Don't forget about Woody Allen's take on the Stooges in his most recent short story collection Mere Anarchy. I mashed together bits and pieces of several reviews to assemble a comprehensive summary:
In This Nib For Hire, Hollywood producer E. Coli Biggs hires comes across Flanders Mealworm’s book The Hockfleisch Chronicles in a little country store. “I’d never seen a book remaindered in the kindling section before,” the producer later recalls. Nevertheless, Biggs hires Mealworm, a self-important writer who wears ‘author’s tweeds with elbow patches and Connemara cap’, to novelise a Three Stooges film.
"Emmes, kid. If this is as lucrative as my proboscis signals, there’s copious zuzim to be stockpiled", Biggs asserts. And with the hope of bagging piles of cash and giving the art of novelisation new depth and dignity, Mealworm takes on the assignment, determined to transform the broad physical comedy of Larry, Moe and Curly into an existential novel about the meaning of life and to turn the slapstick Stooges trio into absurdly angst-ridden men prone to inexplicable violence:
Calmly and for no apparent reason, the dark-haired man took the nose of the
bald man in his right hand and slowly twisted it in a long, counterclockwise circle.
“We are at least free to choose”, wept Curly, the bald one. “Condemned to death
but free to choose.” And with that Moe poked his two fingers into Curly’s eyes.
“Oooh, oooh, oooh”, Curly wailed, “the cosmos is so devoid of any justice!” He stuck
an unpeeled banana in Moe’s mouth and shoved it all the way in.
-- mnw
PS: I long ago transcribed the Stooge-related portions of Dave Sim's brilliant graphic novel Cerebus The Aardvark: Latter Days, along with the few Stooges magazine articles from the 50s & 60s that I've managed to find, and posted them on Usenet -- I'll try to dig around the alt.comedy.slapstick.three-stooges archives sometime and repost them here... or have I done that in this forum already?
