Writer's Block: Karaoke Time

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Yeah - I only need one to screw you up:

This is the song that never ends
Yes, it goes on and on, my friends
Somebody started singing it, not knowing what it was
And they'll continue singing it forever just because
This is the song that never ends ...

"I gotcha present, Snook. Go ahead, open it ..."

I didn't find out, until several years after I'd started watching old "Three Stooges" shorts regularly, that girls aren't supposed to like it. It goes back before I can remember, possibly before I could read. The Stooges are one of those mediums where I have no 'ship preferences, no plot complaints, and few arguments with the execution of it. I even enjoy the fact they re-used footage from old shorts into new ones when they changed Stooges, just re-filming the bits with the new guy. So when I heard the Farrelly brothers were making a Stooges movie in modern times, I sort of cringed - it's really, really hard to duplicate what the Horwitz Bros. & Co. did all those decades ago, in a way that preserves the laugh-out-loud stupid without making it seem dated or just plain stupid and unfunny. But I saw the trailer on TV this week and ... well, I dunno, maybe they've managed it:

In modern times, enjoying the Stooges would probably be called "problematic" and every other -ism under the sun, but here's the thing about the Stooges: They never did anything that made any other character in their features look more foolish than themselves. Their collective personae ridiculed themselves and the world around them. They lampooned everybody nearly equally (and nobody more stridently than the wealthy and self-important), and the times may have finally swung back around to accept that much of their humor once again - I could see a Stooges short that involves them being unemployed sandwich-board walkers as part of the Occupy movement, involving some Wall Street type, a rich woman or two, other working-class or out-of-work people, and a dog.

Anyway, I may be wrong, it may be awful and I may hate it. But the previews sort of make it seem like it could work out, at least. I just hope the Farrellys preserve the Stooges' innate innocence and bumbling good intentions and don't stoop to base sex to sell the product - Moe's old-skool finger-poke there at the end is a nice throwback to something more innocent than the "dick-in-a-box" joke we're used to now (and in the right setting, that too can be hilarious - but this isn't the setting for it).