I'm happy to find that this time I am in agreement with the majority in rating this short very highly. The setups are effective, the secondary roles, especially Messrs. "Pain" and "Johnson" are extremely well cast (not only are James Morton and Bud Jamison excellent in their respective roles but I would count their roles here among the best ones that either of them ever had in the Stooge shorts), the comic plotting moves naturally from one setup to the next, and the gags, some of them quite memorable, come at a steady pace.
My favorite gag in the whole short is the repeated one of Johnson being awakened in his berth by the shouting of his name by an increasingly agitated Paul Pain [correction added in editing: and various other incidents], and banging his head on the bottom of the upper berth. It's one of those gags that actually gain from the repetition of something completely predictable: the only thing that changes is that, every time it happens, you know that it has to hurt the character a little more! I think that the gag works on us by a complex reaction. We all know what it is like to hit our heads on something hard; we can at least imagine, if not actually recall, what it is like to hit our heads a second time on the same spot; and Bud Jamison's portrayal of Johnson's reaction is completely realistic. This is not exaggerated, unrealistic, conk-on-the-head-with-a-hammer Stooge violence but a real "Ow!" So initially, sympathetic distress may predominate in our reaction. But eventually, perhaps on the second occurrence of the gag, mirth prevails. At least, it will prevail if one loves the Stooges' humor: as Big Chief Apumtagribonitz very rightly says, if you don't like this short then you don't like the Stooges.
But when mirth prevails, we don't cease to feel sympathy. Instead, we now feel, on top of our contending sympathy and mirth, compunction: we feel bad (at least I do) for laughing at poor Johnson's suffering! Now, one doesn't cease to find something funny just because one feels bad about finding it funny. One must either follow one's conscience and repress one's laughter, which no one but a prig would do in this case, or abandon one's conscience and simply laugh, as if enjoying a holiday from moral scruples.
Stephen Jay Gould has an essay, "The True Embodiment of Everything That's Excellent," in which he discusses how in case after case, some lines in the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan that he had known and enjoyed since early in life only revealed their meaning to him years later. Citing a joke about Swiss churchgoers, who laugh in their pews on Sunday morning because that is when they get the jokes that they heard at the party on Saturday evening, he calls these occurrences "Swiss moments." I have had a couple of Swiss moments with this short. One occurred after I had seen it a few times, when it dawned on me that when Moe reproves Larry [correction: Curly] for jostling him in their bunk, he does not, as I had thought, make the bizarre remark, "Do you want to give me birth marks?", as if he thought that birth marks could be acquired in adult life. (I thought that funny enough as an exhibition of what you might call Stooge-pidity, like not understanding that "right" and "left" vary in their reference according to the direction in which you are facing.) Rather, he makes the perfectly lucid pun (already used in the title of another movie, as I understand, which is perhaps why Preston Black could count on viewers at that time to get the joke), "Do you want to give me berth marks?"
The other Swiss moment to which I confess shows even greater slowness on my part. As background, understand that I have come across people of surnames spelled "Paine" (e.g., Thomas Paine) and "Payne," but never "Pain"; so when I first looked at the transcript page for this short on this site and saw that the name of James Morton's character was written "Pain," I could not understand why that spelling, which seemed to me rather improbable, had been chosen. It did not occur to me to connect his name with the title of the short until I saw a transcription of Curly's answer to Moe's question, "What's a heartthrob?"—"A pain in the neck!" Only when I saw this in writing did I connect it with the title and with the name of the "heartthrob" in question. I had taken "pain in the Pullman" to be a simple play on "pain in the neck," or on the less polite phrase for which that one is a byword. Of course, it is the monkey that is pain in the neck to Pain, so that there is pain in the Pullman as well as a Pain in the Pullman.
