There’s Curly, winging the cream pie at Larry. Splat. Direct hit. Classic slapstick. The Three Stooges and the old pie-in-the-face shtick.

But wait! There’s Curly again. He’s still winging the cream pie, but who do we have on the receiving end? It’s Larry in one frame, but in the next it’s, it’s, uh …

It’s the president of the United States! But it’s not a cream pie coming his way, it’s a shoe. Yes, a shoe. And he deftly dodges it. He actually leans left, according to one shameless wag, to avoid the well-heeled missile.

We’re going for laughs here — good ones, cheap ones, small ones, maybe even big, gut-busting ones. That’s what it’s all about. We’re all getting together to tell the same bad joke as many different ways as we can.

So our thanks go out to the person who instantly saw the connection between the president ducking flying footwear in Baghdad and Larry failing to duck the flying pie in black and white. There is common comic ground, and the brilliant piece of video trickery — inserting the president and the shoe in with Curly, Larry and the pie — is making the Internet rounds and giving us all a much needed giggle.

It’s the best way. It really is. Sure, we can go a little crazy thinking about impeachment and war crimes trials, but none of that is going to happen, at least not in any official, meaningful way. There will be no calling of the president before any bar of justice. We must call him before a bar of our own.

So we go for the laughs. We turn our hard feelings to sight gags and one-liners and make sure that, come Salvation Day on Jan. 20, we have put something laughable in its proper place.

Of course, there are those who have done their part all along. The president has been a comic writer’s dream for a long time. There was Garrison Keillor’s early observation that the president’s mouth is where the English language goes to die.

And there are David Letterman’s regular attempts to secure the president’s comic place with his excerpts from great presidential speeches. He might feature Franklin Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear…” and John Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country…” And then Letterman gives us our current president, chasing down words as a farmer might chase down stray chickens. It is sadly funny.

And now, of course, we have Muntadar al-Zeidi, who gave up his shoes for the cause. Al-Zeidi is a reporter for an Iraqi TV station and he reacted to the president’s appearance in Baghdad this week by hurling his left shoe, then his right at the podium. The president showed very good reflexes for a man his age. Al-Zeidi went 0 for 2.

Al-Zeidi appears one of those Iraqis who take issue with the president’s decision to invade his country without provocation and turn it into a hellhole. And he apparently reflects the feelings of many of his countrymen since he has reportedly become something of a national hero for the shoe fling.

He clearly wasn’t doing it for laughs. He was apparently doing it out of anger and resentment and a sense of national insult.

But he gave us that moment that we can take for its hilarious sense of balance, for leaving the president ducking for cover in the very place where he has left so many others to do the same thing.

Leno is on it. Letterman is on it. Saturday Night Live is on it.

That’s where it belongs, with the jokesters, with the people who can look at the entire collection of presidential goofs and give it a real comic punch.

And maybe, just maybe, they can let the rest of us have the last laugh.

bkerr@projo.com