The best expression to define this new incarnation of The Three Stooges, currently playing in cinemas across Pakistan, isn’t far from Curly’s infamous “nyuk, nyuk” chuckle.

For the Facebook generation unacquainted with the original Stooges, the “nyuk” is equivalent to the more internet-happening ‘lol’ (laugh out loud). To maintain a constant “nyuk” with unrelenting ferocity is hard work indeed; especially for a film running on a sketchy premise.

Now, let’s get a few things straight: I don’t fancy the Stooges and their style of physical comedy. Where Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton mastered the art of physical abuse, often endowing it a delicate sentimental charm, I felt the Stooges were abusive and violent — more to each other than others. Imagine my surprise when I went expecting a routine ‘lol’ and got ‘rof (rolling on floor) lol’. For once, their comedy has an embedded (if a tad sappy) charm that actually clicks.

For narrative purposes, Curly, Larry and Moe (perfectly cast Will Sasso, Sean Hayes and Chris Diamantopoulos) are given a back-story. The film opens 35 years before and we see three cute babies (with peculiar hairstyles) get dumped in front of an orphanage. The nurses (Jane Lynch, Jennifer Hudson and Larry David) are less welcoming in the subsequent cut 10 years down as they have matured into dumb, dumber and dumbest. Some 25 years later, Curly, Larry and Moe leave the orphanage to make $830,000 and save it from shutting down.

Arriving in an unfamiliar city, they meet sultry villainess Lydia (Sophia Vergara) and co-plotter (Craig Bierko), who want to do away with her husband (Kirby Heyborne). She hires the Stooges to do him in; I could feel most of the audience go “ouch” when she introduces her accomplice as her husband.

Writers Mike Cerrone, Bobby and Peter Farrelly — with the last two also directing — have a clear understanding of what makes Stooges tick. This is a pop-out, knockabout farce timed to absolute perfection.

One major problem that films based on popular series have is in stretched running time. The film is broken down into three short sections with each opening with a title-card similar to the original episodes, and the film’s original premise providing the overall storyline. The final act/episode runs Moe smack right into the reality show Jersey Shore as a contestant.

Like the original Stooges, whose brand of slapstick relied chiefly on hair pulling and eye-poking, this Farrelly Bros. version supports a lot of hard-hitting routines in their most unsubtle, brutal form. Anyone expecting less is, quite frankly, sitting at the wrong screening.

Released by 20th Century Fox and Mandviwalla Entertainment, The Three Stooges is rated PG-13 for painstaking and sometimes-crude nitwit slapstick, involving jackhammers, buzz saws, falling church bells and live lobsters. Any normal man suffering this kind of assault would end up comatose by the end credits.