In our humorless and anxious culture, slapstick is sorely missed, at least for me. iI’ve always loved slapstick, from W.C. Fields to Jerry Lewis to Bugs Bunny to the Marks Brothers and even the Three Stooges, an admittedly low end and sophomoric form of the genre. I almost had to be hospitalized when Fields kicked Baby Leroy across the room in “Never Give A Sucker An Even Break,” I was laughing so hard, or when O.J. Simpson (yes, O.J.) was pushed off the stadium upper deck in “Naked Gun.” Slapstick reminds us not to take life too seriously, as we do in our warning-obsessed, regulated, lawsuit obsessed, argumentative and politically correct culture.

I try to laugh all of the time, at myself and others, in my writing and photos,  amidst all of the warnings and regulations. There isn’t enough of it.  It’s too bad because we all need to laugh, it is important, like love, and slapstick made us laugh,  almost always targeting authority figures, from priests and  rabbis to bossy spouses to nasty bosses to officious cops.

Slapstick was made for people with authority problems, people like me.

So when I learned the Farrelly Brothers had taken on The Three Stooges, and this movie was to be released this weekend,  I was excited. I wasn’t sure Maria would want to go. My former girlfriend has a great sense of humor, but doesn’t laugh out loud much. Her humor is quiet, as she is, and she is sophisticated, artistic, unlike the man she married. She expressed a strong interest in going, to my surprise, but I was pretty sure she wouldn’t like the crude antics of these former Vaudevillians, with all of their slapping, poking, and hair-pulling. “Are you sure you want to go?” I asked, and she said sure.

I have to admit I did not know the person I sat next to in this theater. From the moment the first (not the last) nun got hit on the head with a church bell, the soft-spoken artist I married was howling. Howling. I could barely hear the movie over her guffaws, thigh-slapping and belly laughs.  She had trouble getting her pretzel into her mouth, drowning out the teenagers behind us. She claims I laughed even louder than she did, but I can’t imagine how this could be possible. We both loved the movie, and it was great to be reminded that in the age of cable news, fearful lawyers, doomsday doctors, angry people online,  pompous politicians, and angry commentators, it is precious to laugh. There is no left and right in slapstick, anything is a target.

When Mo and Curly pulled the armpit hair out of a stuffy monsignor, and Mo dropped a lobster in Curly’s crotch I thought Maria would need assistance. She claims I have a screechy, high-pitched kind of squeak when I laugh. She had never heard that before, she said. Who is this stranger in my bed, I wondered? I turned to her, and I said, “nice to meet you. Who are you?” We resolved to laugh more. I guess we just keep evolving, knowing one another.  And we also resolved to get on Netflix and order some W.C. Fields and Marx Brothers movies.

At the end of the movie, we are brought back to life by an appearance by the Farrelly brothers, striking a more contemporary mode with a lawyer-inspired warning to children not to poke one another in the eye or hit each other on the head with a hammer. The commentary broke the spell, for sure, and stopped the laughing cold. It was very American. As a kid, I saw every slapstick movie there was, and none of them needed to caution me that the slapping wasn’t real or that I should not throw nuns into a swimming pool.