100 Fun Facts About The Three Stooges

Which future star, then a little-known bit player, appears in the Stooges' 1934 football short Three Little Pigskins?

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.

Which 1934 hospital spoof earned the Three Stooges their only Academy Award nomination?

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!'

Which sibling directing team made the 2012 feature film The Three Stooges?

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.

Before the Three Stooges made the word famous, what did 'stooge' mean in show-business slang?

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.

Which famous cartoonist wrote Soup to Nuts, the 1930 feature in which the future Three Stooges made their film debut?

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 Fox liked the Stooges enough to offer them a contract without Ted Healy, who furiously had it withdrawn.

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

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.

What was Curly Howard's real first name?

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.

By most accounts, why was Ted Healy at first unimpressed by the youngest Howard brother in 1932?

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.

In which city was Larry Fine of the Three Stooges born in 1902?

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.

Which studio signed Ted Healy and his Stooges in 1933 and put them in shorts like Nertsery Rhymes?

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.

Which 1933 musical featured the Stooges alongside Joan Crawford and Clark Gable?

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.

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

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.

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.

In Punch Drunks (1934), hearing which tune sends Curly into a punching frenzy?

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.

Which future TV superhero starred with the Stooges in their last feature film, The Outlaws Is Coming (1965)?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Which 1940 Stooges short lampooned Hitler while America was still neutral?

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.

What was the name of Moe's Hitler-like dictator in the Stooges' 1940 spoof?

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.

In Gents Without Cents (1944), which place name sets off the Stooges' 'Slowly I turned… step by step' routine?

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.

In Disorder in the Court (1936), the Stooges are star witnesses at a trial for which crime?

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.

Moe, Shemp and Curly Howard grew up in which borough of New York City?

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.

Curly suffered the stroke that ended his career in May 1946 on the set of which short?

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.

Which 1947 short is the only film in which Moe, Larry, Shemp and Curly all appear on screen together?

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.

Shemp agreed in 1946 to rejoin the Stooges until what?

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.

In Micro-Phonies (1945), Curly dresses as a woman and is mistaken for what kind of performer?

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.

What was the title of the Stooges' 1949 ABC television pilot, which Columbia blocked from becoming a series?

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.

Where had Shemp Howard spent the evening before he died in a taxi home in November 1955?

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.

Moe Howard's wife, Helen Schonberger, was a cousin of which famous entertainer?

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.

What do filmmakers call a disguised stand-in, a term born from four 1956 Stooges shorts?

Fake Shemp. After Shemp's sudden death, bit player Joe Palma was filmed from behind to finish four shorts; director Sam Raimi, a Stooges fan, coined the phrase and put 'Fake Shemps' in his own films' credits.

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

Joe Besser. Columbia insisted on a comedian it already had under contract, and he lasted only two years: when the shorts ended and his wife fell ill, he chose to stay home rather than go on the road.

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

No hard slaps. 'I usually played the kind of character who would hit others back,' he explained, so Larry volunteered to take the extra punishment from Moe in his place.

The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze (1963) spoofs a novel by which author?

Jules Verne. The Stooges play servants to Phileas Fogg III, great-grandson of Verne's hero, who must repeat the 80-day trip around the globe without touching his family fortune.

Which director filmed the last Stooge short and closed Columbia's shorts unit in December 1957?

Jules White had made comedies with the Stooges since 1934. The last, Flying Saucer Daffy, wrapped on December 20, 1957; he shut the unit that day, and by the year's end the trio were off the payroll.

How do the Stooges reach ancient Greece in The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962)?

In a time machine. Their inventor friend is sent to row in the galleys, comes back bulging with muscle, and is promptly billed by the Stooges as Hercules, until the real one turns up.

Why was Moe refused entry when he returned to Columbia to say goodbye after the team's firing?

He had no current studio pass. After 24 years and 190 shorts for the studio, the guard at the gate would not let him in, and Moe 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 new Stooge Joe DeRita shave his head?

To look more like Curly. The old Curly shorts were the favourites of the television revival, so DeRita went from a crew cut to a shaved head and was billed as 'Curly Joe'.

In The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962), the trio help defend Earth against invaders from which planet?

Mars. The film's opening scenes were salvaged from The Three Stooges Scrapbook, a colour television pilot of 1960 that never sold, reprinted in black and white to match.

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

Have Rocket, Will Travel. Its title played on the hit TV western Have Gun – Will Travel, and it came from Columbia, the very studio that had fired the team less than two years earlier.

Which figure skater, fresh from 1960 Olympic gold, played Snow White opposite the Three Stooges in 1961?

Carol Heiss. The film's ice-skating scenes were built around its new star, but the costly widescreen fairy tale left the Stooges little room for slapstick and flopped at the box office.

Who produced the Stooges' 1960s features, including The Three Stooges Meet Hercules?

Moe's son-in-law Norman Maurer. A comic-book artist who had married Moe's daughter Joan in 1947, he took over the team's affairs after Columbia dropped them and wrote, produced or directed most of their later films.

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

Firemen. They are on screen for only a few seconds as an airport fire crew, the briefest of all their feature-film appearances, though the same year a big-budget Western gave them a full comic scene.

Who voiced the trio in the 1965 cartoon series The New 3 Stooges?

The Stooges themselves. They also filmed live sketches to introduce the 156 cartoons, but only about forty, and Joe DeRita said the repeats made viewers take new cartoons for reruns and switch off.

What was the title of the travelogue TV pilot the Stooges were filming when Larry had his stroke in 1970?

Kook's Tour. The 'retired' Stooges were to visit a new beauty spot each week; after Larry's stroke the footage was pieced into a special that never aired and reached home video in 1973, their last film together.

Which longtime straight man in the Stooges' films was chosen to replace Larry after his 1970 stroke?

Emil Sitka. He posed for publicity photos as the new 'middle Stooge', but one comeback film lost its funding and the other collapsed when Moe fell ill, so he never played a scene in the role.

Which illness forced Moe out of the film Blazing Stewardesses a week before its 1975 shoot?

Lung cancer. Moe died that May, little more than three months after Larry, and another veteran comedy team, the Ritz Brothers, took the Stooges' place in the film.

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

Yiddish. In Mutts to You (1938) Larry, disguised as a Chinese laundryman, answers a suspicious policeman with a stream of it that means, roughly, 'stop bothering me, and I don't mean maybe.'

The Stooges turn up as bumbling delivery men in 4 for Texas (1963), a Western starring which two Rat Pack singers?

Sinatra and Martin. Frank and Dean feud over a riverboat casino while the Stooges, delivering a nude painting for its lounge, are set upon by two outraged old ladies.

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.