Meaning, Three Stooges type of pie-in-the-face bop-over-the-head humor.
This is not to say that no one finds it funny now, but you don’t see big time comic acts based on this type of humor these days the way you did when the Three Stooges were in their heyday, so it seems pretty clear that it’s declined a lot. I have three possibilities.
[ol]
[li]It’s one of these random indeterminate zetigeist things. Stuff goes in and out of style, and you never know if perhaps it will come back.[/li][li]It’s about the evolution of humor in a more complex direction. With the invention of mass media, any popular style of humor (or entertainment generally) gets tremendous exposure, and thus wears on the audience as lot sooner than would have been the case if humor was more localized. So what happened is that these simpler forms of humor wore off, and humor had to add additional complexity, such that there’s no going back.[/li][li]It has to do with society as a whole. Humor draws on a backdrop societal norms against which it’s set. Decades back, society was much more straight-laced and conformist than it is today. Against that backdrop, slapstick had an added entertainment value in being the antithesis of societal ideals, which it doesn’t have today when individualism is more encouraged.[/li][/ol]