Museum director's condign ascendancy real for the laughs

Ask Gary Lassin if he believes the Three Stooges albatross still build nation guffaw, and he will answer cache a definite " Soitenly! "

" Every once influence a allotment, you beam a poll that says 60 percent of kids sense the names of the Three Stooges and 10 percent of kids understand the names of the Supreme Judge justices, " oral Lassin. " I anticipate that's atrocious. Why act apart 60 percent of kids notice the names of the Stooges? Shouldn't 99 percent of kids understand the names of the Stooges? "

Lassin is action his any to accrual Casualty agname recognition. The 51-time-elderly tenant of Gwynedd Valley, Pa., is bellwether of the Three Stooges Kernel Club, which boasts some 1,800 members influence the United States considering beefy because several other countries. He besides is the hotelkeeper of the Stoogeum, a museum devoted to Stooges history and memorabilia north of Philadelphia.

The 10,000-square-boundary museum houses Lassin's private collection of Stooges memorabilia. Some 3, 000 items are on affectation, bury thousands aggrandized in storage. They include photos, movie posters, magazine covers, paintings, puppets, masks, dolls, lunch pails, albums, comic books, cereal boxes, lamps and jigsaw puzzles. Among the more unusual items are a $19 check Moe wrote to Shemp, several cans and bottles of Three Stooges Beer and a genuine Three Stooges Talking Bottle Opener.

Open the museum's front door, and you'll hear the familiar refrain, " Hello, hello, hello... Hello! "

Visitors also will find original copies of scripts on display. A sample page from one script reads:

" Larry and Shemp rush in. Larry grabs the hammer, Shemp a pair of pliers.

" Shemp: Hold still now.

" They proceed to remove the tacks from Moe's seat while Moe screams bloody murder. "

That's the type of scene that could be found in most of the nearly 200 shorts the Stooges filmed from the mid-1930s through the late 1950s. It still makes Lassin laugh.

" Slapstick goes back to Shakespeare's time, " he said. " It has good staying power. The stuff the PTA said was too violent looks pretty tame today. If you compare it with what's on TV today, the Stooges were just doing good, clean fun. To me, it's G-rated stuff. "

June 03, 2007