The Three Stooges — Give’em a Bop on the Casaba (1965) 🇺🇸

September 27, 2025

For 40 years — that’s been the Three Stooges’ philosophy of comedy — and it’s still paying off

When she became upset, the emotionally disturbed 12-year-old girl spoke and wrote only in numbers. For instance, when she was angry, she cried out numbers ending in 4, the number becoming larger with the degree of her anger. Psychiatrists at Los Angeles County General Hospital called her condition a “numbers syndrome.” Eventually they discovered that the numbers corresponded with those on Three Stooges bubble-gum trading cards, which depicted the moods of violence the girl felt but because of her emotional problems could not otherwise release. In 1963 her case became the basis of an award-winning Los Angeles television documentary called “Tell Me Not in Mournful Numbers.”

Today Moe Howard, senior member of the venerable Three Stooges, gets tears in his eyes when he tells the young girl’s story, for he, like his veteran partner, Larry Fine, is a sentimental man, whose memories go back far beyond the early 1920’s, when they began stooging for comedian Ted Healy. The third Stooge, Joe DeRita, is a comparative newcomer. In 1958 he replaced Moe’s late brothers, Shemp and Jerry (Curly) Howard, who over the years had taken turns as third member of a knockabout act that has flourished for more than four decades, has made more than 200 two-reel comedies and is now enjoying fame and prosperity from release of those old movies on television.

A delight to children

To the dismay of many parents but the delight of their offspring, to whom the Three Stooges are a fresh and heady experience, the old comedies are shown on more than 150 TV stations. The Stooges receive no recompense from the showing of their old movies, but the renewed interest these have sparked has resulted in a thriving business in personal appearances and in a rash of low-budget but high-grossing feature pictures. The Stooges live well, have offices in a swank new building on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip and have plans for a new television show.

In other words, they have come a long way.

Moe Howard has come farthest. This year he celebrates the 50th anniversary of his first stage appearance. It was on a Mississippi river boat. The Stooge with the Beatle haircut, he comes closest to being the straight man of the zany trio. Off-screen he has been described as comporting himself “more like a wealthy ex-cab driver than an utterly extroverted clown.” His clown’s face is sad and lined, and gray shows at the roots of his dyed hair. On the river boats, far from his native Brooklyn, and later in small-time stock companies, he played what he says were “highly dramatic roles” in such highly dramatic productions as The Two Orphans and Ten Nights in a Barroom. After World War I, he and his older brother Shemp formed a blackface comedy team which played seven theaters in as many days in an era when the theater manager could fire an act after one performance. Moe joined Ted Healy in 1921 “to help out for a few days” when a performer objected to being doused with water five times a day. Shemp came along two years later.

In 1925 the Howards and Healy saw Larry Fine and asked him to join them. At the time, Larry was one-third of an act called Haney Sisters & Fine. The sisters, one of whom became Larry’s wife, sang and danced, while Larry played the violin and did a Russian dance simultaneously. Haney Sisters & Fine were described, possibly optimistically, as “a class act.” Professionally, it was the last connection with class for Larry, a Philadelphian who got his start in vaudeville as the sissy in an act patterned after the “school act” of Gus Edwards’. After he joined Healy and the frères Howard, the act became variously Ted Healy & His Gang, Ted Healy & His Southern Gentlemen, Ted Healy & His Racketeers and, finally, Ted Healy & His Stooges.

When Healy decided to become a Hollywood character actor in the early 1930’s, the Stooges started out on their own. Although Moe admits that some of their early comedies are too violent, he has said, “People want to laugh with their mouths, not their minds. Audiences want belly laughs. Rarely does a subtle line or a cute phrase send them into a laughing jag. It takes the old pratfall, a pie in the face, a good chase or a bop on the casaba to keep a laugh going. That’s what we give ‘em.”

Rarely taken seriously

The Three Stooges have rarely been taken seriously, except by parents whose children start bopping their playmates on the casaba after watching them. But the publication Films in Review thought it saw something beneath the fright wigs and the slapstick. In a 1959 article it said, “The Three Stooges gradually began to utilize their screen personalities for more than low comedy. Moe’s ineffectual field-marshaling developed into satire of the dictator that is in all of us… [Curly] suggested an oversized infant… Larry was reality’s bridge between Curly and Moe.”

That is pretty highbrow talk for the Three Stooges, whose attitude toward their latter-day success can probably be best described as one of wonderment. Ted Healy, who started it all, is dead. So are Shemp and Curly. But, after 40 years, the act still goes on. Joe DeRita, the newest member of the trio, is a former burlesque comedian whose greatest claim to fame is his performance as the menacing hangman in a Gregory Peck Western, The Bravados. DeRita is as much a member of the group as are Moe and Larry. “It’s a three-way split,” says Moe. “That’s the way it’s always been. I wouldn’t know how to do business any other way.”

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