The Stooge Gene
September 2005

Let's be very clear about this: I love men. I was very close to my father, and I've always been friends with my two brothers. I didn't date much in school, but I had plenty of boy friends who were not boyfriends, and I've been happily married to the same man since dinosaurs roamed the earth. So it's not like I'm complaining.

But let's face it. Whatever their individual merits may be, men are a different species than women. I don't mean all that Venus and Mars claptrap: not all women are sensitive, soulful, nurturing earth mothers, any more than all men are necessarily head-banging Neanderthal warriors. And yet there's a fundamental divide that separates male and female from a very early age.

When my young friend Jazlyn was two, she could sit quietly in a room by herself, playng with her toys or coloring. When her younger brother Tyrus was two, he walked into the living room one day, marched over to the low coffee table littered with books, papers, pencils, and coasters, and placidly swept off everything with a mighty crash to the floor. He wasn't having a tantrum, he was in a perfectly happy mood. It was just a guy thing.

Last spring, Art Boy painted a mural with three classes of fourth-graders at Bay View Elementary School. The theme was Day in the Bay, and each child painted one sea creature for the mural. For the most part, girls drew mermaids, or funny fish with animal heads. Boys drew gangsta starfish, killer sharks with razor teeth, or fish equipped with rocket launchers and Ninja swords. There were exceptions to prove the rule, of course (one boy drew a beautiful, animé-style mermaid). But next time your peace is shattered by neighborhood kids bombing around on those silly, noise-polluting midget motorcycles, or a scooter with a roaring exhaust pipe the size of a Sousaphone, guess which gender is riding it?

I used to think of it as the male destructo gene, an impulse toward random mayhem coded into the male DNA. This seemed to explain a lot, like the annual deluge of crash-and-burn summer action movies (Revenge Of The Sith, War Of The Worlds, Fantastic Four). Why else would young Art Boy and his tween-age friends buy model kits of movie monsters, painstakingly build, glue, and paint them—and then blow them to smithereens with firecrackers? But now I realize what separates male from female is more than just a primal urge for noise and destruction. It's a much more subtle and insidious cultural reference point, a renegade scrap of odd circuitry in even the most enlightened human males.

I call it the Stooge Gene.

Men find the weirdest things funny. When I was a kid, old Three Stooges shorts from the '30s and '40s were played constantly on TV in syndication. Entire new generations of kids were exposed to Larry, Moe, and Curly bashing each other upside the head, poking each other in the eyes, and hitting each other with hammers, two-by-fours, and bowling pins. Documenting the reaction of little kids could launch a thousand doctoral theses in behavioral psychology. In a nutshell: girls hate the Stooges, and boys love them.

The reverberations continue into our grown-up lives. I used to hate Candid Camera, a voyeuristic species of televised entrapment where ordinary people were set up in ludicrous situations to flounder helplessly for the laughing hidden camera eye. At the end, Allen Funt, or Fannie Flagg or somebody would pop out of the woodwork and let the despairing dupe off the hook, thanking them for being such "a good sport." I always thought it was an appalling act of wamton humiliation. Art Boy thought it was funny. Every time there was a Candid Camera special on TV, he had to watch.

Now that creeping Candid Cameraism has spawned so-called "reality TV," there are endless opportunities for men to get in touch with their inner Stooge. Take America's Funniest Home Videos, where ordinary shmoes are so beguiled by the prospect of cash prizes and a trip to Hollywood that they turn the cameras on each other, encouraging their spouses, kids, families, even their pets, to make fools of themselves for the idle amusement of millions.

We once channel-hopped across a clip in which a woman was posing beside a mountain creek for her videographer husband. She slipped on a slick rock and stumbled knee-deep into the freezing water, shrieking. Did her husband drop the videocam and run to her aid? He did not. He stood where he was, filming it all, laughing like a hyena as his wife slogged around in the drink, struggling to get a foothold. I stared at the screen as slack-jawed as the opening night audience for Springtime For Hitler. Art Boy laughed. Two marriages flirted with disaster.

Stooge aficionado Mel Gibson made an entire midlife career doing Stooge routines in the increasingly slapstick Lethal Weapon movies. Could there be a covert Stooge influence in the flogging, stoning and poking of The Passion of the Christ? I'm just saying.

Why would anybody remake The Dukes Of Hazzard? How can people like Rob Schneider have careers? Chalk it up to the Stooge Gene.

(Send your favorite Stooge gene examples to lisajensen@sbcglobal.net)