By Jean Johnson  | Contributing Writer

The question is what would fill the void now that “The Chappell Show” is on an indefinite hiatus; Stella is the answer.

Its pilot aired Tuesday and delivered more than the promos promised. Side splitting laughs from their bewildering antics fashion through their modern-day Marx Brother adventures.

Their existential spoof on society is marked by the cinematography. The unspoken comedy is remarkable. For instance, when three of the characters become homeless in the first episode and are starving, an iris lens views the three from the perspective of a lone baked bean waiting to be divided and devoured.

The overly enjoyed morsel then follows the sequence. Overacting can be annoying yet not by these three, it complements the ridiculousness of the script.

The show has been promoted with the tagline “Comedy in Suits,” which seemed a little bizarre and intriguing. However, their sophomoric antics contradict the attire.

This week’s episode found absurdity in finding an apartment mixed in with the occasional jab at Nazi jokes and some out-of-left-field dry humping on corpses, in addition to an out-of-left-field cameo by Edward Norton. Future episodes will find satire in trivial activities such as hanging out in coffee shops, camping and meeting women.

You might find yourself asking, “Who is Stella?” Stella is a unique three-man comedy group. Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, and David Wain have been writing, producing, and performing comedy together and apart for 16 years.

The co-venture began in 1997 as a weekly nightclub comedy show that quickly became New York's premier showcase for alternative and mainstream comedy and ran for seven years at Fez in Greenwich Village.

They met at New York University in 1988, where they helped create the sketch comedy troupe THE STATE which ran on MTV, as well as a prime-time special on CBS, a book, “State by State with the State,” several tours, and a comedy album for Warner Brothers Records.

After The State, Black co-created the Comedy Central series Viva Variety. He was the voice of the pets.com sock puppet and was a regular on the NBC series “Ed.” The trio is also on VH1's “I Love the 80s” and “I Love the 70s.”

Showalter and Wain co-wrote and co-produced the 2001 feature film “Wet Hot American Summer,” directed by Wain and starring Janeane Garofalo.

It is an off-the-wall spoof about the last day of summer camp in 1981, and as you might imagine, everything that can go wrong does.

Stella airs Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m. If you missed the pilot, it will re-run multiple times in true “Comedy Central” fashion before next Tuesday’s new episode.

For more info and for show times, visit comedycentral.com.