The Farrelly brothers' version of the Stooges: from left, Will Sasso as Curly, Chris Diamantopoulos as Moe and Sean Hayes as Larry.  THE new “Three Stooges” movie, opening Friday, brings the knuckleheaded stalwarts of American comedy back to the big screen and into the present day. Given that the film could just as well be called “Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest,” it also brings its directors, Peter and Bobby Farrelly, full circle, back to the vaudeville anarchy and blunt slapstick antics of their expulsive debut.  The Farrelly brothers (Peter, left, and Bobby) grew up watching the original Three Stooges on television.  Thanks to an immortal scene featuring Jeff Daniels, a dose of extra-strength laxative and a broken toilet, the Farrellys’ “Dumb and Dumber” (1994) became a hit and a cultural phenomenon. A convenient peg for innumerable essays on the dumbing down of American culture, the movie was also credited and blamed for ushering in a new era of scatological comedy, never mind that bad-taste transgressions were by then familiar to several generations of filmgoers, whether from “Animal House” or from John Waters.  The Farrellys’ early hits may have demonstrated the financial viability of toilet humor — an epiphany that haunts us to this day — but the brothers have always resisted the gross-out tag. Disgust is at most half of the equation. Their movies thrive on a distinctive mix of profanity and pathos, on the happy, bracing coexistence of a low brow and a big heart.  Their underdog heroes include some of the more sympathetic incarnations of the comic man-child: Ben Stiller’s smitten suitor in “There’s Something About Mary” (1998); the sexually frustrated married men (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) of last year’s “Hall Pass.” Not insignificantly, their put-upon schmoes are often coping with conditions more serious than arrested development. Woody Harrelson’s bowler in “Kingpin” (1996) has a prosthetic hand. Jim Carrey’s state trooper in “Me, Myself and Irene” (2000) has multiple-personality disorder. The protagonists of “Stuck on You” (2003) are a pair of conjoined twins, played by the emphatically dissimilar Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear.  The basic components of Farrelly humor — absurdist raunch, compensatory sentimentality, an unmistakably male point of view — have become commonplace in a comedy landscape ruled by Judd Apatow and Todd Phillips. But none of their successors have matched the boldness or generosity of the Farrellys at their best. Their outrageous gags and their obsession with bodily functions (or rather malfunctions) are well documented. Less remarked upon is the sly double-edged effect of their films, where colorblind casting or the use of actors with disabilities can function equally as sight gag and social comment, and where the comic traditions of cruelty and mortification are subsumed into a spirit of inclusiveness. As the brothers see it, the capacity to experience pain, misery and humiliation is an endless and unifying source of both humor and poignancy.  Which is where Moe, Larry and Curly come in.  Growing up in Cumberland, R.I., in the 1960s, the Farrellys discovered the Stooges on TV. “In my lifetime no one has brought me more laughs than the Three Stooges,” Peter Farrelly said by phone recently.  The kinship is not hard to explain: Both on screen and off the Stooges were the ultimate underdogs. “They never got the first-class treatment they deserved,” said Peter Farrelly, who has been working on the “Three Stooges” project with his brother since the late 1990s. “Every kid in my neighborhood knew and loved the Stooges. Now it’s maybe every third kid, and that to us is sacrilege.”  The Stooges, made up most famously of the brothers Moe and Curly Howard and Larry Fine (Shemp — Moe and Curly’s older brother — replaced the ailing Curly in 1946), have always had their cultists, who found them in reruns and on home video. (The nearly 200 shorts they cranked out for Columbia from 1934 to 1959 are available in DVD boxed sets.) Fans gather on online forums and at annual conventions; the Stoogeum, outside Philadelphia, is a monument to Stooges merchandise and memorabilia. But the Stooges have long been sidelined by film buffs and historians, who tend to favor the more respectable clowning of the Marx brothers.  Various biographical accounts have recounted the story of the Stooges. It’s a sad tale of ill health, disruptive personnel changes and constant exploitation — first by Ted Healy, a comedian who featured the Stooges as sidekicks in his vaudeville act, and then by the miserly Columbia studio head Harry Cohn.  The Farrellys’ film avoids this biopic fodder, opting instead to channel the knockabout energy of the best-known Stooges shorts. Lifting a setup straight from the “Blues Brothers” movie — Moe, Larry and Curly resolve to save the orphanage where they grew up — the film thrusts its hapless heroes into a murder plot and somehow lands Moe on “Jersey Shore.” (The script has been kicking around for so long that the initial plan, Mr. Farrelly said, was for him to get a makeover on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”) The reality-TV twist may seem incongruous, but topical satire was part of the Stooges arsenal; they often spoofed the westerns and war movies of the day.  The Farrellys agreed that it made commercial sense to modernize — no pie fights, for one thing — but Peter Farrelly said that to a large extent they strove for absolute fidelity to the original: “They had to look the same, sound the same, talk the same, dress the same.” Die-hards, they realized, would not tolerate deviation when it came to characters who had hardened into legend: Moe, the impotent leader with his mood swings and undercurrent of simmering rage; Larry, with his goggle eyes and frizzy mop of yankable hair; Curly with his trilling falsetto and subverbal yelps and nyuk-nyuks. The Farrellys also painstakingly preserved the famous sound effects: the boinks and thumps of all those head smacks and eye pokes and sledgehammers to the skull.  During the years in development a parade of actors came and went, some more likely than others: Mr. Carrey, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Hank Azaria. The Farrellys have slipped several well-known faces into the supporting cast — Jane Lynch and Larry David as orphanage nuns (yes, Mr. David plays Sister Mary Mengele) — but of the leads, the sitcom and Broadway veteran Sean Hayes, as Larry, is the closest thing to a name. Will Sasso, of “Mad TV,” and Chris Diamantopoulos, whose credits include “24,” play Curly and Moe.
The Farrelly brothers finally get their version of the Three Stooges on the screen, with a plot borrowed from the âBlues Brothersâ and an appearance on âJersey Shore.â