Three Stooges, Feet, Tickling, and Fetishes
AM Harm760
At first, I wasn't sure if I should post this, but after seeing all the
messages about "pie fetishes," maybe it's not so far off topic after all (and
besides, this is an "alt" newsgroup).
I was born in the sixtoes, and I saw almost all of the Three Stooges
shorts in syndication no television while I was growing up (way back before
they started hacking them to bits to fit in more commercials). And while I am
sure that I do not know these films nearly as well as most of you do, there is
something odd that I have noticed about some of them that you may have not....
First of all, there are numerous examples (too numerous to mention) in
many of their shorts of either foot or tickling fetishism. Well, maybe not
fetishism exactly, but odd occurrences involving either barefoot stooges or
stooges being tickletortured.
Let me point out the three most obvious examples. The first would be
"Hold That Lion!" Moe, Larry and Shemp are gyped out of their inheritance by a
crooked lawyer. They follow him onto a passenger train and corner him, but not
before they accidentally let a lion loose on the train. At one point the boys
decided to turn in, since they haven't been able to corner the lawyer yet, and
since they are stowaways, they do not want to arouse suspicion by snooping
around. So they three of them climb into a berth, remove their shoes and socks
(notice how Moe's socks don't even cover the front half of his feet), and go to
sleep in their suits and ties. (Notice also how Shemp sleeps in between Moe
and Larry, but with his head down near their feet.)
As Moe sleeps, being the one closest to the curtain, his bare left foot
sticks out into the aisle of the train car, poking through the drape. As the
lion passes by, he cannot help but notice this odd sight, sticking out like the
proverbial sore thumb in an otherwise emtpy aisle of closed curtains. The lion
starts to lick Moe's bare foot, lapping his sole with his rough tongue. Moe
begins laughing in his sleep from the tickling of his foot, but does not wake
up at first. The lion pauses momentarily at the sound of Moe's laughter, lets
out a very strange sound himself as he rears his head back, then begins licking
Moe's sole again in earnest. Now Moe's laughter is even more hysterical, and
increasing in pitch. (We get a few close-ups of Moe's sleeping face as he
reacts to the tickletorture, but we see his bare foot and the lion only from a
"downward" angle; it is also quite clear, upon repeated viewing, that this is a
REAL human male foot being tickled and licked by this REAL lion!) After a few
exchanges, Moe instinctively pulls his foot back into the berth, still laughing
(he must really be ticklish), and then he wakes up abruptly. He then looks
down at Shemp, sleeping with his head at his feet, and slaps him in the face
with his bare foot. Shemp wakens, asking, "Hey, what's the big idea?!" Moe
answers, "Stop tickling my foot!" "I didn't tickle your foot," Shemp says.
"You did too," Moe replies, then commands him to sleep with his head up where
his and Larry's are, pulls up the covers, and goes back to sleep.
The second occurence I will mention is in "Self Made Maids," where the
stooges are artists who want to marry their models, who are also all played by
the boys in drag. When the girls' father (played by MOE) doesn't approve, they
wrap him up in a tapestry at the girls' apartment, with just his head and feet
poking out the ends. They set him in an easy chair, and demand that he give
them his consent to marry his daughters. He refuses, so Larry and Shemp tell
Moe to go and "do his stuff." While the father rants against the stooges, Moe
kneels down at his feet, whips off one of the old man's shoes, and begins to
furiously tickle his white-cotton-socked-sole with his fingers. Larry and
Shemp look approvingly at one another, smiling, and pointing gleefully down at
Moe. After a bit, Moe pauses, letting Papa catch his breath while Larry and
Shemp ask him again to consent. "No! Never!" Moe gets a look of frustrated
exasperation on his face, then immediately goes back to tickling Papa's foot.
Papa laughs even more hysterically this time, crying out, "Police! murder!"
After a bit more torture, they ask him again to consent; he pauses a moment,
still laughing a bit, sounds like he's about to refuse, but then thinks better
of it, saying, "Yes, yes; I'll consent, I'll consent!" The interesting thing
about this one is, since Moe is playing both himself and Papa, he's actually
tickling his own foot....
The third and final instance I will mention is also the most long and
drawn-out scene of barefoot male tickletorture I have ever seen in mainstream
media, "Space Ship Sappy" with Moe, Larry, and Joe Besser. An eccentric
scientist tricks the stooges into joining himself and his daughter on an
expedition to Venus. On Venus, the boys go exploring and encounter
cannibalistic amazons who plan to devour them. The stooges escape and take off
in the spaceship which goes wildly out of control. As the ship is about to
crash, the scene changes to the annual meeting of the Liar's Club, where the
stooges win the prize as the biggest liars in the world.
When the boys first encounter the non-English speaking Venutian women,
they think that the girls have some sort of romantic interest in them. When
the boys turn their backs on the girls to prepare to kiss them, the girls hit
them all on the heads with their clubs, knocking them unconscious. The boys
awaken to find themselves tied to poles, standing up, with their hands behind
their backs. After some animated discussion, the each woman kneels down at a
stooge's feet, pulls off one shoe and sock, then begins to tickle torture his
bare foot. They do this in two "sessions," once with smooth little whittling
sticks, and once with little whisk brooms which they apply to boys' soles. In
between the two "sessions," the women again huddle for some sort of argument in
their strange alien language. The whole scene goes on for quite a while, and
we get several close-ups of the stooge's feet being tickled, of each stooge's
laughing face, of the girls smiling evilly at the stooge's faces and at on
another, and of the girl's furrowed brows as they concentrate instensely on
what they are doing.
At one point, the scientist's daughter spots the scene from the spaceship,
and shows her father: "Their going to tickle them to death!" The scientist
then uses a loudspeaker to tell the women to go away, but this only draws a
giant gila monster to the area, who scares of the women, and scares the boys so
much that they are able to get loose of their bonds, and make a run for the
ship....
Now, I'm sorry, but the fetishistic nature of this scene is undeniable!
SOMEbody in the cast or crew, or some writer, producer, or director, must have
had some sort of foot or tickling fetish to include this one! Even if you try
to deny the others, this one is impossible to dismiss. In fact, all the other
instances of feet and tickling in the stooge films, especially the three
occurences of barefoot male tickletorture listed above, only go to prove the
point all the more.
How could all this just be COINCIDENCE...?
D. Kirkpatrick
I think you have a fetish about Stooge fetishes.
Its obvious.
<sheesh>
Dave Bushong
I have to believe this was really a toedian slip:
In article <19971126164...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
AM Harm760 <amha...@aol.com> wrote:
> At first, I wasn't sure if I should post this, but after seeing all the
>messages about "pie fetishes," maybe it's not so far off topic after all (and
>besides, this is an "alt" newsgroup).
>
> I was born in the sixtoes, and I saw almost all of the Three Stooges
^^^^
Regardless of that, or maybe because of that, thanks for the posting :)
All the best,
Dave
--
Dave Bushong
bushong at bigger dot com
SaxonCow
I think you have too much time on your hands!! Actually you left out a couple,
the most typical one being where the only way they can calm Curly down after he
goes into a "fit", is to tickle his foot, which they do with religious fervor.