Mike Judge on The Three Stooges

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You brought back a wilder, more anarchic comedy with “Beavis and Butt-Head” in the nineties. At the time, it reminded me of the ferocity of the Three Stooges and other early filmed comedy.

Yeah. It had disappeared for a while. I think for a lot of us—the old folks—there was a time when we were kids, in the seventies or eighties, and the Three Stooges would come on late at night on some weird channel, and it just seemed amazing. I’m a huge Three Stooges fan. It’s interesting to me that when film first had sound, it didn’t take long for people to realize that possibly the best use of that technology was just somebody smacking another person in the head. I’m always arguing with sound mixers about this, because now they layer all the sounds, and it’s funnier when it’s one pure, distinct sound like the Three Stooges had, which is probably just some guy sitting there with a coconut or smacking something. Those sounds are hard to beat. But they now have the ability to layer twenty different sounds, and it ends up being one big, mushy, meaningless, loud sound.

interviewed in The New Yorker.

anyone remember the Three Stooges Nintendo game?

How about this:

Did working dreary jobs help you when it came to writing comedy?

Puts it in perspective. There’s so much material I’ve got from working so many jobs. A lot of the writers that I’ve worked with, same thing. It usually ends up being a good experience.

I remember there was a book I grabbed at a bookstore a long time ago, “Ernest Hemingway on Writing,” and I expected him to be, like, “You’ve got to suffer,” and this and that. But one thing that stood out was something he wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life—and one is as good as the other.” I think that’s a pretty honest thing for him to admit. I remember conversations pretty well. Can’t remember people’s names, but I remember their life story and other details.