For Emil Sitka, All the World Was a Stooge

The service was predictably somber until Bob Hasen loosened it up: “If he were here today, Emil Sitka would say, ‘They’re a nice house, Bob, but I don’t hear too many laughs . . . .’ ”

We all laughed too heartily. But the line was a blessed relief from the Scriptural passages and speculations about the world that lies beyond. Besides, what could be more apt at the funeral of the Three Stooges’ greatest straight man than a few cascading rounds of belly laughs?

Sitka appeared in 70 Stooge productions. He was the minister, the governor, the doctor, the professor, the rich uncle, the stuffed-shirt authority figure who required immediate deflating.

For more than two decades, he was the Stooges’ last surviving major player. He was a proud relic from an age when silliness was no sin and pomposity no virtue. In pursuit of folly, he took more pies in the face, pokes in the eye and pliers to the nose than any film actor before or since.

“Sitka may very well have set a record for martyrdom among supporting players,” wrote Jeff Forrester, a Stooge scholar.

But at 83, he gave out. He’d had a stroke as he regaled three of the many fans who would make pilgrimages to his Leisure Village home. For six months, he lay in a coma. Now, in the final appearance of his lengthy run, he lay in an open casket by the altar.

At Hasen’s urging, the crowd in the Camarillo chapel gave him a standing ovation.

Sitka’s five sons and two daughters were on hand, and their kids, and his friends from Leisure Village, and a few cronies from his 400 films and six decades in show business. One after the other, they trooped up to reminisce.

An elegant blond woman in black said she’d played a gangster’s moll in a Stooge episode called “Three Loan Wolves.” Now the minister of a church she founded in Sherman Oaks, Beverly Gaard praised her longtime friend as a terrific family man.

“I’m very grateful for what I call ‘the chapter of soul’ that he lived,” she said.

Family members spoke of his love and devotion. Others talked about his antics, spontaneous gags from an actor who specialized in flushing excess seriousness from the system. Hasen, a Leisure Village neighbor, recounted his futile attempt to teach Sitka, an expert paddle-tennis player, how to serve.

“Is this right?” Emil asked.

“Yes, that looks pretty good.”

“You sure this is OK?”

“Yep, you’ve got it now.”

Sitka reached down, sipped from his water bottle, cocked back his arm, raised his racket and, to Hasen’s astonishment, shot a brisk jet of water from his pursed lips.

That was years after his last slapstick foray with the Stooges in “Flying Saucer Daffy.”

Most of Sitka’s passions weren’t unusual for a vigorous, older man. He loved deep-sea fishing and dancing, watching the fights on TV and playing craps in Las Vegas for a quarter a roll.

But more than past times, he loved his fans.

As a lunatic justice of the peace in “Brideless Grooms,” he’d tell hapless couples to “hold hands, you lovebirds.” More than once, he uttered that line into his phone for amplification at fans’ weddings.

He kept Hallmark stock pumped up by sending fans hundreds of greeting cards each year.

“He didn’t miss a Christmas, or my grade school graduation, my high school graduation, my college graduation,” said Steve Cox, a Los Angeles freelance writer who first wrote to Sitka when he was 12.

Barely containing his tears, Cox read Sitka’s reply at the funeral.

“Your very nice introduction with a thoughtful photo of yourself makes us two solid friends,” Sitka wrote. “From this moment on, Stephen, write me as often as you wish and ask any special questions about me and the Stooges.”

Over the years, the two became fast friends.

Cox, whose latest book is about Abbott and Costello, would visit Sitka frequently in Leisure Village.

“I’d go to photograph him and he’d pull out the props--a bent golf club or a hat or something. He was always directing,” Cox said.

Sitka told Cox what every fan would want to know: how it felt to be pelted by pie after pie.

“He was expecting them to be light and fluffy,” Cox recalled. “But he said the first one he took from Moe was like concrete. He said he saw blue lights. He asked me, ‘How do you think I got this bent nose?’ ”