That is a very perceptive analysis on your part, 282RA. Your linking of the Stooges with the Punch and Judy shows and the vaudeville tradition is well thought out. As you say, that kind of humour is deliberately intended to be as lowbrow and stupid as possible to appeal to very young children...so criticizing it for so being is really quite redundant. I therefore withdraw my criticism.

It's a matter of taste as to whether one would enjoy watching it or not, and I suppose it would depend on the occasion. There are times when lowbrow fits the bill.

Consider this: You point out that the Stooges were Jewish, which is well known, of course, and they would have been considered representative of the most low class, migratory vagrants and labouring class sterotypes of the time. Well, seeing the first Stooge films in the early 30's may have been what drove Adolf Hitler's already gross prejudice against the Jews over the edge into genocidal madness! Thus the Stooges could inadvertently have been the factor that tipped the balance and sent the world into its greatest conflict and resulted in the slaughter of many millions. A sobering thought, isn't it?

That was, I might add, the conflict in which we, the British, stopped the Germans in the Western Desert and the Battle of Britain and saved all you Yanks...because if it wasn't for us, you'd all be speaking German! (tee hee!)

*PR