You de­cide you need some stooges.

Where do you find stooges? Do you put out an ad­vert?

“Wanted: Three Stooges.”

You’re not cer­tain that would send the right mes­sage.

How much are stooges paid, any­way? You won­der if you can pay them with smiles. Your smiles are rare enough to be valu­able, you’re sure.

Do they need ben­e­fits? Are they or­ga­nized? Do you need to con­tract with the Stooges Union?

You wish you could del­e­gate all this out to some­one else.

It’s why you need stooges. You’d only trust such mat­ters with trusted stooges, but lack­ing any, you’re out of luck.

How many stooges do you need, though? Is three enough?

Three has a cer­tain ring to it.

Per­haps you can con­vert some of your ex­ist­ing goons into stooges.

That one po­lice­man… If only he had a mus­tache, he’d be per­fect. Well, that and some ex­tra bum­bling. You like bum­bling po­lice­men.

You have a han­ker­ing to go down to the lake and do some fish­ing, but you don’t think that would find you very many po­ten­tial stooges.

It would find you some fish.

Stooges aren’t in­tel­li­gent, but they are, at least, a slight bit more in­tel­li­gent than fish.

You won­der if fish might, in fact, be in­tel­li­gent, but then think that if any fish were in­tel­li­gent, those fishes cer­tainly would­n’t get caught on a fish­ing line, and so you’d be in­ca­pable of find­ing and hir­ing them.

Fish­ing for stooges just won’t be a work­able strat­egy, you’re afraid.

You do even­tu­ally pop down by the lake with your newly-mus­ta­chioed stooge.

You fish.

You have a spot of ad­ven­ture, com­plete with a chase and some hostage ne­go­ti­a­tions.

You find Al­bert.

You thought Al­bert could be a stooge, but ap­par­ently he had lit­tle de­sire to sur­vive above wa­ter. You did­n’t force him, so he died.

He was, how­ever, quite tasty.

“Al­bert” is a ter­ri­ble name for a stooge, any­way.

You still need two more stooges.

Though you’re not sure any­one reads it any­more, you or­der the one stooge you do have to put an ad in the pa­per:

“Wanted: Two Stooges. Con­tact Chief Stooge.”