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Breaking: One of the Three Stooges Star passes away at 52 years after suffering a devastating…
In the 1944 Three Stooges short “Crash Goes the Hash,” Moe, Larry, and Curly offend a snooty butler. “You remind me of the Three Stooges,” he chastises them. Curly takes umbrage. “Hey, that’s an insult,” he replies.
Curly’s just being modest. The Three Stooges, the Holy Trinity of slapstick, are in the pantheon of comedy teams. This year marks the 90th anniversary of “Woman Haters,” Moe, Larry, and Curly’s first short for Columbia. The vaudeville team itself, in different incarnations, was launched a century ago! It’s high time they got their own museum exhibit and streaming channel.
The Hollywood Museum just opened “The Three Stooges 100th Anniversary Exhibit,” containing original posters from their movies and nearly 200 shorts, costumes, scripts, props, and collectibles (including 1930s vintage Stooges hand puppets).
For those who can’t make the pilgrimage, there’s C3 Entertainment’s aptly titled Three Stooges+, which, when fully populated, will contain all 190 of the Columbia shorts. It’s up to 120 now. About five a week are being uploaded chronologically, so hang on, Joe Besser fans.
The channel, available on YouTube, Freevee, and other platforms, contains rarities from the archives, including Kook’s Tour (1970), the team’s final project, a proposed pilot for a travel-TV series. Also currently accessible are the feature films with Besser replacement Joe DeRita, and the New 3 Stooges cartoons. Original programming includes documentaries about the team, Shemp’s shorts as a solo performer, two-hour-plus marathons (“Curly vs. Shemp”), and “quick scenes.”
But where to begin? For those new to the Stooges, we’ve selected 25 of the shorts that are invariably the most quoted or referenced amongst Stooges fans. With 190 shorts to their credit, some favorites are bound to be missed here (as a kid, I loved “Idiot’s Deluxe,” with the driving bear who puts his arm out to signal a turn), but these should make any Stooge aficionado slap-happy.
