Faulkner goes (slightly) slap-happy

Wise guy, eh?

Screenwriter David Sheffield won this year’s Faux Faulkner contest by imagining what it would’ve been like if William Faulkner, a Nobel laureate known for thickets of challenging (often parenthetical) prose, had written for the Three Stooges.

Sheffield’s 550-word script, “As I Lay Kvetching,” has Moe, Larry and Curly, “slack-jawed and splayfooted,” renovating a home, with the eye-gouging, nose-twisting slapstick guided by plenty of Faulknerian stage directions:

“At last it is Curly who picks up the plank, rough hewn and smelling of sweet gum, and -- feeling the weight and heft and fiber of it -- swings it innocently (bending to retrieve the tool, the ball-peen hammer dropped casually on Larry’s toe) and feeling the awful force of the blow as it (the plank) catches Moe upside his head....”

The 56-year-old Sheffield, best known as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” and a string of Eddie Murphy movies, returns to his native Mississippi this weekend to perform his script at the 31st Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha conference in Oxford.

Faulkner’s niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, who has coordinated the parody contest for 15 years with her husband, Larry, said Sheffield’s script clearly stood out.

“What I cannot believe, from the hundreds and hundreds of entries we read, is that there could be something this fresh and this new and this funny,” she said. “This one was unique.”

Like Sheffield, Faulkner toiled as a Hollywood screenwriter but enjoyed only marginal success and even less fulfillment in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s.

“I think screenwriting is the antithesis of Faulkner,” Sheffield said from his Los Angeles home. “Faulkner is about the joy and profundity of language and words. The best screenwriting is invisible. The words should disappear into the faces of the actors.”

Many of Sheffield’s own words have disappeared into the malleable face of Murphy.

Sheffield was head writer for “SNL” from 1980 to ‘83, a job he landed after mailing comedy sketches to the show’s producers while working at a Biloxi ad agency. With writing partner Barry Blaustein, Sheffield helped create some of Murphy’s most memorable characters: trash-talking Gumby, goofy Buckwheat and James Brown in the hot tub.

Sheffield lived in Faulkner’s native Oxford as a child in the early 1960s, and he still tries to visit the state a couple of times a year.