Embrace Your Inner Stooge

Today in Tedium: A while back, I wrote this piece on the Sound Blaster where I spent a bit of time explaining that internal expansion ports were once very common in PCs. It was the type of thing that, had I written the story even five years earlier, might not even have been necessary. But so many people have grown up without them, on laptops and tablets, that the explainer was actually useful. There are a lot of pop culture phenomena like that—where the passage of time makes the common feel obscure again. The Three Stooges, which I’m writing about tonight, aren’t necessarily obscure just yet, but maybe they’re not out in front of pop culture they way they once were. That’s a fate undeserved for the short-subject films that Howard, Fine, and Howard created. Sure, there was a movie back in 2012, but I think the Stooges deserve a bit of a cultural refresher. So here goes. Today’s Tedium takes a look at The Three Stooges with fresh eyes. Nyuk, nyuk. — Ernie @ Tedium

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Larry, Moe, and Curly: Why The Three Stooges are worth admiring in the modern age

There’s a certain purity to a Three Stooges short that doesn’t get replicated very often in modern comedy sketches, which often rely on complex conceits to cull their best jokes.

Shows like Arrested Development or 30 Rock play more aggressively with dialogue and framing, and more traditional sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory masterfully emphasize convention, creating a comfort level with which to sell the jokes.

The Three Stooges’ comedy has some of that convention, sure, but really what makes the films work is a physicality that’s rare in modern comedy. There’s lots of violence, but no gross-out stuff. Moe Howard’s slap set a high bar for the Jackass guys to top, and he didn’t even have to go blue in the process.

In many ways, the best Three Stooges sketches work like cartoons; even while rooted in some degree of reality, the trio’s unusual appearance and zaniness has a way of cutting through everything.

A good example of this is the 1934 short Men in Black, in which Moe, Larry, and Curly basically play out the plot to a Scrubs episode 70 years early.

One of the most inventive jokes in the sketch plays with a trope more closely associated with cartoons: hammerspace, or the tendency for objects to appear out of thin air only when they’re needed, and remain hidden away in this unseen space when they’re not.

Multiple times during the sketch, the trio runs into a supply closet and comes out with a completely impractical form of travel for the task—once with a horse, once with a bicycle, and once with three miniature cars. The anonymous voice on the loudspeaker shouting “Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard” clearly seems targeted at getting these knuckleheads to fall into line. But they always find a way to tweak things just a little more.

This short, one of the earliest they worked on during their long-term contract with Columbia Pictures, is the only Oscar-nominated thing ever associated with The Three Stooges. They worked together in one form or another for nearly 50 years.

The Stooges didn’t always need this sort of fantasy to pull off comedic magic, of course. My personal favorite Three Stooges film is An Ache in Every Stake, a magical 18-minute film that culls much of its humor from the failed attempts of the trio to get an icebox (and, of course, the ice) up a massive outdoor staircase.

Maybe there weren’t a ton of layers that made The Three Stooges great. Maybe it was simple: They had a polished chemistry from decades of close interaction and they were goddamn funny showing it off to the world.

But they were also willing to speak for the everyman, the hoi polloi, as it were. The Stooges were often shown working factory jobs, manual labor, or as the wait staff. (I personally could not imagine them working on a laptop at a WeWork.) They were rarely, if ever, portrayed as rich, and in their films, they had a tendency to punch up, not down. Moe, Larry, and Curly would throw pies at a party full of annoying rich people in one film, but save the orphanage in another. They fought with each other, but it didn’t come at the expense of the less fortunate, unless that less fortunate person was Curly Howard.

Perhaps the most prominent and visible example of this type of punching up is You Nazty Spy!, a parody of Nazi Germany that came out during a particularly interesting time in American history. It was a film that flouted the Hays Code to parody Hitler, and did so nearly a year before the U.S. entered World War II. Moe Howard and Larry Fine each called it their favorite Three Stooges film, and it’s understandable why: It did something risky at a time when nobody else was doing it. They beat out Chaplin’s take on the same issue by many months.

Maybe the Stooges weren’t so pedestrian after all.

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What happened to The Three Stooges? Why their story eventually turned tragic

These days, you can generally figure out how popular you are and how big your reach is in your given industry pretty easily.

All you have to do is Google your name, pull up an analytics app, or look at the number of followers you have on Twitter or Facebook. It’s something that we take for granted today, even though it was harder—but still possible—to do even a decade prior.

But imagine it’s the 1930s, and you’re not at the top of the Hollywood system. You’re not Clark Gable or Shirley Temple, and you have no way of telling what people outside of your immediate field of vision think about the work that you’re doing. TV isn’t a thing. Newspaper articles about your work are sparse. The work you do generally, even though you’re the star, does not get nominated for awards. It’s not even the main feature. But it’s still steady work, and you’re proud of it, even if it’s not making you a millionaire.

However, if you knew how famous you actually were, you might feel like you weren’t getting your fair share. That you should have been mentioned in the same light as Clark Gable or Shirley Temple, but you were not.

That’s the real story of The Three Stooges, if you break it down: A comedy troupe whose success was minimized by the very people that should have been doing their best to maximize it, all in an effort to ensure their control.

Certainly, though, the Stooges—borne from the backing team of vaudeville star Ted Healy, Howard’s childhood friend who he improbably became reacquainted with through a newspaper ad—were hugely prolific, but for much of their career they lacked control over their destinies.

Healy helped form many of the basic elements of the Stooges, but didn’t exactly have a reputation as a great boss (Howard described Healy as having a “Jekyll and Hyde personality,” which led Healy to subjugate them and withhold pay), and there were numerous legal battles before the Stooges broke up with him for good in 1934.

It was during this period that The Three Stooges we know and love came to life, via a deal with Columbia Pictures’, which made the Stooges a centerpiece of the studio’s short subjects department. Over a 23-year period, the Stooges filmed around 190 films—an impressive amount of work for a single studio.

But while the segments were hugely successful for the studio—to the point where the studio would only let theaters run them in exchange for picking up the studio’s B-movies—the head of the studio, Harry Cohn, took advantage of the fact that the Stooges had little awareness of their success in the world at large—no Twitter accounts to analyze, no Google search to offer evidence of their reach—to discourage them from leaving the roost.

Instead of thinking that they held the power as major stars, they believed they were minor players, working for the man, believing the sky could fall at any time. Their reliance on Columbia became crippling to their career—they got by, receiving a few thousand dollars per film, but never thrived.

It would only be clear how much money they were getting screwed out of years later.

In the 1999 book The Three Stooges: An Illustrated History, From Amalgamated Morons to American Icons, Moe Howard’s daughter, Joan Howard Mauer, noted the trio had an agent who had a close relationship with Cohn—and that might have led to the long-term underpayment situation.

“One of Harry Cohn’s best friends was my dad’s agent,” she stated. “They used to play cards together, they traveled together on vacation and everything. My dad never accused him of anything, but my feeling is they were just too close. I don’t know how the Stooges could have had the right representation when their agent was Harry Cohn’s buddy.”

Cohn was a major Stooge supporter, but he did little to push them out of their comfort zone, which meant the Stooges appeared in few feature films during their best-regarded era, and just one, Rockin’ in the Rockies, as the main stars.

This subtle, long-running cruelty hurt the Stooges in significant ways. Curly Howard fell ill to a major stroke at the relatively young age of 44, in part because the studio pushed him to work despite a prior stroke.

Shemp, who had found success as a comedic film actor outside of the Stooges, reluctantly returned to the fold. In Moe’s book, he suggested that he put his foot down to Columbia and told them there would be no act without Shemp; other, less sympathetic tellings of the story imply that Shemp was something of their last hope, and that he was required to take a pay cut to help out his brothers.

One must wonder if the Stooges would have faced such a dire situation had they been paid what they were actually worth to the studio.

The situation had long-term effects on the Stooges’ financial security, too. By sheer accident, all those films The Three Stooges made for Columbia worked particularly well for television due to their relatively short length, which meant that after Columbia shut down its short subjects division, the old films were still incredibly valuable.

Larry and Moe were able to bring in Curly Joe to help embrace the ensuing success over the next decade, but the Columbia contracts still stung and would linger over the Stooges’ estates decades after their respective deaths.

By the early ’90s, when Curly Joe was on his deathbed, stories surfaced that suggested that the trio’s families were fighting over literal scraps in relation to the Stooges’ work—even though, at this time, they were showing frequently on cable television.

It was only in the mid-’90s that the headaches around the Stooges’ estates were finally worked out. It took a while, but their heirs are finally seeing the benefits of the work Moe, Larry, Curly, Shemp, Joe Besser, and Curly Joe did decades prior.