Married with Children Star David Faustino on the Wild Mad TV Three Stooges Coke Sketch

I want to tell you about an episode of Mad TV I did, very early in their run, that I can promise you is the most unhinged five minutes of my acting career. I am not exaggerating. They put me in a Three Stooges parody as a coke dealer, and instead of pies in the face it was Coke in the face. Take that in for a second.

When this came in, Mad TV was throwing real money at sketches. They had a window where they would actually leave the studio, take everyone out on location, and shoot a little sketch like it was a feature. This one was a pretty big budget production. The crew rolled out, the wardrobe trailers showed up, and the whole thing was set up at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Hollywood.

For anyone who has not been to the Ebell, it is this gorgeous old 1920s clubhouse and theater building. Marble, hardwoods, the whole production history of Los Angeles vibe. You do not normally walk into the Ebell to get powder dumped on your face. But that is what we did.

The whole gag was a Three Stooges takeoff. So you have got the Stooges style slapping and the slipping around and the wide-eyed reactions. The pie in the face is the iconic Stooges bit, Moe smashes a cream pie into Curly’s mug, everybody cracks up. Mad TV took that exact rhythm and replaced the pies with what was obviously meant to be cocaine. Different sense of humor, different decade.

I was the coke dealer. I am there in a suit playing it straight, doing the setup that gets reversed when one of these Stooges style characters takes the whole supply right in the face. Powder everywhere. I remember the cleanup as much as I remember the shoot. We had powder in our hair, in our clothes, in the cracks of the theater floor. Somebody was getting paid to refill the props between takes because the moment you do the gag, you have to reset the whole tray.

Mad TV ran from 1995 to 2009 on Fox, basically as the network’s late-night sketch alternative to Saturday Night Live. The cast was unreal. Nicole Sullivan, Mo Collins, Michael McDonald, Phil LaMarr, Orlando Jones, Bobby Lee, Will Sasso, Frank Caliendo. The list keeps going. Amanda Bearse, who you will see on the Bundy Club watch parties with us, actually directed a stretch of Mad TV episodes after she came off Married with Children, which is how this whole conversation started.

My episode was early enough that the budgets were still flush. By the back half of the show’s run they were doing more in-studio sketches, less location work. So this Three Stooges Coke gag is from the era when Mad TV felt like it was funded by a movie studio that had lost a bet.

Looking back at it now, the sketch is one of those time-capsule pieces. You cannot make that exact sketch in 2026, and that is fine. But it is the kind of thing that lived in the era and made the era what it was. I am glad I got to be in one of those.

Also: anytime a director hands you a wig, a suit, and a tray of fake drugs and tells you to play it straight, you take the gig. That is just the rule.

Not a Bundy Club member yet? Get in here. The free tier gives you a peek at the community, and the paid tiers put you on the couch with us for the watch parties where stories like this one come out. Join up at bundyclub.com/join and stop watching from the outside.