Photo: Everett Collection
In the 1944 Three Stooges short “Crash Goes the Hash,” Moe, Larry, and Curly offend a snooty butler. “You remind me of the Three Stooges,” he chastises them. Curly takes umbrage. “Hey, that’s an insult,” he replies.
Curly’s just being modest. The Three Stooges, the Holy Trinity of slapstick, are in the pantheon of comedy teams. This year marks the 90th anniversary of “Woman Haters,” Moe, Larry, and Curly’s first short for Columbia. The vaudeville team itself, in different incarnations, was launched a century ago! It’s high time they got their own museum exhibit and streaming channel.
The Hollywood Museum just opened “The Three Stooges 100th Anniversary Exhibit,” containing original posters from their movies and nearly 200 shorts, costumes, scripts, props, and collectibles (including 1930s vintage Stooges hand puppets).
For those who can’t make the pilgrimage, there’s C3 Entertainment’s aptly titled Three Stooges+, which, when fully populated, will contain all 190 of the Columbia shorts. It’s up to 120 now. About five a week are being uploaded chronologically, so hang on, Joe Besser fans.
The channel, available on YouTube, Freevee, and other platforms, contains rarities from the archives, including Kook’s Tour (1970), the team’s final project, a proposed pilot for a travel-TV series. Also currently accessible are the feature films with Besser replacement Joe DeRita, and the New 3 Stooges cartoons. Original programming includes documentaries about the team, Shemp’s shorts as a solo performer, two-hour-plus marathons (“Curly vs. Shemp”), and “quick scenes.”
But where to begin? For those new to the Stooges, we’ve selected 25 of the shorts that are invariably the most quoted or referenced amongst Stooges fans. With 190 shorts to their credit, some favorites are bound to be missed here (as a kid, I loved “Idiot’s Deluxe,” with the driving bear who puts his arm out to signal a turn), but these should make any Stooge aficionado slap-happy.
If you’ve got the entire Stooges-verse at your command, this is the one to go to first. It’s one of the team’s best-paced and funniest shorts, and it’s an excellent showcase for Curly, who (don’t ask) must step in at a party for high-society swells to impersonate Senorita Cucaracha, an aspiring singer trying to win over her disapproving father. This is where I was introduced to Strauss’s “Voices of Spring” and the “Sextet” from Lucia di Lammermoor, so you can’t tell me the Stooges were lowbrow.
“Any resemblance between the characters in this picture and any persons, living or dead, is a miracle.” Preceding Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, this gutsy spoof of Adolf Hitler is arguably Moe’s finest hour (or 18 minutes). Munitions manufacturers plot to oust the pacifist king of Moronika and install a dictator. They just need to find someone stupid enough to do what they tell him. Enter paperhanger Moe Hailstone and his two pals (Gallstone and Pebble), who are all in when it is explained to them that a dictator “makes speeches to the people promising them plenty, gives them nothing, then takes everything.” “You Nazty Spy” is the only Stooges short to inspire a sequel. Both end with pitch-black gags that should serve as cautionary warnings for any aspiring despots.
These three shorts make up the Stooges’ “Pygmalion” trilogy, in which Larry, Moe, and Curly are ill-advisedly groomed for high society. In “Hoi Polloi” and “Half-Wits Holiday,” scholarly types debating environmental versus heredity traits wager on whether the Stooges can be transformed into gentlemen. Both contain the classic “Do exactly as I do” dance lesson, while “Holiday” contains one of Moe’s best bits, when a society dowager unwittingly sits beneath an errantly tossed pie slowly separating from the ceiling. “Young man,” she chides Moe, “you act as if you had the Sword of Damocles over your head.” “Lady,” an amscraying Moe responds, “you must be psychic.” “Half-Wits Holiday” was Curly’s last short with the team following a stroke (although he makes a welcome cameo in “Hold That Lion”).
These three shorts are linked by a bizarre concept: mild-mannered Curly driven berserk by an unexpected source. In “Punch Drunks,” the Stooges’ second short, it’s the song “Pop Goes the Weasel.” In “Horses’ Collars”, it’s seeing a mouse (prompting the surreal catchphrase, “Moe, Larry, the cheese”), and in the wrestling comedy “Grips, Grunts and Groans,” it’s the smell of Wild Hyacinth perfume. “Punch Drunks” is, incidentally, the only Stooges short inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
This one’s a veritable Curly-palooza with several prized bits. One echoes Laurel and Hardy’s Oscar-nominated classic, “The Music Box,” as deliveryman Curly frantically races to deliver blocks of ice up a steep staircase before they melt. Another sees Curly take Moe literally when Moe tells him to shave some ice. But perhaps best remembered is the Stooges’ take on “Happy Birthday,” which ends with a real bang.
It’s grade-A Stooges when the trio, as service-station attendants, are mistaken for Mildew College’s new professors. In this fan favorite, the elites, as always, get the worst of it, particularly a wealthy donor who balks at giving the university an athletic fund. This is the one with the musical number “Swingin’ the Alphabet” (“B-A-bay, B-E-bee, B-I-bicki-by-B-O-Bo …”).
Depression-era audiences delighted in witty and sophisticated screwball comedies that made the rich look foolish. The Stooges took a different approach. Inept and uncouth, these working-class anti-heroes invaded the homes of the one percent and laid waste to them. In “Plumbing,” the Stooges rewire and repipe a home until a leak in the basement turns into a tsunami that pours out of every device, including a TV set broadcasting from — you guessed it — Niagara Falls. “Ants” ups the creep factor with insects and rodents that the Stooges themselves unleash in a bid to get hired to remove them. (That’s Clarence “Donald Duck” Nash voicing the cats in the piano.)
“For duty and humanity.” Moe, Larry, and Curly are “not overly bright” med-school graduates installed at a hospital. This was the Stooges’ third short and the only one to be nominated for an Academy Award. It’s best remembered for the iconic loudspeaker call for “Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard.”
After fouling up an assignment, inept photographers Moe, Larry, and Curly, here dubbed Click, Clack, and Cluck, are expendably dispatched to the Vulgarian Frontier (“Cameras Prohibited on Penalty of Death”) by their fed-up editor. This short contains one of Curly’s most indelible scenes, in which he does battle with a bowl of oyster soup and one very fresh oyster. Curly’s escalating frustration is exquisite.
A Stooges short with a happyish ending? That’s just one of the things that make this an atypical but must-see outing in which Moe, Larry, and Curly are a struggling acting team. This is the one with the iconic “Niagara Falls” routine (“Slowly, I turn, step by step, inch by inch …”), in which Moe and Larry are driven mad by the mere mention of the landmark and take it out on poor Curly.
The Stooges are restauranteurs who need $100 to save their establishment. They enter a cow-milking contest with Curly as the milker and Moe and Larry as the milkees in a fake cow costume. Curly, ahem, milks every gag to perfection, especially in early scenes in the kitchen, in which his efficiency contraptions go awry.
This is what our mothers warned us about with the Stooges. Moe, Larry, and Curly are inept repairmen hired to fix a doorbell in a home that turns out to be the secret lair of Nazi spies. Considered the most violent of all Stooges shorts, “Conga” contains some genuinely excruciating scenes, most notably the one in which Curly steps all over Moe with a climbing spike that finds its way into Moe’s head, ear, and eye.
Moe, Larry, and Curly win $50,000 in a radio contest, bringing them to the attention of three gold diggers, who plot to “meet the goofs and make them propose, marry ’em, get their dough, and give them the ozone.” It does not go well for them. The Stooges are most in their element when they are placed out of it, in this case in a ritzy hotel. “Go take a bath,” Moe commands. “But it ain’t spring yet,” Larry protests.
This bottle short is set entirely in a courthouse, where Moe, Larry, and Curly wreak havoc on a murder trial. Nonstop silliness ensues, with Curly’s “Take off your hat / raise your right hand / put your left hand here” a standout routine. This feels closest to what it would have been like to see the Stooges on the vaudeville stage.
In his autobiography, Moe Howard called the Stooges’ fourth short “a humdinger of bangs and bruises,” but part of its historical cachet is that it features one of a pre-redhead Lucille Ball’s earliest screen appearances. This is the first Stooges short in which Moe, Larry, and Curly are victims of circumstance: They are mistaken by gangsters for three famous football players. Unlike, say, the Marx brothers in Horse Feathers or Harold Lloyd in The Freshman, these underdogs do not end up winning the game. They are chased from the scene, bullets being fired into their rears.
Moe, Larry, and Curly, here called Tom, Jim, and Jack, are members of the Woman Haters Club (not to be confused with Our Gang’s He-Man Woman-Haters Club). Tom and Jack (feels weird calling them that) discover that Jim is engaged and plot to foil his nuptials. This is the very first classic-lineup Three Stooges short, which gives it some historical import, but it’s not your typical Stooges outing. It’s a musical novelty in which all the dialogue is spoken in rhyme, and it takes a full three minutes to get to the first slap.
I know, we’ve been favoring Curly here. For many, Shemp is the Hydrox to Curly’s Oreo, but Shemp, who replaced his brother, has a cult following of his own (a new bio by Burt Kearns will be published in October), and this is one of his best outings. He’s a voice teacher left $500,000 by his uncle on the condition that he is married. He has just seven hours to find a bride. When all the women who turned his proposal down find out about the windfall, they all want to cash in. Veteran Stooges foil Emil Sitka has the indelible line, “Hold hands, you lovebirds.”
In the interest of inclusion, we need to feature one short featuring Shemp’s replacement, Joe Besser. “Space Ship Sappy” contains my favorite line of any Stooges short, “I can’t die, I haven’t seen The Eddy Duchin Story yet,” which I fully intend to quote on my deathbed. And then there’s “Horsing Around” with the talking horse. But this farce gives us nine stooges: three sets of separated identical triplets who are reunited, much to the confusion of wives, fiancées, and a cleaver-wielding waiter. There is a nice goof on Marty, and at one point, Moe channels Curly after a passionate kiss.
This one goes off the rails quickly. Larry, making like Marlon Brando in a torn T-shirt, steals a railroad car. He can’t marry his fiancée until her “beanpole” sister gets married first. Shemp, her intended, is “filthy with money,” but in states of drunkenness, he hallucinates his true love, Carie, a human-size costumed canary. Moe arrives on the scene as a railroad inspector and the beanpole’s lost love. Larry reportedly liked this, but anecdotal consensus ranks this as the Stooges’ all-time worst short. Aren’t you the least bit curious?
