New Yorkers and comedy...go figure! It was a comedy cauldron spawning vaudeville, slapstick and schtick..pratfalls and "Dont get me started, take my wife please" gags, that were old then that had them rolling in the aisles from Broadway to the Catskills. The Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, Wheeler and Woolsey and many other duo's, trio's and foursomes that dared to heckle the hecklers and break now ground in comedy, but when it came to extreme slapstick...there are four that stand out as the Four Slapstick Horesman of the Apocalypse...the Three Stooges!
What the hell are you talking about...you said four horseman..not three! Do the math Bozo, no matter what academic theory you are using, three does not equal four. Well, yes it does if you are using the math of that beloved university... NYUK! The Three Stooges were and are comedy icons who not only entertained generation after generation and frat house after frat house, and dammit...there were Four!!! Larry, Moe and Curly...but ..there was one more..lest we forget to legalize Shemp!!! Shemp came before Curly afterall...Look at it this way...there were four Beatles right..sort of...but then there was Pete Best the original drummer..referred to as the Fifth Beatle..so Shemp was the Fourth Stooge..except he wasn't the fourth, Curly was the fourth...oh Christ, even I'm confused now...(Later there was Joe DeRita and Joe Besser but to me they were faux stooges and just didn't have the slapstick panache of the originals..in fact..they sucked!) There, I've said it.
Just who are these Jewish jokesters from another galaxy, and what makes Jews so funny anyway? The Prophet Lenny Bruce summed it up...the Negro slave had to dance his way off the plantation...the Jews had no rhythm and can't dance, so they told jokes and slapsticked their way out of bondage! Moses as Rodney Dangerfield? Take my burning bush, please!!!
Moses Harry Horowitz, (Moe Howard who developed the original Beatles mop top look) stolen later by four lads from Liverpool) was born in 1897. Samuel Horowitz (Shemp Howard) in 1895, while Jerome Horowitz, (Curly Howard) was born with a full head of hair in 1903. Non-brother Louis Feinberg, (Larry Fine) was born with a violin in his hand in 1902.
Between the four of them, they appeared in over 200 Stooge films together..mainly shorts and very few features as the studio regarded them as filler...high priced filler and box office boom and boffo filling the studios bankroll to overflowing with their celluloid antics. The Stooges however were kept in the dark, and were never really aware of their popularity thanks to monetary and box office coverups by corrupt studio heads and officials. More on the darkside later...but...the inevitable "once upon a time..."
In the orbit of the planet Vaudeville, there dwelled a king...his name was Ted Healy and with him he had three amiable clowns he dubbed "The Southern Gentlemen". The Southern Gentlemen had gone through numerous personnel changes until the 9th circle of comedy hell was complete in 1925 with the inclusion of Moe, Shemp and Larry. Moe joined the act in 1921, Shemp in 1923 and finally Larry Fine in 1925. Fine had also had a career on the stage as an accomplished violinist but switched to comedy and was a natural Stooge fit. By 1925 the ensemble was officially known as Ted Healy and the Stooges.
Greasepaint, and leaky dressing rooms were the environment and when the curtain rose....it was a glittering standing room only palace of comedy panache...well..in a practical pratfall sort of way. This was not Seinfeld or Lenny Bruce afterall..this was pure and simple Neanderthal knuckle dragging nyukasaurus comedy that would be taken to extreme levels to delight finger poking generations to come and those yet unborn!
All were seasoned stage professionals but Hollywood came knocking in 1930, and Ted Healy and the Stooges were signed for a one film deal called "Soup To Nuts" and the audience and studio were nuts over the Stooges...but Healy was literally a "fifth wheel" and was not approached by the studio for further work. He was left at the starting line while the Stooges were now fuel injecting the box office coffers. Healy was pissed off to say the least and with his erratic temperment he blew a gasket over the growing fame of his Stooges whose rise to theatrical power threatened to leave him in the wings while they wowed the world with sight gag after sight gag that were not the most cerebral fare on the table of the comedy banquet, but were more visual and visceral to relate to the baser instincts of comedy funny bones. Bear in mind, Healy took the bulk of all show profits, not sharing fairly with his co-horts who actually were the talent and tried to screw them on the film deal as well..Healy was heartless...and when it came to assets..he was an asshole.
The Stooges broke with Ted and Healy's funny bone was broken into a million fragments, renamed themselves the Three Stooges and hit the entertainment circuit once again. Healy had threatened to blow up the theaters where they would appear. Told you he was a hot head,
Healy hired three so called comedians to duplicate the Stooges act but they bombed time after time. They were no Larry, Moe and Shemp afterall...but Larry, Moe and Shemp were..and they were on a roll.Then in one of those "the planets must not be aligned moments" The Stooges extended a hand of friendship to Healy and re-joined his act in 1932...(actually Healy joined THEIR act) and to Shemp this was akin to Chamberlain appeasing Hitler with the false promise of "Peace in our time..." So Shemp jumped the Stooge ship in disgust...and was replaced by his younger brother, Jerome, whose face in the decades to come would adorn more tee-shirts sold in more headshops right alongside those with Bob Marley and John Lennon. Curly was a dormant volcano of slapstick that was about to erupt!!!
Shemp may have abandoned the good ship Lollipop temporarily, but the hole in the Stooge hull was about to be patched and made seaworthy once again with Jerome joining the act. Only one problem. Jerome had more than his share of hair..flaming red cascading locks that made him look more like a deranged Zeus complete with massive handlebar mustache!!! He was more frightening looking than comical looking so he decided to do a 360 and went for broke going bald as a billiard ball and shaving his mustache completely off. He now looked like an oversized cue ball but the results are the stuff comedy legend are made of...Jerome is dead....long live King Curly!!!!
They did a few forgettable films with Healy without great financial success and once again, by 1934 they split atomically, anatomically and amicably with Healy and his Jekyll and Hyde personality that became too much for them to put up with. Healy died in 1937 and now the way was clear as the Stooges were now under contract by Columbia Pictures and were on a Hollywood roll pumping out comedy shorts the way Schwarznegger used to pump iron. They were making a whopping $7,500 per film which in todays money is over $100,000 per.
During those madcap Hitler years of world conflagration, the Stooges did numerous propaganda films to help bouy the spirits of the homefront and although Curly and Larry wanted to do longer feature films..Moe who was now also the manager of the trio nixed the idea with a doink doink and a finger poking emphatic "No!"...he felt unlike other comedy groups (Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, etc.) that the Stooge brand of comedy was too fast to be sustained in a longer feature film and in fact what could today only be described as "fuel injected extreme slapstick" more suitable to a quartermile dragstrip then the Indy 500.
1940 was not the year the music died..but the year that marked the end of the road for true Stoogeists..it was when Curly's weight ballooned due to years of drinking, good food, hard living, gambling and womanizing, and by 1946 he suffered a devastating stroke that brought the great one down. Once again, Shemp was called off the bench and took his place as comedy quarterback of the team. Curly died from a cerebral hemmorage in 1952. (Although Three Stooges films always featured one of the lineups..there is one film "Hold That Lion" that features all four originals..Larry, Moe, Curly and Shemp..it is the holy grail of Stooge films..a true classic.
The Stooges also did television. Not just re-runs of their old films that garnered them a whole new fanbase as it still does to this day, but their first TV appearance was on the Milton Berle show in 1948 and the second on the Morey Amsterdam show. Larry died in 1975 followed by Moe three years later in 1978..but the most Stoogelike death of all was Shemps...he was riding in New York City in a taxi cab with a close friend in 1955 when a heart attack came out of nowhere and Shemp was bouncing all over the backseat..the friend who thought..oh fuck, this is just Shemp fooling around but Shemp was not fooling around and died in the backseat at the age of 60.
The saddest part of the Stooge tale is that their contract ran out at Columbia in 1957 and there were no goodbyes..no farewell parties..no thanks for saving the studio's ass all these years or even a goddamned fuck you. They were banned from the lot and when Moe tried to go back to say goodbye to some of the old crew on the films..he was denied entry. As a final blow Columbia which owned the rights to their films..repackaged them for television which also spawned a Saturday morning cartoon show among other things, not to mention merchandising on everything from lunch boxes to bobbleheads...the Stooges were paid a pittance for their share and if that ain't a finger poke in the eye.
The Stooges are gone...up in comedy heaven somewhere (what the hell there is a rock and roll heaven with Janis and Jimi, eh?) so why not a slapstick heaven where they do the Curly Shuffle and every Friday night is pie in the face night, and the Holy Trinity is known as Nyuk, Nyuk and Nyuk!!! Soitenly!!!