100 Fun Facts About The Three Stooges

For which studio did the Three Stooges make their famous 190 comedy shorts?

They stayed 24 years and, thanks to Harry Cohn's scare tactics, never once asked for a raise.

Which two Stooges were the constants across the act's entire 1922–1970 run?

Six men were Stooges over the years, but only three at any one time.

Under which vaudeville comedian did the act begin in 1922?

Healy sang or told jokes while his noisy stooges interrupted, and he retaliated with abuse.

What does the show-business term "stooge" originally mean?

Healy's act was also billed as His Southern Gentlemen and His Racketeers.

What was the first Hollywood feature film Ted Healy and His Stooges appeared in, in 1930?

Fox singled out the Stooges and offered them a contract without Healy, who furiously got it withdrawn.

What instrument did Larry Fine play as a vaudeville comedian before joining the act?

He joined Healy sometime between 1925 and 1928.

What was Curly Howard's real first name?

He was the youngest Howard brother and joined in 1932 when Shemp left.

What did a freshly shaved Jerry Howard say that Healy misheard as Curly?

Healy had said the long-haired, mustached Jerry did not look funny.

How did Jerry Howard look before he shaved his head to become Curly?

He kept the handlebar mustache for a while after the haircut.

With which studio did Healy and his stooges sign in 1933, making shorts like Nertsery Rhymes?

Nertsery Rhymes used an early two-color Technicolor process and recycled MGM musical footage.

Which 1933 MGM musical featured the Stooges alongside Joan Crawford, Clark Gable and Fred Astaire?

Their last film with Healy was Hollywood Party in 1934, after which the partnership ended.

What was the Stooges' first short for Columbia in 1934?

One account says they got $1,000 between them for it before signing a $7,500-per-film term contract.

Which Columbia president kept the Stooges unaware of their popularity for 23 years?

His yearly mantra was that the market for comedy shorts was dying out.

How many shorts per year did the Stooges' Columbia schedule call for?

They were filmed within 40 weeks, leaving 12 weeks free for family or touring the live act.

Which director made more than three dozen Stooge films at Columbia?

Jules White directed dozens more, and his brother Jack White used the pseudonym Preston Black.

Hoi Polloi (1935), with a professor betting he can refine the trio, borrows from which play?

The plot was reused twice, as Half-Wits Holiday in 1947 and Pies and Guys in 1958.

Which 1938 short features the musical interlude "Swingin' the Alphabet"?

It was directed by silent-comedy star Charley Chase.

In A Plumbing We Will Go (1940), what do the Stooges nearly destroy?

Water pours from every appliance, including an early television set; it was remade twice.

Which 1940 short lampooned Hitler while America was still neutral?

Moe, Larry and director Jules White considered it their best film.

What was the name of Moe's Hitler-like dictator in You Nazty Spy!?

Curly played a Göring type covered in medals and Larry a Goebbels-style propaganda minister.

Which 1943 short is considered the team's most violent?

Spook Louder, by contrast, is often called one of their weakest for its rehashed jokes.

Who was the Stooges' primary on-screen foil, playing the Nazi ringleader in No Dough Boys?

He appeared opposite the trio in dozens of shorts.

Why did Moe reject Columbia's 1935 offer to star the Stooges in a full-length feature?

He said it was hard enough stealing gags for two-reelers without making a seven-reeler.

On the set of which film did Curly suffer the stroke that ended his career on May 6, 1946?

It ended a 14-year career; he made only one more brief on-screen appearance.

Which 1947 short is the only film with all four original Stooges on screen at once?

Curly visited the set and Jules White had him do a cameo for fun; it was recycled in Booty and the Beast.

How many shorts did Shemp make with the Stooges after returning in 1946?

He also split a low-budget Western feature, Gold Raiders, with cowboy star George O'Brien.

Which director joined in 1945 and let Shemp develop his own Stooge persona?

He directed Brideless Groom, Who Done It? and his own favourite, Punchy Cowpunchers.

What was the title of the 1949 ABC pilot for a Stooges TV series that Columbia blocked?

Columbia allowed guest appearances on shows like Texaco Star Theater but not their own series.

Where had Shemp been on the night he died in a taxi, November 22, 1955?

His daughter-in-law confirmed it was a massive cerebral hemorrhage, not the heart attack often reported.

Which actor doubled for Shemp, shot from behind, in four shorts after his death?

Disguising one actor as another outside stunt shots is now called a fake Shemp.

What name did the Stooges' practice of disguising a stand-in give to filmmaking?

The four fake-Shemp shorts were Rumpus in the Harem, Hot Stuff, Scheming Schemers and Commotion on the Ocean.

Which comedian, known as Stinky on The Abbott and Costello Show, became the third Stooge in 1956?

He appeared in the final 16 shorts, often considered the team's weakest.

What unusual clause did the third Stooge of 1956–58 have in his contract?

He had noticed that one side of Larry's face looked calloused from years of slaps.

Which 1958 short had no supporting cast at all, with the Stooges working entirely alone?

A Merry Mix Up the year before had cast them as three sets of triplets.

What was the last Stooge short filmed, on December 19–20, 1957?

Jules White closed the shorts unit the next day, and the trio was fired after 24 years.

Which was the final Stooge short to reach theaters, on June 4, 1959?

Columbia had enough finished shorts to keep releasing them for 18 months after firing the team.

Why was Moe refused entry when he visited Columbia to say goodbye after the firing?

He called it a crushing blow to his pride.

Which Columbia TV subsidiary syndicated the Stooge shorts to television starting in 1958?

By September 1959 all 190 shorts were airing regularly, aimed squarely at children.

Why did Moe suggest that Joe DeRita shave his head?

Curly-era shorts had proved the most popular on TV, so DeRita became Curly Joe.

On whose NBC variety show did Curly Joe make his first national appearance with the Stooges in 1959?

They re-created their Stand-In sketch, with Curly Joe as the silent double who takes all the punishment.

What was the first of the Stooges' comeback feature films, released in 1959?

It was produced by their agent, Harry Romm.

Which Olympic skater co-starred in the money-losing 1961 film Snow White and the Three Stooges?

Co-written by Wizard of Oz scribe Noel Langley, it lost about $2.3 million.

Who produced the 1960s Stooge features like The Three Stooges Meet Hercules?

Maurer later salvaged the Kook's Tour pilot into a 52-minute home-video special.

As what did the Stooges cameo in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)?

The same year they had a bigger role in 4 for Texas with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

How many animated cartoons were made for the 1965 series The New 3 Stooges?

The trio filmed 41 live-action skits to wrap around them and voiced their cartoon selves.

What was the travelogue-sitcom pilot the Stooges were filming when Larry had his stroke in 1970?

The unfinished footage became a 52-minute special released to home video in 1973, the team's last performance.

Which longtime Stooges straight man was lined up to replace Larry after his stroke?

He posed for publicity photos but never performed; a 1975 comeback died with Moe.

What illness was Moe diagnosed with a week before filming Blazing Stewardesses in 1975?

He died on May 4, 1975; the Ritz Brothers took the Stooges' place in the film.

Much of the Stooges' seeming gibberish was actually which language?

In Mutts to You, Larry's Chinese laundryman is really telling a cop to stop annoying him in Yiddish.

The Stooges' inside-joke initials A.K. for pretentious big shots stood for what?

It is a Yiddish idiom for an old person of diminished capacity.

Which future sitcom star, then a platinum blonde, appears in the Stooges' Three Little Pigskins?

Lucille Ball played one of the recruiters who mistake the trio for football stars, and later joked that the main thing the job taught her was how to duck.

Which 1934 Stooges short, set in a hospital, earned the trio's only Academy Award nomination?

Men in Black spoofed Men in White, a Clark Gable and Myrna Loy medical drama released earlier the same year.

Which star of TV's Batman played the sheriff in the Stooges' last feature, The Outlaws Is Coming?

Adam West played Kenneth Cabot, a Boston magazine editor sent to Wyoming over a buffalo slaughter, who gets his badge with secret help from Annie Oakley.

Helen Schonberger, who married Moe Howard in 1925, was a cousin of which world-famous performer?

Harry Houdini's cousin Helen married Moe in June 1925, after which he briefly left show business to sell real estate with his mother.

A clip from the Three Stooges short Brideless Groom plays on a television in which 1990s crime film?

Pulp Fiction shows Eric Stoltz's character watching the short on television at home, and its credits name Emil Sitka, who plays the justice of the peace in Brideless Groom.

Which comedy star gained 40 pounds to play Curly in the 2012 Three Stooges film, then dropped out?

Jim Carrey quit rather than risk his health by gaining the 60 to 70 pounds the part needed, and the role went to Will Sasso.

Which nursery rhyme became the Stooges' opening theme in 1939, often ending in a jazzy flourish?

Three Blind Mice began as a slow arrangement nicknamed the sliding strings version, and a faster take with accordion replaced it in mid-1942.

Which three Stooges were real-life brothers, the sons of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants?

Moe, Curly and Shemp were three of five brothers, while Larry, born Louis Feinberg in a different city, was no relation.

Which cartoon dog met animated versions of the Three Stooges in two 1972 television episodes?

Scooby-Doo met the trio in Ghastly Ghost Town and The Ghost of the Red Baron, with impressionists supplying the Stooges' voices.

Which Hollywood star and long-time Stooges fan executive-produced a 2000 TV film about the trio?

Mel Gibson's production was shot entirely in Sydney, Australia, and reached American screens on ABC in April 2000.

Which tribute to the Three Stooges was unveiled on Vine Street in Los Angeles in August 1983?

A Walk of Fame star came on August 30, 1983, when only two of the six men who had been Stooges were still alive.

Which sibling filmmakers wrote and directed the 2012 Three Stooges film after a decade of delays?

The Farrelly brothers shot it as three linked episodes set in the present day, rather than as a biopic or a remake of old shorts.

In the Stooges short Punch Drunks, which tune sends Curly into a fighting frenzy in the ring?

Pop Goes the Weasel was a gag good enough to reuse: Curly Joe DeRita gets the same musical burst of strength in a 1963 feature.

Which place name triggers a stranger's rage in the Stooges' stage routine from Gents Without Cents?

Niagara Falls is the trigger in the trio's take on an old burlesque sketch; Abbott and Costello filmed a version built on the name Pokomoko.

In which New York City borough was Moe Howard born, the fourth of five brothers?

Brooklyn, in the Bensonhurst neighborhood, was also where a young Moe ran unpaid errands at Vitagraph Studios in return for bit parts in its silent films.

Which comic actor hosted AMC's 1999 Stooges showcase in character as the Professor of Stoogelogy?

Leslie Nielsen played an instructor at the New Yuk University of Knuckleheads, lecturing a class of students on the trio before the shorts aired.

The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze (1963) is loosely based on a novel by which author?

Jules Verne's hero gives way to a great-grandson, Phileas Fogg III, who repeats the famous wager with the Stooges in tow.

Which singer joined Frank Sinatra in 4 for Texas, the 1963 comedy Western with a Stooges cameo?

Dean Martin and Sinatra play rivals racing to open a waterfront casino in Galveston, with Anita Ekberg and Ursula Andress at their sides.

In which city was Larry Fine born, where a mural of him now stands near Third and South Streets?

Philadelphia dedicated the mural in 1999 with Larry's sister looking on, after a local weekly newspaper urged the city to honor him.

In Three Little Beers, the Stooges wreck which kind of sporting venue while chasing a cash prize?

A golf course is torn up when Curly chops down a tree, Moe gouges out divots and Larry rips up a putting green to pull out a root.

Which male comedian played the Stooge-hating nun Sister Mary-Mengele in the 2012 Three Stooges film?

Larry David plays the nun who has always hated the trio, and she is flattened by a falling bell that they were trying to repair.

Which actor played Curly opposite Paul Ben-Victor's Moe in the 2000 TV film about the Stooges?

Michael Chiklis played Curly alongside Evan Handler as Larry and John Kassir as Shemp, in a film based on Michael Fleming's history of the trio.

Which horror director, a professed Stooges fan, named a type of stand-in after one of the trio?

Sam Raimi made up the label on The Evil Dead, where he, his brother Ted and several friends doubled for cast members who had walked away.

In the Stooges' Disorder in the Court, which animal turns up carrying the real killer's confession?

A parrot carries the confession of the true culprit, Buck Wing, whose name puns on the buck-and-wing, a vaudeville dance step.

Why can Disorder in the Court and three other Stooges shorts be shown freely by anyone?

Their copyrights expired, leaving Disorder in the Court from 1936 and three shorts from the late 1940s, Malice in the Palace among them, in the public domain.

Which cable channel's movie awards gave the Three Stooges a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993?

MTV gave the same movie award to the horror slasher Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th one year earlier.

In The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, a time machine sends the trio back to which ancient land?

Greece, specifically Ithaca under King Odius, is where they land, in what became the most profitable of the trio's feature films.

In The Three Stooges in Orbit, invaders from which planet plot to destroy Earth and Disneyland?

Mars has a spy planted as a professor's butler, and the trio end up bolting a nuclear depth bomb to the engine of his military vehicle.

The Stooges' final record, in 1966, teamed them with which Hanna-Barbera cartoon character?

Yogi Bear shared the bill on an album that set the trio and the cartoon cast against a villain called the Mad, Mad, Mad Dr. No-No.

Which animal nickname did Moe give Larry Fine, a nod to the bushy hair ringing his bald spot?

Porcupine suited a look that, by one rumor, began when Larry met his future boss with freshly wet hair that dried at odd angles.

Which family surname did Moe Howard legally give up in 1945, decades after adopting his stage name?

Horwitz stayed his legal name until June 1945; he was born Moses, the fourth of five sons of Jennie and Solomon.

Which skill made a young Curly Howard a regular at a Queens nightspot also visited by George Raft?

Ballroom dancing came easily to Curly, a mediocre student who starred on his school basketball team and was also a good singer.

Shemp Howard played a saloon keeper opposite which comedy star in the 1940 film The Bank Dick?

W. C. Fields was one of several Universal stars Shemp supported in the early 1940s, a list that also included Abbott and Costello.

What accident at age 13 left Curly Howard with the limp he later hid behind his exaggerated walk?

A gunshot to the ankle, self-inflicted while he cleaned a rifle, went uncorrected because Curly was so afraid of surgery.

Spooks! and Pardon My Backfire were the only Stooges shorts made using which 1953 movie craze?

3-D filming stretched each shoot to five full days, and the gags hurl eye pokes, blowtorches and hammers straight at the audience.

In An Ache in Every Stake, what do the Stooges haul to a house at the top of a long staircase?

Blocks of ice melt away on the climb, and the trio go on to wreck a dinner party with a birthday cake they have inflated with gas.

In the 1987 Cinemaware game The Three Stooges, players earn money in minigames to save what?

An orphanage is either foreclosed or rescued depending on the takings, and in the best ending the trio marry its owner's three daughters.

In Hanna-Barbera's 1977 cartoon The Robonic Stooges, Moe, Larry and Curly were reimagined as what?

Bionic superheroes with powers that often misfired, they worked out of a junkyard and took orders from a frustrated boss called Agent 000.

In Malice in the Palace, the Stooges sneak into the Emir of Shmow's palace disguised as whom?

Santa Clauses is the unlikely disguise the trio pick to enter the palace and take back a diamond looted from the tomb of King Rootintootin.

In Ants in the Pantry, the Stooges gatecrash a society dinner party while drumming up work as what?

Exterminators short of customers, they release moths and ants themselves, then destroy a piano while hauling hidden cats out of it.

In 1948, the Stooges first appeared on television as guests of Morey Amsterdam and which other host?

Milton Berle hosted them on his hit Texaco Star Theater, and within a year the trio had filmed a pilot for a weekly series of their own.

Which Civil War-era song was the Stooges' first regular theme, starting with Pardon My Scotch?

Listen to the Mocking Bird was arranged for the series by Louis Silvers and played for laughs, complete with the sounds of birds.

Which trained soprano sang in Micro-Phonies and broke Shemp's nose with a punch in Brideless Groom?

Christine McIntyre held a music degree from Chicago Musical College, and her accidental real punch was left in the finished film.

Punch Drunks became the only Stooges short to earn which honor in 2002, for cultural significance?

A National Film Registry entry put the 1934 short under Library of Congress preservation; its story is credited to the three comedians themselves.

Which future Oscar-winning character actor appears in the Stooges' costume short Restless Knights?

Walter Brennan went on to win the supporting-actor Oscar three times in five years, for Come and Get It, Kentucky and The Westerner.

The 1960 Stooges compilation Stop! Look! and Laugh! added new scenes starring which ventriloquist?

Paul Winchell and his dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff set up each old Curly clip, alongside an animal act, the Marquis Chimps.

What injury did Moe suffer on Pardon My Scotch when Curly sawed through a table he was standing on?

Broken ribs did not stop him at once: Moe pulled himself up, slapped both partners, then collapsed and was rushed to hospital.

Which nickname did Curly Howard's brothers give him as the youngest of five, one he kept for life?

Babe caused confusion once Shemp married a woman with the same pet name, which is one account of why the family started saying Curly.

Which future network TV host interviewed two of the Stooges as a high-school student in 1971?

Tom Bergeron kept the tapes in storage for decades, then turned them into a 2009 satellite radio special after Howard Stern talked him into it.

In which language are the Three Stooges known by a name literally meaning Three Smelly Shoemakers?

Chinese takes the name from a proverb in which three lowly cobblers, putting their heads together, outdo the great strategist Zhuge Liang.