Are the Three Stooges martyrs, demons, or splendid anti-role models?

The Three Stooges, which airs Monday on ABC, is a heart-tugger. Its stooge protagonists are clown saints—martyrs to the violence in their own comedy as well as to the moguls who made millions off their punishing smacks and eye-pokes. When the movie opens, an aging Moe Howard (Paul Ben-Victor) is a glorified errand boy on the Columbia Pictures lot, his brothers Curly (Michael Chiklis) and Shemp (John Kassir) are long dead (historically, Shemp preceded Curly and then replaced him after he had a stroke), the Three Stooges are kaput. For the next two hours, the film flashes backward and forward, from the team's early vaudeville days through their years under contract to studio head Harry Cohn, to whom they signed away their rights, residuals, and all hope of making movies longer than 18 minutes. The birth of the Stooges' most legendary slapstick is juxtaposed against Moe's guilt over the fate of his fragile brothers, who are like fallen comrades in arms—bloodied, abandoned, unremunerated. Did years of slaps and pokes kill Curly (stroke) and Shemp (heart attack)? Hard to say for sure, but The Three Stooges builds to Moe's vindication. No, it's more than a vindication. After television resurrects them, the re-formed Three Stooges (the third is "Curly-Joe" De Rita) stand haloed by spotlights before a new generation of roaring young fans. They've become immortal—apotheosized.

In outline, the story is compelling, and it's faithful to the facts as they appear in Michael Fleming's brief illustrated history From Amalgamated Morons to American Icons: The Three Stooges. In execution, however, the movie is stupefyingly bad, a dope-slap in the face for those of us who love the Stooges in spite of our "higher" instincts—who find something mysteriously liberating in those belly bumps and nose boinks and warbles of pain.

Part of the problem is endemic to "biopics," in which journalistic detail gets slotted into the mouths of characters in the vain hope it will pass for dialogue. Poor Linal Haft as Harry Cohn has tongue twisters like "These guys are Columbia's blue-plate special—workin' stiffs who thumb their noses at the hoi-polloi!" The artistic process becomes laughably telescoped, as in the bit in which Moe pokes Larry (Evan Handler) in the eye during a card game and then realizes: "Hey! That's funny!" How did Jerome (a k a "Babe") Howard come by the moniker "Curly"?

And you were there.

Chiklis is so sweet-faced and open that he makes you forget all the other Curly imitators you've seen—but not, for an instant, the original Curly. Paul Ben-Victor has a different kind of face than Moe: convex instead of concave, with rubbery features instead of Moe's haggard, slightly pinched ones. He works hard, but he has a way of subtly signaling that his slaps and punches are gags. Moe rarely stylized his anger: His rage was so funny because it looked real.

There's no point in faulting the actors, however. No one could be a credible Stooge with dialogue this synthetic. Nothing in The Three Stooges brings us closer to understanding either the art or the craft of Moe, Larry, Curly, and Shemp, let alone the working-class anger that's the dark heart of their comedy. There are other film farceurs who loaf, puncture the elites, and introduce chaos into the machine of the capitalist workplace. There are other—far more stylish—linguist acrobats. But no one crafts ballets of abuse like the Stooges. No one else finds such comic sublimity in hitting.

And hitting, of course, is a terrible thing.

One Sunday morning last month, after enduring a half-hour of Teletubbies with my 23-month-old daughter, Lucy, I decided to treat myself to part of a Three Stooges marathon on American Movie Classics. And what of Lucy? She watched the Stooges for a couple of minutes, listened to her daddy yuk it up, and said, with unusual clarity, "Turn it off." She then gave me a whack upside my head.

An obvious question arises from this episode: "What kind of moron lets his 23-month-old daughter watch the Three Stooges?" Maybe one so convinced of the therapeutic nature of knockabout comedy that he forgets that no such therapy can be derived by people who haven't learned to distinguish fantasy from reality. The childlike pleasure to be had from "forbidden" things—e.g., watching grown men slap one another like toddlers—is of no benefit to toddlers, who have yet to grasp the meaning of "forbidden" and would as soon scratch your eyes out as look at you.

"I can't believe you'd show the Three Stooges to your daughter," said a friend, June, who seemed poised to dial the nearest child-welfare agency. When I babbled something about catharsis, Aristotle, and Freud, she said, "Aristotle and Freud were never little sisters. I was. I had to grow up in a house in which my brothers watched the Three Stooges and couldn't wait to try out everything they saw on me." The Stooges, she added, were the reason she became a radical feminist.