The Farrellys bring back the Stooges

The sound of "nyuk, nyuk, nyuk" will be heard across the land when "The Three Stooges" -- the Farrelly brothers' long-awaited tribute to the slapstick comedy legends -- opens Friday, introducing the trio to a new generation of knuckleheads, featuring the three Stooges you'd most expect to see.

"You can't make the . . . Stooges [movie]," said writer-director Peter Farrelly, "without it being Moe, Larry and Curly."

The fact is there were a lot of Stooges if you count everybody who got bopped, boinked and banged around since the act started in 1922.

But the Farrellys are purists -- of a sort: Their own Stooge-inspired oeuvre includes "Dumb & Dumber," "There's Something About Mary" and "Me, Myself & Irene." At the same time, in their version of "The Three Stooges," the characters have a back story: The three brothers are not, for instance, dropped on the doorstep of the orphanage. The duffel bag they're in is thrown from a speeding car. (Upon opening said bag, Sister Mary-Mengele, played by Larry David, gets poked in the eyes by Baby Moe.)

Essentially, said Peter Farrelly, the movie's stars -- Chris Diamantopoulos ("Up All Night," "24") as Moe; Sean Hayes ("Will & Grace") as Larry, and TV vet Will Sasso as Curly -- are intended to be "clones" of the originals. This strategy presented one more obstacle to a movie that has been the subject of discussions that occasionally included the casting of such unlikely personages as Sean Penn and Robert De Niro.

"We'd meet with big movie stars," Farrelly said, "and they'd say, 'I want to do my take on Larry.' And we'd say 'Uh, no . . . we want you to do Larry as Larry, copy his every mannerism, his nasal voice, his Philadelphia accent,' and they didn't like that. It was daunting for an actor. We kept losing our people."