Tag: Curly Joe

Whenever I watch the Three Stooges it feels like I’m getting ready for school again. My sister would get me up in the morning and I would dress while watching the Three Stooges and get ready to run to catch the bus just at the end of our driveway. 

I do like them at times. My dad never liked them…he said “they make me nervous as hell son.” I must admit when I got older and found the Marx Brothers, Chaplin, and Buster Keaton more in line with my comedic tastes BUT sometimes I just have to watch the Stooges!

I just watched one episode at random today. A Ducking They Did Go…they were all in a boat and Curly accidently shoots a hole in the boat…water starts coming up and the boat is sinking….so Larry gets the gun and shoots another hole in the boat. Moe asked him why…Larry says “I made another hole so the water will run out.”…ahhhh….the Stooges logic! I found a clip of that scene

The 1934 short, ‘The Woman Haters’ marks the first of 190 theatrical short films made by Columbia Pictures, which starred, ‘The Three Stooges’ between 1934 and 1959.

The culture impact of the Stooges was huge through the decades. They have been parodied by everyone from SNL, That Seventies Show, Simpsons, and so many more references. 

Parents were concerned about kids copying the Stooges…they probably had a right to be. When I was in school I would hear the nyuk, nyuk but we didn’t hit each over the head with lead pipes. 

Their 1940 short, You Nazty Spy!, was the first American production to openly make a mockery of Adolf Hitler’s regime. (Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator opened nine months later.) The short was perceived as a great insult by Hitler, who listed the Stooges on his own personal death list…Here is the episode colorized. 

As popular as they were they never got paid what they deserved. They were in “shorts” which played before and between feature movies. They worked for Columbia who was ran by the notorious cheap Harry Cohn. Columbia’s shorts department thrived throughout the late ’30s and ’40s. Keeping its biggest stars in the dark as to their true value was a deliberate ploy to ensure they worked cheap.

Cohn kept the Stooges on one year contracts and claimed that the department lost money.

Here in a link to a short history of the Stooges.

https://www.liveabout.com/three-stooges-4587473

Here is a bio of the Three Stooges introduced by Curly’s grandson.