In 1940, Adolf Hitler faced a most unlikely enemy: the Three Stooges (WaPo)

My mother had a built-in radar that warned her whenever I found a Three Stooges movie playing on our old Magnavox black and white television set. 

"Turn that off!" she'd yell from the kitchen, or from the laundry room in the basement. I guess it didn't help that I always turned the volume up full blast as soon as I heard their theme song, "Listen to the Mocking Bird." 

Only a fool disregarded my mother's commands, so I would sullenly switch channels to some dismal gray soap opera or Art Linkletter's House Party. 

She harbored an unreasoning hatred of Larry, Moe, and Curly -- and all because I once filled my palm with black pepper and blew it into the face of my baby sister while she was in her playpen. Moe did it to Curly with interesting results, so I figured I might as well try it on Linda. 

I vowed as a child that when I was grown I would seek out the Three Stooges to offer them my fealty -- their violence attracted me in a savage way. 

But alas, when I attained my majority they were gone -- dispersed by old age and the collapse of the two-reeler industry. So I became a circus clown instead. I traveled on a train and threw pies at grown men with red wigs and pants that fell down when they played the trombone. And they threw buckets of water on me and kicked me in the rear. It was a very fulfilling career.

Then, one night, in a dream, the Three Stooges came to me. They floated over my murphy bed on the train. Moe spoke first.

"Listen, kid" he said, "the production of too many useless things results in too many useless people."

"Why soitenly!" Curly chimed in. Moe hit him on the head with a bung starter. "Shaddup!" he snarled.

Then Larry said "What Moe is talkin' about is that the development of art should be dialectical and not metaphysical." 

"You shaddup, too, lamebrain!" Moe said, slapping Larry on the cheek.

Then I woke up in a muck sweat, a changed man and a broken clown. I couldn't figure out what they meant, and I lost all heart, all belief, in the power of slapstick. I quit the circus and wandered through fields of sunflowers until I learned this one true thing:

Life is a movie script that the Hays Code refuses to pass.