Stooges shorts showing at Civic

Many of us hold onto our original Stooge.

Some may think I am talking about Iggy Pop’s band. After all, more than a few of us have a little Iggy as well.

But this is about the Three Stooges, the trio of slapstick-using comics who remain a sensation more than 40 years after the last of the original members died.

At 2 p.m. Sunday, the Akron Civic will host a Three Stooges festival featuring three (of course) short films: Men in Black (1934), Hoi Polloi (1935) and Movie Maniacs (1936).

All consist of the Stooges combine of Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Moe’s brother Curly — the truest of Stooge trios. (Other teams included Moe and Larry with Moe’s brother Shemp, Joe Besser and Curly Joe DeRita.)

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According to the official Stooges’ website, Men in Black is the only Stooges film nominated for an Oscar, in the comedy short subject category. It did not win. One can imagine what Moe would have done to the winner if he had a chance.

The Stooges site also notes that Hoi Polloi could have been an inspiration for the Dan Aykroyd-Eddie Murphy comedy Trading Places in 1983, since the Stooges comedy finds the guys the subject of two rich men’s experiment on the impact of heredity or environment.

And that’s just one of the ways the Stooges have impacted culture long past their heyday.

Of course, that heyday was quite something. The Beacon Journal’s Mark J. Price has written about the Stooges’ triumphant, four-day performance at Akron Palace in 1938. One writer at the time said the Stooges were “masters of comedy timing and students of whatever perverse twist in human nature takes to make us laugh at the discomfort of others.”

By then, the individual Stooges had about a decade of work in vaudeville, at first as part of an act with comic Ted Healy, but later on their own. Aging, death and the passage of time worked against them. In 1950, they were just third-billed in an Akron show instead of headliners. Curly, following a series of strokes in the 1940s, died in 1952; Shemp died in 1955. In a memoir, Moe said that by the late ’50s, when he was over 60, “Our film career was over; we were really meant for vaudeville, but vaudeville was dead. I wondered where our next booking would be.”

But television brought them a new, young audience and cemented their legacy. Endless replays of their movies led to a cry for new Stooges. Feature films followed, notably Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961), where the Stooges teamed with ice-skating gold medalist and former Akron resident Carol Heiss (now Carol Heiss Jenkins).

Even across a generation gap — Heiss turned 21 while working on the movie, while the youngest of those Stooges, DeRita, was 51 — she found herself admiring their craft.

As have many people since.

In 1990, Akron had an epic pie fight in conjunction with a Stooges celebration.

Mel Gibson is an unabashed Stooges fan (as can be seen in some of his onscreen behavior) and his clout helped get a Three Stooges biopic made for ABC in 2000.

In 2012, moviegoers could see a new Three Stooges movie, starring Will Sasso, Sean Hayes and Chris Diamantopoulos in re-creations of vintage Stooges bits. Last year saw the announcement of plans for a second movie with that cast.

It has to be admitted that the Stooges are an acquired taste — although an easily acquired one if your tastes are like those of an 8-year-old boy.

When writing about the 2012 movie, I said it had “brutal slapstick, terrible puns and a barely acknowledged plot. There are slaps, eye pokes, falls from tall buildings and objects landing on people. There are fake-seeming sound effects [and] bloodless maiming.”

Because that’s Three Stooges territory. And I am laughing just by thinking about it.

Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal, Ohio.com, Facebook, Twitter and the HeldenFiles Online blog. You can contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.