The Three Stooges Trivia
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100 free The Three Stooges trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Three Stooges ran from a 1922 vaudeville act called Ted Healy and His Stooges to 190 two-reel comedies for Columbia Pictures, and their films have not left American television since 1958. Six men played a Stooge, but only three at a time, and Moe Howard and Larry Fine were the constants. This quiz covers the Healy years and Soup to Nuts, how Curly got his name, Harry Cohn's yearly scare tactics, You Nazty Spy!, Curly's stroke and Shemp's return, the fake Shemp, Joe Besser's no-hitting clause and the Curly Joe comeback features. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who grew up on the shorts, a third are medium and the rest are for Stooge completists. Every answer is checked against the act's reference history.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which future star, then a little-known bit player, appears in the Stooges' 1934 football short Three Little Pigskins?
Lucille Ball
Lucille Ball. As a gangster's girlfriend she takes a blast of seltzer in the face, and the rough shoot left Larry short of a tooth and Curly with a broken leg.
Q 02Which 1934 hospital spoof earned the Three Stooges their only Academy Award nomination?
Men in Black
Men in Black. The title mocked that year's Clark Gable hospital drama Men in White, and the whole short runs on one loudspeaker call: 'Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard!'
Q 03Which sibling directing team made the 2012 feature film The Three Stooges?
The Farrelly brothers
The Farrelly brothers spent more than a decade trying to get it made. At one point Sean Penn, Jim Carrey and Benicio del Toro were lined up as the trio, before a lesser-known cast took over.
Q 04Before the Three Stooges made the word famous, what did 'stooge' mean in show-business slang?
A comic's assistant
A comic's assistant. Dictionaries date that sense to 1913 and call the word's origin unknown; only later, by 1937, did it take on its wider meaning of a lackey or dupe.
Q 05Which famous cartoonist wrote Soup to Nuts, the 1930 feature in which the future Three Stooges made their film debut?
Rube Goldberg
Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist of absurdly complicated machines, also appears in it as himself. Fox liked the Stooges enough to offer them a contract without Ted Healy, who furiously had it withdrawn.
Q 06What instrument did Larry Fine play as a vaudeville comedian before joining the act?
Violin
Violin. As a child Larry's arm was badly burned by acid from his father's jewellery shop, and violin lessons were prescribed to rebuild the muscles; he became good enough to play professionally.
Q 07What was Curly Howard's real first name?
Jerome
Jerome. Known to his family as 'Babe', the youngest of the five Horwitz brothers got his chance in 1932, when Shemp quit the act and Moe put his kid brother forward.
Q 08By most accounts, why was Ted Healy at first unimpressed by the youngest Howard brother in 1932?
He didn't look funny
He didn't look funny. With thick wavy hair and a waxed moustache the newcomer seemed too handsome for a knockabout comic, so he shaved both off and became the bald 'Curly'; how the nickname itself arose is told several ways.
Q 09In which city was Larry Fine of the Three Stooges born in 1902?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia. The son of a watch-repairer and jeweller, he earned money as a teenage lightweight boxer until his father, who hated seeing him fight in public, put a stop to it.
Q 10Which studio signed Ted Healy and his Stooges in 1933 and put them in shorts like Nertsery Rhymes?
MGM
MGM. Its Stooge shorts were built around leftover Technicolor musical numbers cut from earlier features, which is why Nertsery Rhymes was filmed in early two-colour Technicolor to match.
Q 11Which 1933 musical featured the Stooges alongside Joan Crawford and Clark Gable?
Dancing Lady
Dancing Lady. Larry plays a rehearsal pianist and Moe and Curly stagehands, still as Ted Healy's sidekicks; within a year the three had left him to work as a team of their own.
Q 12What was the Three Stooges' first short for Columbia, released in 1934?
Woman Haters
Woman Haters. Every line of it is spoken in rhyme, and the trio were not yet billed as a team: they appear under their own names, below leading lady Marjorie White.
Q 13Which Columbia president kept the Stooges unaware of their popularity for 23 years?
Harry Cohn
Q 21In Gents Without Cents (1944), which place name sets off the Stooges' 'Slowly I turned… step by step' routine?
Niagara Falls
Niagara Falls. The sketch was an old burlesque standard, and the Stooges had filmed it a year earlier for a Columbia feature that dropped it; their producer saved the footage and built this short around it.
Q 22In Disorder in the Court (1936), the Stooges are star witnesses at a trial for which crime?
Murder
Murder. A nightclub dancer stands accused and the Stooges re-enact the fatal evening for the jury; the short's copyright lapsed in the 1960s, so anyone has been free to reissue it ever since.
Q 23Moe, Shemp and Curly Howard grew up in which borough of New York City?
Brooklyn
His yearly mantra was that the market for comedy shorts was dying out.
Q 14In Punch Drunks (1934), hearing which tune sends Curly into a punching frenzy?
Pop Goes the Weasel
Pop Goes the Weasel. Moe came up with the story himself, and Sousa's 'Stars and Stripes Forever' was the first choice until the studio balked at paying royalties and swapped in a tune that was free.
Q 15Which future TV superhero starred with the Stooges in their last feature film, The Outlaws Is Coming (1965)?
Adam West
Adam West played the sharpshooting hero a year before he became Batman. The outlaws ranged against him were played by local television hosts whose shows had been running the old Stooge shorts.
Q 16The Stooges' Hoi Polloi (1935), with a professor betting he can refine the trio, borrows from which play?
Pygmalion
Pygmalion. Unlike Shaw's flower girl, the Stooges cannot be improved: the professor loses his bet, and by the end of the society party it is the guests who are slapping one another.
Q 17Which 1938 Stooges short features the musical interlude 'Swingin' the Alphabet'?
Violent Is the Word for Curly
Violent Is the Word for Curly. The catchy chant was no Stooge invention: it was 'The Spelling Bee', a parlour song of 1875, though nobody traced it to its Victorian composer until 2005.
Q 18In A Plumbing We Will Go (1940), what do the Stooges nearly destroy?
A socialite's mansion
A socialite's mansion. On the run from a policeman, they pose as plumbers and flood the house until water bursts out of the television set, while Curly builds himself into a cage of his own pipes.
Q 19Which 1940 Stooges short lampooned Hitler while America was still neutral?
You Nazty Spy!
You Nazty Spy! Chaplin had started The Great Dictator first, but the Stooges' two-reeler beat it into cinemas by nine months, and Moe and Larry both called it their favourite of all their shorts.
Q 20What was the name of Moe's Hitler-like dictator in the Stooges' 1940 spoof?
Moe Hailstone
Moe Hailstone, a paperhanger turned dictator, rules with Curly as his field marshal and Larry as minister of propaganda until an angry mob of citizens drives all three from power.
Brooklyn. The Horwitz boys were raised in Bensonhurst, and in 1909 Moe talked his way into films at the nearby Vitagraph studio by running errands for the actors.
Q 24Curly suffered the stroke that ended his career in May 1946 on the set of which short?
Half-Wits Holiday
Half-Wits Holiday. It was the last day of shooting, and the closing pie fight had to be filmed without him; apart from one brief cameo he never appeared on screen again.
Q 25Which 1947 short is the only film in which Moe, Larry, Shemp and Curly all appear on screen together?
Hold That Lion!
Hold That Lion! Curly, retired after his stroke, was visiting the set when the director put him in for fun as a snoring train passenger, the only time all three Howard brothers shared the screen.
Q 26Shemp agreed in 1946 to rejoin the Stooges until what?
Curly recovered
Curly recovered. He never did, so the 'temporary' stand-in, who had been starring in film comedies of his own, stayed for nine years, until his own death.
Q 27In Micro-Phonies (1945), Curly dresses as a woman and is mistaken for what kind of performer?
An opera singer
An opera singer. He is only miming to a record made by the film's real soprano, Christine McIntyre, but the trick works so well that the trio are hired to perform at a society party.
Q 28What was the title of the Stooges' 1949 ABC television pilot, which Columbia blocked from becoming a series?
Jerks of All Trades
Jerks of All Trades. Columbia warned that their contract barred any TV series that might compete with the two-reelers and threatened to cancel it, so the pilot, filmed in a single day, was shelved unaired.
Q 29Where had Shemp Howard spent the evening before he died in a taxi home in November 1955?
A boxing match
A boxing match. Boxing was his favourite sport to watch, and the 60-year-old was riding home from the Hollywood Legion Stadium with a friend when he collapsed.
Q 30Moe Howard's wife, Helen Schonberger, was a cousin of which famous entertainer?
Harry Houdini
Harry Houdini. After the wedding in 1925 Moe quit the stage and tried selling real estate, but before long he was back in Ted Healy's act.