Several years ago, I came across a great article entitled "Which Stooge Are You?" It was very well written, funny, true and extensive. I found an abridged version that I'll post below. If I can ever come across the entire article (with great pictures and sub stories), I'll post it in the future. The full article was published in Men's Health Magazine Issue: September 1999.
Woo-woo-woo! Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk! Why, I oughta ...
Charlie Patton
I've always thought of this fine head of hair of mine as Lennon-esque - as in John Lennon, circa 1964, the leader of the mop-topped Beatles.
Some of my colleagues have a different way of describing my coif. Moe-esque, they say, as in Moe Howard, the leader of The Three Stooges. I don't think they mean it as a compliment.
Moe, as those of us who came of age watching old Stooges shorts on television will recall, had the classic bowl cut, bangs hanging lankly down over every available surface.
However, according to the September issue of Men's Health magazine, Moe isn't the Stooge with whom I should most identify.
In an article titled ''Which Stooge Are You?,'' writer Ron Geraci, identifies Moe as your Classic Type A, a hard-charging workaholic.
''If you're a Moe, you're probably the hardest-driving wise guy at work,'' Geraci writes, before quoting New York psychologist Allen Elkin to the effect that ''high strung, bossy men with Moe personalities tend to live at their work.''
Obviously, the head football coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tom Coughlin, is a classic Moe.
I, on the other hand, am closer to Larry, even if I have more hair. ''Larry is the passive, agreeable fellow who scrapes through life by taking his licks and collecting his paycheck,'' Geraci writes.
The classic Larry job is middle management. While I've never risen that high in the business world, except for a brief, tragic foray into the fast-food restaurant business, I do, like Larry, ''gravitate to jobs with management buffers above and below.''
A third Stooge personality is the Curly. Curlys tend to be the class clowns, who ''laugh at themselves so other people can't ridicule them first,'' according to Elkin.
Sounds lighthearted except that humor, for the Curly, is a ''kind of defense mechanism [that] stems from a large reservoir of anger and resentment.''
Curlys tend to excess. The real Curly expressed the Curly philosophy rather nicely in Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb: ''Oh boy! Pie a la mode with beer chasers three times a day!''
It should not surprise us, then, that the real Curly (a.k.a. Jerome Howard), was forced to quit by a stroke at 40 and was dead six years later.
He was replaced by brother Shemp Howard (the only Stooge who wasn't a Howard was Larry Fine, at least until after Shemp's death in 1955, when Joe Besser and Joe De Rita, had stints as the third Stooge). According to Geraci, Shemp ''had the ideal Stooge personality type: the lovable Moe.''
Unfortunately, for all his sophistication, Shemp had to live in the rather large shadow of Curly, forced forever to address the question: ''Where's your crazy brother?''
While Geraci's article suggests that ''we're all variations of Moe, Larry or Curly,'' the reality, I suspect, is that for most of us, our inner Stooge is a composite.
I know I am: The hair of Moe, the personality of Larry, the appetites of Curly, the charisma of Shemp. It's enough to make me want to poke someone in the eye.
