Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
How The Three Stooges, icons of early film and late-night TV, inspired one late super-fan to carve his interest in the comedy troupe into his headstone.
Even now, cable networks like IFC and AMC run the Stooges at odd times, in the middle of the night, mostly on weekends, as fillers between other movies. In some ways, their broad brand of slapstick humor has grown into a niche endeavor in the modern day—in part because more sophisticated takes on physical humor (think the eyerolls and subtle cringeiness of The Office and its variants, or Paul Rudd’s cafeteria scene from Wet Hot American Summer) have made the pokes and prods of Moe Howard and his second bananas seem a little dull.
But they were trailblazers whose shorts crucially were perfect for the television era, and their fast-paced humor won them a lot of fans. Perhaps the most dedicated of these fans, as it turns out, is a man who died a decade ago. James Bechtold, a longtime resident of Metuchen, New Jersey who spent decades as a firefighter in the town, was by all accounts a well-loved guy whose sense of humor was shaped by The Three Stooges.
When he died in February 2007 at the premature age of 50, he specifically asked for a gravestone design in his will that honored that appreciation of the Stooges, along with a simple message about what the Stooges meant to him: “Laugh, don’t weep, it feels better!” The result is that Bechtold is the only deceased person in the world with a gravestone featuring The Three Stooges.
(Image credit: Susan Kane/Find a Grave)
“It was in his will, that’s what he wanted,” noted Robert Donnan, the Metuchen fire chief, in comments to CBS New York. “When you go to visit him, rather than sitting there with a tear you see the Three Stooges looking at you, and you can’t help but laugh.”
The hard part about the gravestone was that many U.S. stone-carvers would not take on the gig because of the copyright infringement necessary to sculpt Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly Howard to last for hundreds of years. So, Bechtold’s family had a Chinese factory take it on.
While Curly Joe DeRita, the later replacement for Jerome “Curly” Howard during the television era, wasn’t featured in Bechtold’s sculpture, DeRita’s face can be seen on another gravestone elsewhere—his own, located in Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood, California. DeRita outlived every other Stooge, making it until 1993.
A version of this post by Ernie Smith originally appeared in the Tedium newsletter, which tries in vain to make dull topics slightly more interesting. You can follow along on Twitter or Facebook.