The Yoke's On Me is the 79th short subject starring the American slapstick comedy team The Three Stooges. The trio made a total of 190 shorts for Columbia Pictures between 1934 and 1959.
THE PLOT
The Stooges try to join the army but are labeled 4-F by the draft board due to Curly having water on the knee. After they decide to go on vacation until a job comes along, their father (Robert McKenzie) insists they aid the war effort instead by becoming farmers. Inspired, the trio sell their dilapidated car and buy an equally dilapidated farm. The farm contains no livestock except for one ostrich, which eats gunpowder. The boys then spot some pumpkins and decide to carve and sell them.
In the interim, several Japanese refugees escape a prison camp (known during World War II as relocation centers), and work their way onto the Stooges' farm. Curly is the first to notice some suspicious activity (one of the refugees places the carved pumpkin on his head, spooking Curly). Eventually, Moe and Larry believe him, and realize that the farm is surrounded by the Japanese. Moe then throws an ostrich egg (laden with digested gunpowder) at the refugees, killing them.
TRIVIA
The Yoke's on Me was filmed on November 8–12, 1943.The film's title is a pun on the expression, "the joke's on me."
Controversy:
During World War II, the Stooges released several comedies that engaged in propaganda against the then-enemy Japanese, including GC6W3GH Curly Howard: Spook Louder ,No Dough Boys, Booby Dupes, and The Yoke's on Me. The Yoke's on Me is especially singled out by modern critics. For many years, the film was blacklisted by some television stations, due to its treatment of Japanese American escapees from a relocation center (the characters are not Japanese POWs).
Author Jon Solomon has said, "no Stooge film so profoundly disturbs modern viewers as this one." Author Michael Fleming put it more bluntly: "Knowing what we do now about how Japanese-born American citizens were mistreated and stripped of their belongings in relocation centers makes this as funny as a train wreck".
QUOTES
- Curly: "Look, look! A pelican!"
- Moe: "That's no pelican, it's a gander."
- Curly: "Mahatma gander?"
- Moe: "No, a gander, a gander! A goose's husband."
- Larry: "Yeah, a papa goose."
- Curly: "Do they have papa gooseses and mama gooseses?"
- Larry: "Oh sure. And little baby gooseses, too."
- Curly: "Oh, I read about them. They come from Germany...the goosetapo!"
PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS
Wow. This one is a fairly strange one. Another one of the Stooges' shorts that wasn't aired on television very much. This one also begins to show the decline of Curly Howard in my view. You can tell a lot of his lines are not as crisp anymore, and seem to be slightly slurred. But the longer clip in the puzzle below still shows Curly's ability to be as zany as ever.
I was intrigued by the concept of the relocation camps of the Japanese-Americans during 1942. And does this short deliver in its racial overtones. So here is another one for you history buffs: (And what an interesting parallel to the times we live in now).
The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II was the forced relocation and incarceration in camps in the interior of the country of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who had lived on the Pacific coast. Sixty-two percent of the internees were United States citizens.These actions were ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt shortly after Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.
Incarceration was applied unequally due to differing population concentrations and, more importantly, state and regional politics: more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, nearly all who lived on the West Coast, were forced into interior camps, but in Hawaii, where the 150,000-plus Japanese Americans composed over one-third of the population, 1,200 to 1,800 were interned. Although there was indeed concern in official quarters and panic in public circles about the loyalties of Japanese Americans and the possibility of assistance that might be given to the Japanese Empire, given the shock and fear that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor, many consider the internment to have resulted more from racism than from any security risk posed by Japanese Americans.
Roosevelt authorized the deportation and incarceration with Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, which allowed regional military commanders to designate "military areas" from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire West Coast, including all of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona, except for those in government camps. Approximately 5,000 Japanese Americans voluntarily relocated outside the exclusion zone before March 1942, and some 5,500 community leaders arrested after the Pearl Harbor attack were already in custody. But, the majority of nearly 130,000 mainland Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated from their West Coast homes during the spring of 1942.
The United States Census Bureau assisted the internment efforts by providing confidential neighborhood information on Japanese Americans. The Bureau denied its role for decades, but this was finally documented in 2007. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the removal by ruling against Fred Korematsu's appeal for violating an exclusion order. The Court limited its decision to the validity of the exclusion orders, avoiding the issue of the incarceration of U.S. citizens with no due process.
In 1980, under mounting pressure from the Japanese American Citizens League and redress organizations, President Jimmy Carter opened an investigation to determine whether the decision to put Japanese Americans into internment camps had been justified by the government. He appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to investigate the camps. The Commission's report, titled Personal Justice Denied, found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty at the time and, concluding the incarceration had been the product of racism, recommended that the government pay reparations to the survivors. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 to each individual camp survivor. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been interned and their heirs.
Of 127,000 Japanese Americans living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast. About 80,000 were nisei (literal translation: "second generation"; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and sansei ("third generation"; the children of Nisei). The rest were issei ("first generation", immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship by U.S. law).
(Honestly, it is just a coincidence that this cache will probably be published on December 7.)
THE CACHE IS NOT AT THE POSTED COORDINATES.
Watch the following short Curly clips
Curly's Buys The Farm: Episode 79 The Yokes On Me Clip1
Curly And The Livestock: Episode 79 The Yokes On Me Clip2
Find the cost in dollars the Stooges ended up paying for each animal on the farm. (Round to the nearest dollar if necessary)
SUBTRACT this amount from the last three digits of the posted North coordinate.
SUBTRACT this amount from the last three digits of the posted West coordinate.
Have fun! Get the family involved.
Curly Code: 651-357