The Three Stooges
The Three Stooges were an American vaudeville and comedy troupe active from 1922 until 1970, best remembered for their 190 short-subject films by Columbia Pictures. Their hallmark styles were physical, farce, and slapstick comedy. Six Stooges appeared over the act's run. The two constants were:
- Moe Howard, 1922–1975, and
- Larry Fine, 1925–1970
- Shemp Howard, 1923–1932 and 1947–1955
- Curly Howard, 1932–1946
- Joe Besser, 1956–1957
- "Curly Joe" DeRita, 1958–1970
Curly suffered a debilitating stroke in May 1946. Shemp returned, reconstituting the original lineup, until his death of a heart attack on November 22, 1955, three years and ten months after Curly's death of a cerebral hemorrhage. Film actor Joe Palma stood in to complete four Shemp-era shorts under contract. The procedure of disguising one actor as another outside of stunt shots became known as the "fake Shemp". Columbia contract player Joe Besser joined as the third Stooge for two years, departing in 1958 to nurse his ill wife after Columbia terminated its shorts division. The studio then released all the shorts via Screen Gems, Columbia's television studio and distribution unit. Screen Gems then syndicated the shorts to television, whereupon the Stooges became one of the most popular comedy acts of the early 1960s.
Comic actor Joe DeRita became "Curly Joe" in 1958, replacing Besser for a new series of full-length theatrical films. With intense television exposure in the United States, the act regained momentum throughout the 1960s as popular kids' fare, until Larry's paralyzing stroke in the midst of filming a pilot for a Three Stooges TV series in January 1970. He died in January 1975 after a further series of strokes. Unsuccessful attempts were made in 1970 and 1975 to revive the act with longtime supporting actor Emil Sitka in Fine's role, but they were each cut short—the first by a movie deal falling through and Moe's wife persuading him to retire, the second by Moe's death.
History
Ted Healy and His Stooges (1922–1934)
The Three Stooges began in 1922 as part of a raucous vaudeville act called "Ted Healy and His Stooges". The act was also known as "Ted Healy and His Southern Gentlemen" and "Ted Healy and His Racketeers". Moe Howard joined Healy's act in 1922, and his brother Shemp Howard came aboard a few months later. After several shifts and changes in the Stooges membership, violinist-comedian Larry Fine also joined the group sometime between 1925 and 1928. In the act, lead comedian Healy would attempt to sing or tell jokes while his noisy assistants would keep interrupting him, causing Healy to retaliate with verbal and physical abuse.In 1930, Ted Healy and His Stooges appeared in Soup to Nuts, their first Hollywood feature film, released by Fox Film Corporation. The film was not a critical success, but the Stooges' performances were singled out as memorable, leading Fox to offer the trio a contract, minus Healy. This enraged Healy, who told studio executives the Stooges were his employees, whereupon the offer was withdrawn. Howard, Fine, and Howard learned of the offer and subsequent withdrawal, and left Healy to form their own act. The act quickly took off with a tour of the theater circuit. Healy attempted to stop the new act with legal action, claiming that they were using his copyrighted material. Accounts exist of Healy threatening to bomb theaters if Howard, Fine, and Howard ever performed there, which worried Shemp so much that he almost left the act; reportedly, only a pay raise kept him on board.
Healy tried to save his act by hiring replacement stooges, but they were inexperienced and not as well-received as their predecessors. Healy reached a new agreement with his former Stooges in 1932, with Moe now acting as business manager, and they were booked in a production of Jacob J. Shubert's The Passing Show of 1932. During rehearsals, Healy received a more lucrative offer and found a loophole in his contract allowing him to leave the production. Shemp, fed up with Healy's abrasiveness, bad temper, and heavy drinking, decided to quit the act and toured in his own comedy revue for several months.
Shemp had been working for the Vitaphone studio in Brooklyn, New York since 1931. He first appeared in movie comedies playing small roles and bits in the Roscoe Arbuckle shorts, and gradually worked his way up to star comedian. Shemp stayed with Vitaphone through 1937.
With Shemp gone, Healy and the two remaining stooges needed a replacement, so Moe suggested his younger brother Jerry Howard. Healy reportedly took one look at Jerry, who had long chestnut-red hair and a handlebar mustache, and remarked that Jerry did not look like he was funny. Jerry left the room and returned a few minutes later with his head shaved, saying: "Boy, do I look girly." Healy heard "Curly", and the name stuck. Other accounts have been given for how the Curly character actually came about.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed Healy and his stooges to a movie contract in 1933. They appeared in feature films and short subjects together, individually, or with various combinations of actors. The trio was featured in a series of musical comedy shorts, beginning with Nertsery Rhymes. It was one of a few shorts to be made with an early two-color Technicolor process. These also included one featuring Curly without Healy or the other Stooges, Roast Beef and Movies, and the recently rediscovered Technicolor short Hello Pop!. Jail Birds of Paradise was also shot in Technicolor, but as of 2022, no print has been found. The short films were built around recycled Technicolor film footage of production numbers cut from MGM musicals, such as Children of Pleasure, Lord Byron of Broadway, and the unfinished March of Time. The studio concluded the series with standard, black-and-white two-reel subjects: Beer and Pretzels ''Plane Nuts, and The Big Idea.
Healy and company also appeared in several MGM feature films as comic relief, including:
In 1934, the team's contract expired with MGM, and the Stooges' professional association with Healy came to an end. According to Moe Howard's autobiography, the split was precipitated by Healy's alcoholism and abrasiveness. Their final film with Healy was MGM's Hollywood Party''. Healy and the Stooges went on to separate successes, with Healy dying under mysterious circumstances in 1937.
Columbia years (1934–1958)
Moe, Larry, and Curly (1934–1946)
In 1934, the trio—now officially named "The Three Stooges"—contracted with Columbia Pictures for a series of two-reel comedy short subjects. Moe wrote in his autobiography that they each received $600 per week on a one-year contract with a renewable option; in the Ted Okuda–Edward Watz book The Columbia Comedy Shorts, the Stooges are said to have received $1,000 among them for their first Columbia effort, Woman Haters, and then signed a term contract for $7,500 per film, to be divided among the trio.Within their first year at Columbia, theater bookings for the Stooges films took off. Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn was able to use the Stooges as leverage, as the demand for their films was so great that he eventually refused to supply exhibitors with the trio's shorts unless they also agreed to book some of the studio's mediocre B movies. Cohn also saw to it that the Stooges remained unaware of their popularity. During their 23 years at Columbia, the Stooges were never completely aware of their drawing power. Their contracts with the studio included an open option that had to be renewed yearly, and Cohn would tell them that the short subjects were in decline, which was not a complete fabrication.
The Stooges thought that their days were numbered and would sweat it out each year, with Cohn renewing their contract at the last moment. This deception kept the insecure Stooges unaware of their true value, resulting in them having second thoughts about asking for a better contract without a yearly option. Cohn's scare tactics worked for all 23 years that the Stooges were at Columbia; the team never once asked for or received a salary increase.
After they stopped making the shorts in December 1957, Moe learned of Cohn's tactics, what a valuable commodity the Stooges had been for the studio, and how many millions more the act could have earned. Columbia offered theater owners an entire program of two-reel comedies featuring such stars as Buster Keaton, Andy Clyde, Charley Chase, and Hugh Herbert, but the Stooge shorts were the most popular of all.
The Stooges' release schedule was eight short subjects per year, filmed within a 40-week period; for the remaining 12 weeks, they were free to pursue other employment, time that was either spent with their families or touring the country with their live act. The Stooges appeared in 190 film shorts and five features while at Columbia, outlasting every one of their contemporaries employed in the short-film genre. Del Lord directed more than three dozen Stooge films, Jules White directed dozens more, and his brother Jack White directed several under the pseudonym "Preston Black". Silent-comedy star Charley Chase also shared directorial responsibilities with Lord and White.
The Stooge films made between 1935 and 1941 captured the team at their peak, according to film historians Ted Okuda and Edward Watz, authors of The Columbia Comedy Shorts; nearly every film produced became a classic in its own right. Hoi Polloi adapted the premise of Pygmalion, with a stuffy professor making a bet that he can transform the uncultured trio into refined gentlemen; the plotline worked so well that it was reused twice, as Half-Wits Holiday and Pies and Guys. Three Little Beers featured the Stooges running amok on a golf course to win prize money. Disorder in the Court features the team as star witnesses in a murder trial. Violent Is the Word for Curly was a quality Chase-directed short that featured the musical interlude "Swingin' the Alphabet".
In A Plumbing We Will Go —one of the team's quintessential comedies—the Stooges are cast as plumbers who nearly destroy a socialite's mansion, causing water to exit every appliance in the home, including an early television set. This was remade twice, as Vagabond Loafers and Scheming Schemers. Other entries of the era are considered among the team's finest work, including Uncivil Warriors, A Pain in the Pullman and False Alarms, Grips, Grunts and Groans, The Sitter Downers, Dizzy Doctors, Tassels in the Air, We Want Our Mummy, Nutty but Nice, and An Ache in Every Stake and In the Sweet Pie and Pie.
With the onset of World War II, the Stooges released several entries that poked fun at the rising Axis powers. You Nazty Spy! and its sequel I'll Never Heil Again lampooned Hitler and the Nazis at a time when America was still neutral. Moe was cast as "Moe Hailstone", an Adolf Hitler-like character, with Curly playing a Hermann Göring character, replete with medals, and Larry a Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda minister. Moe, Larry, and director Jules White considered You Nazty Spy! their best film. Yet, these efforts indulged in a deliberately formless, non-sequitur style of verbal humor that was not the Stooges' forte, according to Okuda and Watz.
Other wartime entries have their moments, such as They Stooge to Conga, Higher Than a Kite, Back from the Front, Gents Without Cents and the anti-Japanese The Yoke's on Me. However, taken in bulk, the wartime films are considered less funny than what preceded them. No Dough Boys is often considered the best of these farces. The team, made up as Japanese soldiers for a photo shoot, is mistaken for genuine saboteurs by a Nazi ringleader. The highlight of the film features the Stooges engaging in nonsensical gymnastics for a skeptical group of enemy agents expecting renowned acrobats.
Wartime also brought on rising production costs that resulted in fewer elaborate gags and outdoor sequences, Del Lord's stock in trade; as a result, the quality of the team's films, particularly those directed by Lord, began to slip after 1942. According to Okuda and Watz, entries such as Loco Boy Makes Good, What's the Matador?, Sock-a-Bye Baby, I Can Hardly Wait and A Gem of a Jam are considered to be lesser-quality works than previous films. Spook Louder, a remake of Mack Sennett's The Great Pie Mystery, is sometimes considered one of their weakest shorts because of its repetitious and rehashed jokes. Three Smart Saps, was an improvement, reworking a routine from Harold Lloyd's The Freshman, in which Curly's loosely stitched suit begins to fall apart at the seams while he is on the dance floor.
The Stooges made occasional supporting appearances in feature films. Most of the Stooges' peers had either made the transition from shorts to feature films or starred in their own feature films from the onset. However, Moe believed that the team's slapstick style worked better in short form. In 1935, Columbia proposed to star them in their own full-length feature, but Moe rejected the idea, saying, "It's a hard job inventing, rewriting, or stealing gags for our two-reel comedies for Columbia Pictures without having to make a seven-reeler. We can make short films out of material needed for a starring feature, and then we wouldn't know whether it would be funny enough to click."
Film critics have cited Curly as the most popular member of the team. His childlike mannerisms, natural comedic charm, and uncouth, juvenile humor made him a hit with audiences, particularly women and children. However, Curly having to shave his head for the act led him to feel unappealing to women. To mask his insecurities, he ate and drank to excess and caroused whenever the Stooges made personal appearances, which was around seven months of each year. His weight ballooned in the 1940s, and his blood pressure became dangerously high. Curly's wild lifestyle and constant drinking eventually caught up with him in 1945, and his performances suffered.
During a five-month hiatus from August 1945 through January 1946, the trio committed themselves to making a feature film at Monogram, followed by two months of live appearances in New York City, with performances seven days a week. Curly also entered a disastrous third marriage in October 1945, leading to a separation in January 1946 and divorce in July 1946, at great cost to his already fragile health. Upon the Stooges' return to Los Angeles in late November 1945, Curly was a shell of his former self. They had two months to rest before reporting back to Columbia in late January 1946, but Curly's condition was irreversible. They had only 24 days of work over the next three months, but eight weeks of time off could not help the situation. In those last six shorts, ranging from Monkey Businessmen through Half-Wits Holiday, Curly was seriously ill, struggling to get through even the most basic scenes.
During the final day of filming Half-Wits Holiday on May 6, 1946, Curly suffered a debilitating stroke on the set, ending his 14-year career. They hoped for a full recovery, but Curly never appeared in a film again except for a single cameo appearance in the third film after Shemp returned to the trio, Hold That Lion!. It was the only film that contained all four of the original Stooges on screen simultaneously. According to Jules White, this came about when Curly visited the set one day, and White had him do this bit for fun. Curly's cameo appearance was recycled in the remake Booty and the Beast, released in 1953.
In 1949, Curly filmed a brief scene for Malice in the Palace as the restaurant's cook, but it was not used. Jules White's copy of the script contained the dialogue for this missing scene, and a production still of Curly does exist, appearing on both the film's original one-sheet and lobby card. Larry played the role of the cook in the final print.