Three Chairs for Harvey and Benny

They were a dangerous Abbott and Costello or perhaps the Two Stooges, arriving with an air of malevolence and potential violence intermingled with occasional bursts of laugh-out-loud insanity.

Remember the 1980s?

Harvey was a 6-foot-3, 255-pound power lifter with a crewcut and black horn-rimmed glasses. He cut a curious, intimidating presence as he crossed the college campus. For comic effect, Harvey liked to speak in a high-pitched squeaking voice, then switch to an evil growl in a split-second, just to freak out strangers and amuse himself. He tried out at a training center for professional wrestling but didn’t have the right mentality.

Half a foot shorter, Benny endured weight fluctuations and yo-yoed between 198 and 450 pounds over a four-year time frame. When he reached his heaviest, Benny blamed it on his ex-girlfriend. “She liked having sex with a fat man,” he grumbled. “But I fell asleep on top of her one time and she broke up with me.”

It was a more politically incorrect time and the more bawdy or impolite the joke, the more Harvey and Benny responded. We ran into them at a local diner, where someone recited the now-taboo, “What do 100 beaten women have in common? They just don’t listen.” After a split-second of silence to process the material, Harvey erupted in a paroxysm of laughter. Patrons from the restaurant’s other dining room put down…