -- and certainly a more verbal -- Larry, Moe and Curly. In episode #108, for example, entitled "Moe Hits Curly in the Upper-Left Part of His Head," the climactic custard battle originally was written as a war of words between Moe and Larry over the impending fascist threat.
In one scene, Moe accosts Larry in a stateroom. Larry is dressed as a waiter, though only from the waist up: He has no pants. Moe, on the other hand, is wearing a waiter's trousers, however he is missing a shirt. Conflict ensues. Larry refuses to relinquish his shirt; further, he insists that, as they were invited to the party in the first place, there is no reason to disguise themselves as waiters and sneak in. The episode -- a classic -- culminates in a naked pie fight. In an alternative version, printed here for the first time, we see a change of tone:
Moe: Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.
Larry: [Threatens with pie.]
Moe: Nyet. I meant, "Nyet!" Nyet already!
Larry: So you are a communist after all?
Moe: Yes, anything is better than being a fascist. They are so classless. Just the way the word roles off one's tongue: Fash-ist. Fashhh-ist. So tacky.
Larry: And yet, the Germans have no sense for the ethereal.
Moe: Interesting... [Strokes his chin.]
It is at this point that Larry slams the pie into Moe's face; the pie fight resumes.
The pie was not a gimmick to be used in performance, but rather, a writing device -- shorthand for, "insert something funny here." Pie equals comedy; hence, insert pie. It stuck. They were supposed to go back and rewrite the scenes, but with notoriously rushed production cycles, they inevitably didn't get around to it. {INSERT PIE FIGHT HERE}
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