The Hollywood of the 1950’s respected religion and avoided crudity. Today, it promotes crudity and trashes Christianity, especially Catholicism. Enter the “The Three Stooges.” The movie is a cultural marker of sociological significance. What it says about the way we’ve changed is not encouraging.
According to one AP movie critic, the directors “never wanted to tinker with the Stooges.” The New York Times agreed, saying the brothers “strove for absolute fidelity to the original.” CBS News also cites their “loyalty to the subject.”
The slapstick is there, but the TV show never mocked nuns or had infants urinating in the face of the Stooges. The film does.
The Stooges seek to raise money for their orphanage run by stereotypical nuns. Swimsuit model Kate Upton plays one of the sisters and is shown wearing a “nun bikini” with a large rosary around her neck. Sister Mary-Mengele, named after the Nazi war criminal, is played by Seinfeld creator Larry David.
On his own show in 2009, David splattered urine on a picture of Jesus in a Catholic home. He recently told Conan O’Brien that dressing as a nun in the film made it easy to understand why nuns are “so mean.” He said, “You know, the outfits might have something to do with that. Forget about the fact that they never have sex. If you gave me a choice of no sex or having to wear that outfit the rest of my life, I would definitely take the no sex.”
