You’ve made a couple of very important points here.
Yes, the addition of a ridiculously out-of-proportion sound effect to an act of physical violence perpetrated on a person has the paradoxical effect of “softening” the blow rather than amplifying it, as it takes it out of the realm of reality and into that of cartoon violence.
I’d have to dig to find the cite, but I seem to recall one critic pointing out that Laurel and Hardy pioneered this technique in one of their first sound shorts.
(Incidentally, I saw The Three Stooges on stage in the early 1960s, and was delighted to find that they traveled with a sound effects man who precisely duplicated the effect of watching their films – expertly timing Moe’s slaps with…well, a slapstick…his bops on the head with an anvil clang, and his blows to the stomach with a tympani. I very recently learned that the man behind this was in fact Larry Fine’s brother-in-law.)
You’ve also articulated why, “Who’s on First” aside, I’ve never cared much for Abbott and Costello. Unlike Laurel and Hardy, whose characters were sympathetic and human (if childish), it’s pretty impossible to warm up to Bud Abbott, and only marginally easier to do so with Lou Costello.
Slapstick can be funny for a while on its own, but without character development to go along with it, it wears thin.
Seriously? There’s 41 posts in a thread about the 3 stooges/marx brothers/abbot and costello/charlie chaplain/etc. and not a single bad pun yet? There’s more humor in the threads about Helen Keller…GET A MOVE ON PEOPLE!!
Well that brings to mind a couple of quotes, both which deliciously reveal the degree to which the loathsome Cohn was reviled.
I’ll just pop one in here, still warm from Wiki: Cohn died of a sudden heart attack in February 1958 in Phoenix, Arizona, shortly after having finished dinner. He was the subject of the famous quote from Red Skelton, who remarked of his well-attended funeral, “It proves what Harry always said: Give the public what they want and they’ll come out for it.”
The other one, not quite so funny for its nastiness, was from a prominent LA rabbi who, when asked whether he didn’t have anything positive to say about the recently-deceased Cohn, commented “Well, he’s dead, isn’t he?”
[BTW, the first quote has been attributed to other wags besides the waggish RS]
[And hello to everybody at The Straight Dope from an olde newbie in East Jakarta. Watch me at bakhirun’s channel on YouTube]
I was hoping someone would post that, so I didn’t have to go find it again and post it myself. That’s a must-read for anyone who recalls the Stooges fondly.
I don’t think vaudeville was ever considered highbrow, and the Three Stooges were certainly vaudeville, even if they peaked after it did. Maybe they would have been better respected if the peaks coincided.
By all accounts it was the reverse, and the Horowitzes tried to actively discourage a vaudeville career. As Shemp reminisced later, “My parents always wanted me to be a gentleman”, and they figured acting was inconsistent with that.
It wasn’t highbrow. It was popular light entertainment. It was much like slightly later radio comedy and early television comedy variety shows. And for a good reason- almost all of the biggest comedy stars of the first half of the twentieth century had backgrounds in vaudeville. Some never moved far away from it- think The Stooges, Abbott & Costello, Burns & Allen, The Marx Brothers, Milton Berle, etc. Others showed their vaudeville roots much more subtly- Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, etc. But vaudeville helped all of these comedians develop very useful skills. They spent years in front of an actual audience learning what people thought was actually funny, and were generally very quick witted- the ability to ad lib was vital when an act went wrong in the middle of a performance. The Three Stooges were actually a pretty high quality version of a typical physical comedy-based vaudeville act. Audiences of the time remembered vaudeville clearly, and the Stooges distilled the gags they had developed over the years into seven minute pure gagfests.
I don’t know if it counts but they never won an Academy Special Award which a few comedians such as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx won.
I can’t recite too many Oscars for best picture/best actor/actress but I doubt if comedies win a lot. Actors like to talk about how hard comedy is but the academy prefers the big, lavish, heart warming human interest story with good box office.
That’s a must-read for anyone who recalls the Stooges fondly.