Why the Three Stooges Still Make Us Laugh — and Whether They Should

Moe Howard slaps Larry Fine across the face. Larry staggers. Curly spins in circles, emitting a sound no human larynx should produce. The audience convulses. Something real has happened — not just a cheap laugh, but a tiny encounter with disorder, pain, and survival. T Schur's 2026 essay 'Goldberg Variations: Systems Theory, Slapstick, and the Relays of Cinema,' published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, situates the Three Stooges within a broader argument about how slapstick cinema operates as a relay system — a structured passing of energy, disruption, and resolution across bodies, gags, and viewers. That framing, for all its academic abstraction, points toward something worth taking seriously: slapstick is not merely juvenile distraction. It is a very old human technology for processing the fact that bodies break, plans collapse, and dignity is always provisional.

What systems theory reveals about a poke in the eye

Schur's argument borrows from systems theory to treat slapstick not as a collection of individual gags but as a self-organizing circuit. A slap is input. The victim's exaggerated reaction is throughput. The audience's laughter is output — and that output feeds back into the performers, who calibrate timing, velocity, and facial register accordingly. The Three Stooges perfected this circuit across hundreds of two-reel shorts between 1934 and 1959. The trio's humor was never random violence. It was precisely engineered disruption: a hierarchy established (Moe as the nominal authority), an expectation built (the task will be completed), and a collapse guaranteed (the task will fail catastrophically, usually hurting everyone involved). The system resets, and the cycle begins again.

This is why slapstick is captivating even when the individual gag is obvious. Jordan Peterson, writing from a Jungian-narrative frame, argues that when we follow a character we are not primarily tracking their stated propositions — we are tracking their orientation, where they point their attention, what they treat as important.¹ In slapstick, we track the character's body. Curly's body is an antenna tuned to chaos. We watch it because it tells us something about the fragility that lives inside our own physical existence, dressed up in the safe distance of exaggeration and mime.

The anthropology behind the pratfall

The Catholic Christian anthropological tradition has always insisted on the unity of body and soul. The person is not a soul temporarily embarrassed by a body, but an ensouled body, a single composite creature. Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (2020), ground this in the Thomistic premise that the body's experiences are not incidental to the person's moral and spiritual life but constitutive of it.² Slapstick earns a kind of theological plausibility from this premise. When Curly falls down a flight of stairs, we laugh not because suffering is funny in the abstract, but because the gap between the soul's intentions and the body's performance is genuinely comic — and genuinely human. Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, identifies the passions as ordered by nature toward goods, but liable to disorder through concupiscence and inattention.³ The Stooges are animated concupiscence: desire perpetually overreaching physical competence.

The Created-Fallen arc of the CCMMP makes sense of this. In a created order of perfect integration between intention and action, there would be no slapstick, because bodies would do what souls intend. In the fallen world, the gap between plan and execution is a structural feature of human life. We spill coffee. We mispronounce names at the worst moment. We walk into the glass door everyone else has been successfully avoiding. Slapstick makes that gap visible and communal. The audience laughs together, partly in relief — that happened to him, not me — and partly in recognition: that has happened to me, and I survived.

Robert McKee, in his analysis of narrative structure, observes that scenes generate meaning at turning points — moments where the value charge of a situation flips from one polarity to another.⁴ Every slapstick gag is a micro-turning-point: competence flips to incompetence, order to chaos, dignity to absurdity. The Three Stooges ran that turning point at high speed, dozens of times per short, which is why their films feel both chaotic and formally precise. They are not random; they are rhythmically organized reversals.

Is it objectively good to watch?

This is the question many readers of goodwill, raised on the Stooges, will feel some anxiety about. The honest answer is: it depends on what the watching does in the watcher.

Slapstick as the Stooges practiced it does not glorify suffering. Nobody in a Stooges short is punished for being virtuous, exploited for sexual entertainment, or depicted as deserving of humiliation because of their race or poverty. The violence is cartoonish, mutual, and democratically distributed — Moe hits Larry, Larry hits Curly, Curly somehow ends up hitting Moe. The trio also survives. Every short ends with the Stooges alive, intact, and ready for the next disaster. This structural resurrection is not trivial. It tells the audience, repeatedly, that chaos does not have the final word. The body falls; the body gets up. This is, at minimum, compatible with a Christian anthropology of resilience.

What is not defensible is the use of slapstick's aesthetic vocabulary — exaggerated violence, the body as spectacle — in contexts where actual degradation is the point. This is precisely where gratuitous violence parts ways with the slapstick tradition. Gratuitous violence does not reset. It does not signal survival. It lingers on damage as an end in itself, and it trains the viewer's attention toward suffering without any comic or moral frame that produces distance or resolution. The question to ask of any given piece of entertainment is not 'does it contain violence?' but 'what does this violence mean in the circuit the work has constructed?' The Stooges constructed a circuit in which violence means temporary disruption, mutual culpability, and assured recovery. Many contemporary action films construct a circuit in which violence means dominance, where the body's damage is aestheticized without redemptive remainder.

Peterson, drawing on his analysis of how narrative functions, argues that engaging with stories of danger and failure is part of how human beings expand their competence — we practice, in imagination, the experience of chaos so that we are not destroyed by it in reality.¹ Slapstick is a very efficient delivery system for this. The Stooges enact failure at high velocity, without real stakes, and the audience processes the encounter in about ninety seconds. That is not nothing.

Nostalgia, formation, and the fond attachment

Many who grew up watching the Stooges carry a genuine warmth for those films. That attachment is worth respecting, not as a sentimental indulgence but as a clue. Aesthetic experiences leave deposits in the person. The Three Stooges, for an entire generation, were among the first encounters with the idea that the world could be absurd, that authority figures could be incompetent, that catastrophe could be met with laughter rather than despair. That is not a negligible formation.

The question worth asking is not whether the nostalgia is justified, but what it was responding to. Children who loved the Stooges were, in part, loving a world in which nobody is too important to fall down. That leveling instinct has genuine moral content. Pride — superbia, in the Thomistic taxonomy — is the root of most disorder. Slapstick is structurally anti-prideful. Nobody maintains their dignity in a Stooges short. Not the pompous socialite. Not the pretentious authority figure. Not even Moe, whose intermittent tyranny is always punished by the system he thinks he controls.

Are there alternatives? Has the era passed?

Schur's essay places the Stooges within a relay that extends from the physical comedy of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd through Jerry Lewis and into contemporary forms. That relay has not ended; it has fragmented. The Office runs on the same structural logic — competence perpetually overreaching itself — but distributes the pratfall across seven seasons of workplace humiliation rather than eighteen minutes of physical gags. Animated comedy from the Road Runner through SpongeBob SquarePants keeps the cartoonish indestructibility of the slapstick tradition alive without human bodies. The viral fail video is slapstick democratized and stripped of any authorial intention — which is precisely what makes it ethically shakier: the body on screen did not consent to the circuit the viewer is completing.

The genuine alternative to slapstick is not high drama but comedy grounded in recognition rather than reversal. Wit, irony, the comedy of character: these engage the intellect more directly and require the audience to supply more of the meaning. They are not superior, but they are different. A Catholic approach to entertainment does not need to rank them. It asks instead what each mode cultivates in the person who receives it — what habits of attention, what capacities for resilience, what relationship to the body's fragility.

The Three Stooges cultivated, at their best, a tolerance for chaos and a refusal of self-importance. Those are not small things. They may not be the deepest goods available in cinema, but they are real goods — and in a cultural moment when gratuitous violence treats the body as disposable rather than resilient, the Stooges' implicit theology of survival looks less like low entertainment and more like a modest argument for hope.

Notes

¹ Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief. Routledge.

² Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health practice. Divine Mercy University Press.

³ Aquinas, T. (1948). Summa theologiae (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Bros. (Original work published 1265–1274)

⁴ McKee, R. (1997). Story: Substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting. ReganBooks.

⁶ Schur, T. (2026). Goldberg variations: Systems theory, slapstick, and the relays of cinema. Quarterly Review of Film and Video.