Victims of Circumstance: The Three Stooges and Young's "Five Faces of Oppression"

I've always felt that academia was deprived a unique and important voice in the field of equality studies when circumstances called me towards the technology sector. Here's a paper I wrote in 2008 on the Three Stooges within the framework of Iris Marion Young's "The Five Faces of Oppression"

Exploited into doing the most menial jobs in the most adverse conditions.  Reduced to pawns in countless social experiments and maneuvers by the cultural elite.  Terrorized by institutionalized violence, a brutal cycle of slaps, eye-gouges, and handsaws across the head.  Marginalized as saps, chowder-heads, and, of course, stooges.  Though not traditionally considered social critics, there's no question that Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Jerome "Curly" Howard (and to a lesser degree Sam "Shemp" Howard and Joe Besser) have, at one point or another in their long and varied film and stage career, addressed many of the conditions Iris Marion Young identifies in her "Five Faces of Oppression", particularly exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness and, of course, violence.  From the systemic physical intimidation Moe uses to oppress Larry and Curly, to the Stooges' relative inability to overcome the limitations of their intellect and social standing to escape their menial jobs and relative insignificance, each two-reeler represents an unflattering look at the social structures and practices that allow people, stooge and non-stooge alike, to remain oppressed in our society.   

           

As Young states, "all oppressed people suffer some inhibition of their ability to develop and exercise their capacity, and to express their needs, thoughts, and feelings."   As wanderers adrift in the newly minted capitalist superpower of inter-war America, the Stooges experience this inhibition at every turn.  Aside from their ever-present intellectual limitations, the Stooges are ever on the bottom rung of society, down on their luck and penniless, constant prey to the machinations of the wealthy cultural elite.  Young identifies this exploitation, and the Stooges' comparative powerlessness to stop it, as being characteristic of a capitalist society such as America's.  As members of the labor class, the Stooges have little recourse when, say, two members of the idle rich want to place a wager on whether or not the Stooges, if properly groomed, could function as so-called "society gentlemen" (as they did in 1935's Hoi Polloi).  What's more, as non-professional laborers, the Stooges are often subject to the petty tyranny of professional laborers and bureaucrats.   The Stooges, like most oppressed peoples in Young's argument, suffer from an insurmountable lack of respectability.  "To treat people with respect is to be prepared to listen to what they have to say, or do what they request because they have some authority, expertise, or influence.  The norms of respectability in our society are associated specifically with professional culture.  Professional dress, speech, tastes, and demeanor all connote respectability."  The Stooges, of course, lack expertise and influence in virtually any form, and with their often threadbare dress, common vernacular, and propensity for starting pie fights, the prospects of them winning any sort of respectability seem remote indeed.  Thus, their ability to effect any meaningful change, or exert some manner of control over their own lives is virtually non-existent. 

           

Indeed, the only chance the Stooges have for bettering themselves often depends on the kindness of the very denizens of the capitalist ruling class that would keep them trampled them underfoot.  In each case, whether the Stooges' benefactor is a long lost uncle, an eccentric millionaire, or a kindly and beautiful social worker, the fact that the Stooges actualization is only at the whim of society is indicative of the type of marginalization Young decries as "the most dangerous form of oppression".  "Because they depend on bureaucratic institutions for support or services, the old, the poor, and the mentally or physically disabled are subject to patronizing, punitive, demeaning, and arbitrary treatment by the policies and people associated with welfare bureaucracies."  Often, the Stooges' deliverance from the material deprivation caused by society's marginalization of them hangs entirely on the caprices of an institution or other benefactor, as in Brideless Groom, when Shemp must find and marry a woman within 24 hours to collect an inheritance.  Although the "marriage by a deadline" system is not commonplace in the American welfare bureaucracy, Shemp's ordeal smacks not only of the marginalizing hoops oppressed people in modern society have to jump through to receive material relief, it also speaks to the sort of cultural imperialism that is woefully prevalent today, decrying the bachelor lifestyle of the unmarried Stooge in favor of the traditional concept of the family.  Our "Uncle Sam" may not be an eccentric old millionaire pushing people to get married by 5pm, but there's no denying that our society confers benefits on married couples that are unavailable to people who embrace a less culturally mainstream lifestyle.

           

In light of the rampant exploitation and marginalization of the Stooges, it can be easy to overlook violence as one of the forms of oppression they face.  Indeed, it almost becomes a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees, so prevalent is the violence that they themselves perpetrate on each other.  While any schoolchild would argue that Moe oppresses Larry and Curly through the liberal use of two-by-fours and monkey wrenches to the face and head, it's less obvious that the Stooges themselves are victims of institutionalized violence sanctioned, and even encouraged, by society.  But what is the difference between Moe grabbing Curly and Larry by their heads and cracking their skulls together, and, say, an angry bailiff striking all three of the Stooges across the face with a single slap?  As Young argues, "what makes violence a face of oppression and a social injustice is less the particular acts themselves, though these are often utterly horrible, than the social context surrounding them, which makes them possible and even acceptable."  Whereas Moe tearing clumps of Larry's hair out is what Young would characterize as an "act of violence or petty harassment committed by a particular individual, often an extremist, deviant, or the mentally unsound", the Sultan Hassan bin Sober threatening the Stooges with a scimitar, and ordering his men to ransack the Stooges' restaurant (as in 1949's Malice in the Palace) is, as Young would say, "not merely an individual moral wrong [due to] its systemic character, its existence as a social practice, its legitimacy, and its irrationality.  Indeed, few of the citizens of the Sultanate of Moronica expressed disapproval of the actions of the Sultan and his men, making Moronica and its government inherently unjust.  According to Young, "to the degree that institutions and social practices encourage, tolerate or enable the perpetration of violence against members of specific groups, those institutions and practices are unjust and should be reformed."

           

Unfortunately for all of us, society has not, symbolically speaking, come so far from the days where three men looking for honest work could get lured into the haunted mansion of a billionaire mad scientist, looking to exchange their brains for that of a gorilla.  The difficulties faced by the Stooges in the thirties and forties are still, in some way or another, being faced by many of societies oppressed groups today.  Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a member of a contemporary emancipatory social movement who does not agree with Curly's frequent characterization of himself as a "victim of circumstance".  As long as society continues to perpetrate the injustices described by Iris Marion Young, and enacted by the Three Stooges, we shall all remain, to some degree, victims of circumstance.