Sit back, click and enjoy a great old vaudeville/burlesque sketch. Years ago, I met a professor-type who was trying to research the origin of this one. What he found was about nineteen different comedians had nineteen different stories about how they wrote it and how everyone stole it from them. At some point though, it became part of the more-or-less public domain repertoire that comedians working in revues then drew from. There were a lot of comics doing this material, often in their own, personalized versions — some of which they copyrighted — on stages the world over. Later on film and television, Abbott and Costello had their interpretation and the Three Stooges had theirs, and there were a couple of other folks who did it now and then, sometimes changing the "trigger word."
You'll understand what I mean when you see it…and you'll probably remember the bit. Here are the Stooges doing what they did best: Beating the crap out of one of their own…
