‘SNL’ writer wins Faux Faulkner award

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 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.”

Larry Wells said he thought “Pappy” would’ve liked seeing his highbrow style superimposed on the lowbrow Stooges.

“His favorite TV show was ‘Car 54, Where Are You?’ ” Wells said. “He liked comedy.”