In March, seventy years after the release of the first Three Stooges short, “Woman Haters”—the only one spoken in rhyming couplets—Peter and Bobby Farrelly met up in a hotel in the ski resort of Sun Valley, Idaho, to resume work on a script that they started two years ago and that some people hope they never finish. The brothers, who wrote and directed “Dumb & Dumber,” “There’s Something About Mary,” “Shallow Hal,” and other vulgar, warmhearted comedies, had a month to produce the second draft of “The Three Stooges,” a script that places the trio in the present day, and gives them a degree of present-day frankness about bodily functions—as well as access to chain saws and microwave ovens. The deadline had been set, in part, by Russell Crowe, whom they were hoping to cast as Moe, the angriest and most violent Stooge.

The afternoon of their first day in Idaho, the Farrellys and their co-writer on the script, Mike Cerrone, a friend since childhood, were in Peter’s room, scrutinizing a scene that updates a familiar Stooge setup. Moe (pudding-bowl haircut), Larry (unruly hair), and Curly (no hair) are dressed in white medical scrubs, standing around a nun lying semi-conscious on an operating table with her abdomen cut open. The Stooges work on her with an electric toothbrush, and then with a vacuum cleaner. Peter—a little clump of beard on his chin, loose corduroy pants—read aloud from the script while Bobby sat in an armchair, his feet, in clean white sneakers, propped on the coffee table: “As Moe sticks the nozzle in and starts vacuuming, we hear some big stuff clanking and rattling up into the machine. Suddenly, there’s a whining sound, as if something’s stuck. Curly turns it off and Moe holds up the vacuum nozzle, revealing a wishbone stuck in the end. Larry and Curly each grab an end and start pulling.” Peter paused. “You know, I think Moe should take the thing. He’s got to use it as a weapon. He wouldn’t let that get by.”

Should Moe, in typical fashion, jam the wishbone up Larry’s nose? Should Moe use the wishbone to hook Larry’s nose and, holding him off the ground, give him a karate chop to the neck? Or should the bone go in one nostril and out the other? As the three men debated the matter, they wandered in and out of the bathroom and then out onto the terrace. It offered a sunny view of the valley, which was beginning to thaw and drip; below, a few people were skating to Sinatra songs on an ice rink.

Bobby, who, at forty-five, is the younger of the brothers by eighteen months, answered his cell phone—“Mmm-yello!”—and talked with his wife and children, who have been living with him in a rented house in Sun Valley for the past year. Peter, who has longer hair and a longer face than Bobby, brewed green tea and took vitamins. (Both Farrellys are family men who like to golf, and although their films are known for drawing likable, romantic-comedy characters into graphic sexual and digestive set pieces, they are not in a perpetually boisterous, spring-break mood. “There’s a lot at stake,” Peter had said earlier. “It’s the Stooges. There’s a huge fan base. To some, this is sacrilege.”) Cerrone began whistling the Stooges’“Three Blind Mice” theme. A big, square-jawed former pro-hockey player and car dealer, he is a kind of Farrelly muse, for whom lust and anger are similarly expressed through gritted teeth.

“You took the turd out, yeah?” he said, recalling a gag from an early draft.

“What turd out?” Peter replied, distractedly.

“You remember the turd.”

“Oh, yeah, it lands in a woman’s mouth, and Larry says, ‘Hey! What’s the big idea? No smoking!’’’

They returned to the wishbone, and agreed that it should go up one nostril but not out the other. “We don’t want a special-effects fest,” Bobby said. Peter began to read again, switching voices from Stooge to Stooge. “Moe: ‘Forceps.’ Larry: ‘Sorry, my rabbi got mine. . . .’ Moe: ‘Oh, a wise guy, eh? Open your mouth.’ Larry does so and Moe jams an eggbeater in and begins twirling. . . .”

In the early decades of cinema, a feature film was likely to be preceded by a burst of slapstick: a two-reel comedy, fifteen or so minutes long. The Three Stooges made a hundred and ninety of these shorts for Columbia Pictures. Shot cheaply over a few days, and originally with a lineup of Moe Howard, Curly Howard, and Larry Fine—their given names were Moses Horwitz, Jerome Horwitz, and Louis Fienberg—a Stooges comedy typically featured three short men failing badly as detectives, firemen, or veterinarians. Plots were minimal: “The Stooges are plumbers; there’s your plot,” as Bobby Farrelly put it. Of the three, Moe was the scowling leader—a caricature of adulthood. Larry was the fragile, wounded adolescent of the group (“One of us is crazy, and it ain’t you,” he says to Moe, in “Crash Goes the Hash”); and Curly was the disturbed child, with a private language of winsomely balletic arm movements, yelps, barks, and the “nyuk, nyuk, nyuk” of short-lived satisfaction. (After Curly suffered a series of strokes, in the mid-forties, he was replaced by Shemp, a third Howard brother, who had performed with them in vaudeville, and who claimed the title of “the ugliest man in Hollywood.” Curly died in 1952, and when Shemp died of a heart attack, in 1955, he was replaced by Joe Besser, whose brief Stooges career was doomed by his contractual refusal to be hit.)

The trio’s humor was in large part verbal—Lawyer: “Drop the vernacular.” Curly: “Vernacular? That’s a derby”—but what distinguished the Stooges from their live-action competition was a level of accidental and deliberate violence more often seen in cartoons. To the amusement of some people more than others, the Stooges jab fingers into one another’s eyes, swing skillets and icepicks, and combine these blows into elaborately choreographed sequences. There can be seventy face slaps in a single short. “What’s that for? We didn’t do nothin’!” Larry and Curly complain after a double slap from Moe in “Hoi Polloi” (1935). “That’s in case you do, and I’m not around,” Moe explains. Stooges fans become connoisseurs of this material. In his book “The Complete Three Stooges,” Jon Solomon notes that in “Slippery Silks” (1936) “there is no sound effect when Curly plunges scissors into Moe’s rear; ‘plink’ will not be used until 1941.”

Columbia dropped the trio in 1957, and closed the shorts department the following year. But, as histories of the Stooges recall, it was at this same moment that television revived their back catalogue, and by 1959 old Stooges shorts were being shown on television stations across America. The Stooges—now with Curly Joe DeRita in place of Joe Besser—entered a kind of posthumous golden age. They earned no residual payments from TV but took advantage of their renewed fame by making personal appearances, and starring in a handful of unloved full-length features—“The Three Stooges in Orbit,” “Snow White and the Three Stooges”—that tested their audience’s stamina for watching what were now quite elderly men stiffly slapping each other without cause or effect.

The Farrelly brothers were born in 1956 and 1958, and watched old Stooges reruns in the living room of their suburban Rhode Island home. The Farrellys’ father, a doctor, and their mother, a nurse-practitioner, discouraged the boys and their three sisters from watching weekday television, and “there were much bigger Stoogeophiles than us,” Bobby recalled. “Most of the kids in school knew all the lines and could imitate the characters. We were never the class clowns. We were the audience for the class clowns.” But they knew enough to be fans; for Peter, the Stooges’ appeal lay not only in the intoxicating excess of hitting but also in their implied promise that adulthood would feel much like childhood. “You know, I remember being ten or eleven and making a pact with my friends that when we got older, whatever happened, we’d all live on the same street,” he said. “We knew there would be families and so on, but we didn’t want to ever part. The Stooges seemed to have pulled that off. They were grown men, but they still acted like boys.” Peter has a theory of Stooge appreciation, based upon his own changing allegiances: “Growing up, first you watched Curly, then Moe, and then your eyes got to Larry. He’s the reactor, the most vulnerable. Five to fourteen, Curly; fourteen to twenty-one, Moe. Anyone out of college, if you’re not looking at Larry, you don’t have a good brain.”

Moe and Larry died in 1975. The Farrellys became adults—Peter emerging as the more voluble brother, more neurotic, more left-wing, and quicker to expose himself in public. Whereas Bobby could be persuaded at weddings to strip to his underwear and imitate a sumo wrestler, Peter’s trick was to wait for the dancing to begin, then collect an armful of unattended cameras, and, in the bathroom, take one memorable photograph with each camera.

Peter first worked as a salesman, then got an M.F.A. at Columbia University (where, next month, he will give a commencement address). In 1985, he moved to Los Angeles to write comedy. Bobby joined him not long after, having failed to market circular beach towels that did not need to be turned as the sun moved. In 1994, the brothers had a worldwide hit when they directed their own screenplay, “Dumb & Dumber,” in which Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels drive across America in a Stooge-like state of alert incomprehension, establishing a Farrelly template of male characters who are simultaneously adult and adolescent. Two years later, as the brothers were working on a follow-up, “Kingpin,” it struck them that no one had made a modern Stooges movie—“a complete oversight,” according to Peter. Their lawyer (who is also one of their sisters) learned that the rights to the Stooges names and images were held by C3 Entertainment, a company controlled by the ensemble’s heirs. They were emerging from a long period of inter-Stooge legal disputes—one imagines pokes in the eye, crunched noses—and were eager to license a movie project. “But we couldn’t come up with the right formula,” Earl Benjamin, the president of C3 and the stepson of Curly Joe DeRita, recalled. “I saw dozens of scripts, most of them awful. We had ’em frozen and coming from the past. We had ’em going to a psychologist to see why they were violent. I remember a meeting with Amy Pascal”—then the chairman of Columbia Pictures—“and she said, ‘Why don’t we have them show their feminine side?’’’ Benjamin laughed. “I said, ‘Amy, they’re the Stooges—they don’t have a feminine side.’”

The Farrellys had an equally frustrating discussion with a Hollywood executive. “He did not seem respectful of what the Stooges are,” Peter recalled. “He was rolling his eyes.” Finally, in 2000, the Farrellys met with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who at the time was the head of production at Warner Bros. Pictures. The Farrellys were expected to lay out some kind of story line, but, as Benjamin remembered it, “Pete and Bobby sat down, and then Pete looked at Lorenzo and he just said, ‘Dumb, Dumber & Dumbest.’ And Lorenzo said, ‘Sold.’”

I recently spoke with Kathleen Chamberlain, who teaches in the Department of English at Emory & Henry College, in Virginia, and is part of a tiny community of academics who have studied the Three Stooges. She has published a paper, “The Three Stooges and the Commedia dell’Arte,” and has given lectures on the trio at meetings of the Popular Culture Association. Chamberlain said that although the Stooges shorts can barely be said to have plots, they collectively have “a contextual arc. Their triumph—slapstick and silly though it is—is often over the pretensions of the rich and the stuffed-shirted. And, even if the Stooges don’t change very much, they say a lot about the ability of the ordinary person—and they’re even less than the ordinary person—to survive.” A contemporary Stooges film, she suggested, would need to supplement this background hum of optimism with something more solid—she recommended as a possible model “A Night at the Opera,” in which the Marx Brothers find purpose by giving aid to young lovers. Chamberlain said that she trusted the Farrellys, who have been adept at organizing anarchic material into engaging plots; she even identifies in their work a vaguely Stooge-like response to women. “In the Farrelly universe, there’s a woman present, but she’s always sort of alien,” she said, citing the characters played by Cameron Diaz, in “There’s Something About Mary,” and Gwyneth Paltrow, in “Shallow Hal.” “That’s also the Stooges: a world in which women aren’t really necessary. The boys function happily together; they share a giant bed. Women come along now and then, but it’s a world of friendship and bonding, where emotional needs and physical needs are met by the male community.”

Stooges fans outside the academy are more wary. Earl Benjamin receives messages every week advising against the project, and a recent discussion on threestooges.net, a fan Web site, was filled with disapproval. “What I’ve always feared is this film will be no more than a pastiche of familiar (to us anyways) Stoogian scenes, without the inspiration that the Stooges could bring to fairly ordinary plot elements, with gross-out humor added to ‘update’ the comedy,” wrote one contributor, adding that he doubted that the Farrellys could equal the original trio’s “unique combination of vaudeville sensibility, sight gags, oddball satire, and utter mayhem.”

“Here’s an idea,” another fan wrote, facetiously. “How about getting Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly Howard to play . . . Moe, Larry, and Curly? If they can’t get those actors (and nobody else) to play the parts, then they should pack it in.” Another wrote, “I don’t care if you get John Gielgud, Ian McKellen, and Ben Kingsley to play the Stooges: the movie will suck.”

Earl Benjamin thought of the Farrellys as the “kings of physical comedy”—but they had not made slapstick of a kind that the Stooges would recognize. Their films had Stooge-like moments, including the snowball thrown into a woman’s face in “Dumb & Dumber” (the scene became funny to test-screening audiences only after the Farrellys added, at the moment of contact, the sound effect of Hank Aaron hitting a home run); and the Farrellys did share with the Stooges a willingness to keep a gag going longer than an audience expected—rediscovering the laugh with a postscripted, after-the-calm hit (or, in the case of a famous scene in “Dumb & Dumber,” shit). But, as Bobby told me, “Ours isn’t slapping comedy, it’s sight-gag comedy”—a distinction reinforced by “There’s Something About Mary,” which has made three hundred and sixty-five million dollars since its release, in 1998, and is best known for the scenes involving Ben Stiller’s genitals being caught in a zipper, and semen mistaken for hair gel by Cameron Diaz.

The Farrellys sat down with Mike Cerrone in January, 2002, in a rented house in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to write a first draft of the script. The challenge was evident. “How the hell do you maintain a movie that’s a slap fest for an hour and a half, without losing the audience?” Peter recently asked. “And how do you make the audience give a shit in the last fifteen minutes, if it’s the Stooges? You’ve got to care, even if it’s just a little. ‘Dumb & Dumber’ was slapstick, a lot of set pieces, but you gave a shit. Ultimately, you wanted to know what happened with Jim Carrey and that girl—even if only just a little.” For all their moments of unblinking obscenity, the Farrellys are traditional filmmakers, who seem to have tricked a generation of young men into enjoying romantic comedies. Although the R-rated “Me, Myself & Irene” (2000) had scenes—such as one in which Jim Carrey sucked a woman’s lactating breast—that Chris Weitz, the co-director of “American Pie,” found “as disturbing as any crazy European art film,” the Farrellys had by 2002 begun what they half-seriously call their “sweet trilogy.” These PG-13-rated romances took on subjects that seem at first too delicate to be handled by the Farrellys (obesity, conjoined twins, and—in their recently finished film, “The Ringer”—the Special Olympics). Yet the protagonists follow arcs of self-improvement, and the movies promote themes of equality and decency.

The Three Stooges, of course, never saw an arc in their lives. “They’re cartoon guys, they’re bulletproof—you hit them and they don’t really hurt,” Bobby said. Movies are about advancement, and yet the Stooges never advance. (A “Seinfeld” episode once traded on this idea, by having an aging actress recall her bit part in an imaginary Stooges short, one in which “the boys are sent to death row and are executed. . . . It was sad for the Three Stooges, what with the dead baby and the Stooges being executed and all.”) The Farrellys were comfortable with characters who learned nothing—they had successfully fought with studio executives to keep Carrey and Daniels from accepting a ride on a bus full of young women in bikinis in the final scene of “Dumb & Dumber.” (They promised to shoot it both ways but then pretended that fading light had prevented them from filming the actors getting onto the bus.) The greater difficulty was that the Stooges live in a world without consequences, in a perpetual present tense. To give them a quest even at the level of Jim Carrey’s in “Dumb & Dumber” was to risk giving them dignity—and dignity could corrode them.

Bobby Farrelly was probably less anxious about this challenge than Peter. “Plots are for pussies,” Bobby likes to say. He told me, “The last couple of films, as we were making them, we were thinking, It’s got a nice message. But originally we never thought about that stuff—to me, it gets in the way of being real funny. Who goes to see ‘Dumb & Dumber’ for the plot?” He later added, “I love it when you have people flat out laughing their ass off. I’d rather do that than have the audience go ‘Awwww.’ People were coming out of ‘Mary’ saying they’d pissed their pants. That’s it right there. Any time when you can make someone involuntarily piss, your life is better for it.” But he also knew how numbing a Stooges TV marathon could be; he saw the need for some “heart or backstory. Just to fill in the gaps, so you can put up with the hitting.”

Why is Moe so angry? The question may never have been asked, but the Farrellys tentatively began to answer it. They worked for weeks on an opening that showed the Stooges on death row, telling their story to a priest. (The movie would have continued in flashback, before eventually returning to the jail, to show the Stooges as prison guards who, by telling their story, have just squandered the final hours of the priest, who has been sentenced to die.) They cut this, and began instead with a laundry bag thrown from a moving DeSoto; it lands on the steps of a drab brick building. A nun crouches and peers into the bag. Then—doink!—a baby’s arm reaches out and pokes her in the eye. “When we came up with the orphanage, it seemed a real good fit,” Bobby recalled. “We decided that Moe’s anger has to do with the fact that the three of them were put in an orphanage and Moe had a chance to go out and make it on his own, but he thought, I can’t leave these knuckleheads behind. He comes back and he feels that he gave up everything to stay and be the leader of these Stooges—because as bad as they are with him, in his eyes they’re sunk without him.” (The Farrellys always planned to use the original lineup of Moe, Larry, and Curly, although there may be room for Shemp in a sequel.)

In the Farrellys’ emerging scenario, the Stooges leave the orphanage as adults, they split up, and they find that in the outside world the rules of violence are different. (Moe slaps a man who cries out, “What, are you crazy? That’s assault!” Moe responds, “Well, here’s your pepper,” and he does it again.) The brothers moved slowly, keeping within the bounds of a PG-13 rating but allowing themselves to go beyond the usual range of the Three Stooges, who never before squeezed babies to make them urinate. Peter told me that there were loud disagreements about a scene at the end of the script involving balloons: “The image of them farting into a balloon—that cracked me up. Bobby was saying, ‘I think this is beneath us.’ I didn’t. I think he was just burned out on slapstick.” (It was an unexpected argument, given that Bobby has been known to say that “a fart is the one thing that is funny in every language” and had suggested to me that “they could use a bit of that in ‘The Passion of the Christ.’”)

The balloon scene remained, but, for fear of causing harm to children, other gags were taken out, including a scene in which Larry falls asleep in the bath and Moe wakes him by throwing in a radio. “And Larry comes up, hair all like this”—describing the scene, Peter held his hands wide apart, and he mimicked Larry Fine’s voice—“‘What are you doing, Moe?’ Well, it occurred to us that some kid will do that, thinking it’s funny. We had to cut it.” (They also decided to defuse the violence by showing, during the end credits, the plasticity of apparently hard objects used as weapons in the movie.)

The first draft took seven months, longer than any of their previous scripts. “At the end, we were fried—fried,” Peter said, and although they were happy with the first and second acts, they were troubled by the end. Some emotional tug was missing, some Stooge-like substitute for Diaz or Paltrow. As it stood, the script had the Stooges trying to save their orphanage from closing, “but that’s a little vague,” Peter said. “There’s some funny shit, but we’ve got to find a through-line, a thread that’s going to get you to the end, have people stay in their seats. We have to crack that.”

If one can leave aside the billion dollars that their films have earned, it’s possible to think of the Farrellys as industry outsiders. Jeff Daniels has compared them to “lottery winners cut loose in Hollywood.” They are easy, open company. Both are married to women they knew before they were rich; they fill their films with friends from home. On a recent long drive through the Rockies with the Farrellys and Mike Cerrone, the conversation was about Rhode Island school friends who had died in freak accidents or lived lives of spectacular deceit; about the comparative virtues of bathrooms in roadside hotel chains (“Holiday Inn, maybe, but Holiday Inn Express? I don’t need the pressure,” Peter said); and about the casting for “The Three Stooges,” which is likely to have a budget of between fifty and seventy million dollars.

“Until Russell Crowe says no, we can’t go to anybody else,” Bobby said, and the others agreed. Peter and the Farrellys’ longtime producer, Bradley Thomas, had recently met with Crowe in Sydney. “He’s the best actor working today,” Peter told me, “and he’s got a bit of a chip on his shoulder, and a block-nosed Moe look. All you have to do is put prosthetic bags under his eyes and give him a haircut.” Crowe initially said that he was not interested; then they had a big night out that ended at Crowe’s apartment in the early hours, and when Peter got up to leave, at 5 a.m., to appear for an interview on Australian morning television, Crowe called him a “despicable pussy” for breaking up the party. But Crowe did say, “Send me the stupid script.” When Crowe later spoke with him, Peter said, “He said he laughed his ass off but didn’t like the ending. So now we’re going to send him the new draft.”

“The Three Stooges” is due to start shooting in mid-October, and you can hear in Bradley Thomas’s voice an urgency about settling on a cast. “If you do this, you’re a Stooge,” he said. “You can’t just turn up and be an actor. If you’re going to be Curly, you’ve got to learn how to be Curly.” Bobby added, “They are going to have to spend a few weeks together, learning how to slap each other. Nobody has done this since the Stooges.” He knows of no specialists to hire. “It’s not like there’s a bunch of guys somewhere still poking each other in the eye. We’re just going to have to slow the films down and study how they did it.”

If the Farrellys still sounded relaxed, “it’s because we have a Zen approach to casting,” Peter said. “Here’s the thing. If you get everything you want, then it’s going to be as good as you wanted it, but if you don’t get what you want, then it could be better. If I think of all the women I might have married before I met my wife . . .” He said that Jim Carrey was “our two-hundredth choice” for “Dumb & Dumber”; Ben Stiller was their eighth for “There’s Something About Mary.”

Warner Bros. has asked the Farrellys to choose a Moe before they cast the others. The Three Stooges were short men, and will appear short in this film. (“If they look bigger, then the hitting is ‘The Sopranos,’” Peter said.) It will be easy to cast very tall actors around fairly tall actors like Russell Crowe, but it would be best if the Stooges were all the same height. “If Russell doesn’t want it, then we should go straight back to Benicio,” Peter said from the passenger seat; the Farrellys had spoken with Benicio Del Toro, but Warner Bros. had balked at his asking price. “That could still work—Benicio . . . and Sean Penn as Larry.” The Farrellys have envisioned other casting scenarios. Peter later told me, “I’ve asked Larry David to play Larry maybe twenty-five times. He whines, ‘I don’t want to leave my family.’ Now I talk to him as if he’s in. It gives him a little panic each time.” The Farrellys have also entertained the idea of Mel Gibson as Moe—Gibson is an admirer of the Stooges, and was the executive producer of a Stooges bio-pic in 2000. “He’s a good actor, and he could use a movie like this, just for his own health,” Bobby said. “Just do a dumb comedy.”

"Look at those colors,” Peter said as we drove across high desert: tumbleweed, distant mountains. “Pfff,” Cerrone said, in mock disdain. Bobby, in the voice of Moe, said, “Ya like colors? How about black and blue?” Peter initiated a simple game: naming a type of vegetable, in turn, until none were left. This lasted for a hundred miles, and involved controversies about rhubarb and tomatoes, and ended when Cerrone was caught reading the back of a vegetable-soup can at a gas station. Reviving a form of schoolroom torture, Peter now and then grabbed at his fellow-passengers at a point just above the knee and held the leg for a moment in a crushing grip. When CDs were played, he mimed along to songs with the wrong instrument—violin for guitar, flute for piano—following an old family joke that has found its way into the script of “The Three Stooges.” At one point, Cerrone performed a favorite party gag: a five-minute impression of someone using a vibrator.

Late that night, still beset with anxiety about the risks of an hour and a half of slapstick, Bobby and Cerrone had a breakthrough: What if they split “The Three Stooges” into four episodes? The script would still tell the same story, but each of its acts would almost stand alone, at the approximate length of a Stooges short. The movie would fade to black, then fade up again, with Stooges theme music and a new title. The audience would get its bearings—and a sense that slapstick had been contained in its proper length. The Farrellys and Cerrone discussed this over breakfast the next morning. “I tell you the truth, I think it’s a really smart idea,” Peter said. “You know, this may interest Russell Crowe.” He added that he had already thought of a title for the first episode: “More Orphan Than Not.”

Every morning in Sun Valley, the Farrellys and Cerrone went to the gym and ate a late breakfast. Then, in Peter’s room, they would begin a four- or five-hour conversation that covered, for example, whether “orphanage,” when spoken by the Stooges, was spelled “oiphanage” or “oyphanage,” and whether Curly’s trademark chuckle could follow an accidental pun. (“No, ‘nyuk, nyuk, nyuk’ is only when he knows he’s kidding,” Peter ruled.) A new draft began to appear, incorporating the episodic structure—“How about this for the second title: ‘Cocks and Balls’?” Peter suggested. “It fades up, and they’re kicking a soccer ball and there’s a chicken around. And then it just goes on.” The others laughed.

In an afternoon session, Bobby said, “The scene we don’t have is where they sit down at some dinner table with fancier people.”

“We have a party at the end,” Peter replied, adding, “I don’t like the dinner-table bit. The Stooges did it to death; it’s kind of hard to beat it.” He paused. “One thing we don’t have here is the ultimate hit fest. Where it’s whoosh, ding, bong, bing”—he was miming punches. “And then, when you think it’s all over, there are a couple more. Boom, dong, bing, whoosh. It’s always funnier the further it goes. Those last two kill you. You think it’s over and then you get a whoosh, boom. We’ve got a lot of hitting but not one set that goes beyond normal. We need one real long one.”

Mike Cerrone began miming, too: “It goes, you know, bang, then whoosh, whoosh—right?—and then he goes whoosh.‘Hey! What’s the big idea?’” Cerrone, who is a talented Stooges mimic, a sometime actor in Farrelly films, and a possible Curly in the movie, demonstrated Moe grabbing at Larry’s hair, then trying to do the same with Curly, who has none. He had Moe looking at his empty hand.

“You know, you could do one where he puts his hand down Curly’s pants,” Peter said. He stood up, and mimed Moe grabbing some pubic hair inside Curly’s pants, and then, with a crunching sound, pulling it up: “Yeaww!”

They laughed at this perfect synthesis of Farrelly and Stooge.

“Yeaooooow!” Bobby said, holding an imaginary fistful of hair. “You could have a bird flying out of it . . . ”

“Yes, it’s a little nest with birds in it,” said Cerrone, fluttering his wings.

“Yeah, there you go!” Peter said, in the tone of a man who has done a good day’s work. “There you go.”