“HEY, PORCUPINE!”
Quick, where does that line come from?
If you said, “a Three Stooges’ skit,” you get to ring the bell. Bong, bong, bong, you got it right. Have a prize, Bubba.
If you weren’t able to place the phrase, here’s a bit of context. Curly, the humor-inducing, big bellied, shaved tight hair member of the threesome was typically the butt of their antics on the TV screen. Mostly Moe would plink, bonk, dunk, and conk him, but Larry got into the act, too. They debuted in 1922. Almost a hundred years ago.
I bring up the Stooges because they were early introducers of slapstick humor and sarcasm to our society. If you listen closely to the dialogue, there are barbs directed repeatedly at some of the silly and stupid institutional directives of the day. Sarcasm, criticism, irony and putting down figures of authority is now almost a daily given in 2020.
I’m confident that criticizing leadership began well before the Three Stooges. But it was likely more direct and personal before we, as a species, started watching the tube. The Stooges brought it mainstream.
The putdowns in their skits released others from their daily routine of work-eat-sleep, work-eat-sleep. Some leisure time was being created, so an opening was there for entertainment to fill it. They jumped on it.
Until that point in history, if you look back, your “leisure” or “non-work” time consisted of going to church or reading a few books in the course of your lifetime. The Stooges filled a void as we moved towards becoming a mass society, both in terms of the production of goods, but also in terms of the words and images we served up to others.
I believe this is a major problem with our society today. Many times I’ve had this conversation with a good friend of mine regarding some of the cynicism and anger that so many people display these days, whether it’s in a personal conversation or some online format. My friend cites that, “Things are too easy and EVERYTHING is readily available.” His point being that the challenges of hunting our own food and building our shelter are no longer “things” we do on any type of regular basis, except for an extremely limited number of people where that is their livelihood.
This notion of his is a corollary to another friend he knows, whose opinion is simply, “The reason we’re so messed up is that we don’t kill our own food anymore.” That used to take up time, energy, focus. And when you got home at the end of the day, you collapsed into bed exhausted. You didn’t have time for humor.
As jobs and lives changed with mass production and segmentation of jobs, we compartmentalized. We got good at one thing and kept doing it, to the exclusion of the basic necessities of life. We went to supermarkets for food, visited the butcher, had a plumber, electrician and carpenter to call on for trade-specific help.
Gaining creature comforts meant losing control, and the Stooges captured this by poking fun at themselves and their ineptitude, as well as the things in the world that we’ve come less and less to have firsthand experience with. The world depersonalized and the Stooges thumbed their noses at it.
We still need that humor today, if for no other reason than to give us a reality-check for the world in which we live. “HEY, PORCUPINE” was Moe’s way of joking about Curly’s bristle-cut hair.
Knocking Larry and Curly’s heads together to the clonking sound of coconuts can help us laugh through another day of the complex stuff we can’t master. The slapstick is relatable
Quick, where does that line come from?
If you said, “a Three Stooges’ skit,” you get to ring the bell. Bong, bong, bong, you got it right. Have a prize, Bubba.
If you weren’t able to place the phrase, here’s a bit of context. Curly, the humor-inducing, big bellied, shaved tight hair member of the threesome was typically the butt of their antics on the TV screen. Mostly Moe would plink, bonk, dunk, and conk him, but Larry got into the act, too. They debuted in 1922. Almost a hundred years ago.
I bring up the Stooges because they were early introducers of slapstick humor and sarcasm to our society. If you listen closely to the dialogue, there are barbs directed repeatedly at some of the silly and stupid institutional directives of the day. Sarcasm, criticism, irony and putting down figures of authority is now almost a daily given in 2020.
I’m confident that criticizing leadership began well before the Three Stooges. But it was likely more direct and personal before we, as a species, started watching the tube. The Stooges brought it mainstream.
The putdowns in their skits released others from their daily routine of work-eat-sleep, work-eat-sleep. Some leisure time was being created, so an opening was there for entertainment to fill it. They jumped on it.
Until that point in history, if you look back, your “leisure” or “non-work” time consisted of going to church or reading a few books in the course of your lifetime. The Stooges filled a void as we moved towards becoming a mass society, both in terms of the production of goods, but also in terms of the words and images we served up to others.
I believe this is a major problem with our society today. Many times I’ve had this conversation with a good friend of mine regarding some of the cynicism and anger that so many people display these days, whether it’s in a personal conversation or some online format. My friend cites that, “Things are too easy and EVERYTHING is readily available.” His point being that the challenges of hunting our own food and building our shelter are no longer “things” we do on any type of regular basis, except for an extremely limited number of people where that is their livelihood.
This notion of his is a corollary to another friend he knows, whose opinion is simply, “The reason we’re so messed up is that we don’t kill our own food anymore.” That used to take up time, energy, focus. And when you got home at the end of the day, you collapsed into bed exhausted. You didn’t have time for humor.
As jobs and lives changed with mass production and segmentation of jobs, we compartmentalized. We got good at one thing and kept doing it, to the exclusion of the basic necessities of life. We went to supermarkets for food, visited the butcher, had a plumber, electrician and carpenter to call on for trade-specific help.
Gaining creature comforts meant losing control, and the Stooges captured this by poking fun at themselves and their ineptitude, as well as the things in the world that we’ve come less and less to have firsthand experience with. The world depersonalized and the Stooges thumbed their noses at it.
We still need that humor today, if for no other reason than to give us a reality-check for the world in which we live. “HEY, PORCUPINE” was Moe’s way of joking about Curly’s bristle-cut hair.
Knocking Larry and Curly’s heads together to the clonking sound of coconuts can help us laugh through another day of the complex stuff we can’t master. The slapstick is relatable