YMMV / The Three Stooges

• The Three Stooges: The Movie

YMMV tropes that apply to the original shorts:

• Accidental Innuendo: This gem from Movie Maniacs:
  Curly: "If at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking 'til you do succeed!"
• Anvilicious: I'll Never Heil Again, which is about Those Wacky Nazis, has the incredibly unsubtle "The characters in this picture are all fictitious. Anyone resembling them is better off dead."
• Archive Panic: 191 shorts in total: 97 with Curly (85 pre-stroke), 78 with Shemp (74 if we don't count the Fake Shemp shorts), and 16 with Besser. There are also the five shorts and film with Ted Healy, as well as various film cameos, TV appearances, and post-shorts projects. That is a lot of eye pokes and slaps.
• Applicability: The Stooges could be seen as working class heroes. The Stooges are often short on cash and take on menial jobs to get by. They often clash with the upper class. Seeing as how their shorts became popular during the Great Depression, the allegory is pretty obvious. Could also have a bit of a Values Resonance, considering the wealth gap has grown from those days and there's more inequality in the world than ever before.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • In Ants in the Pantry, the short involved the Stooges trying to rid a house of pests (that they pre-infested to get business). Long story short, a mouse ends up crawling down the back of an unfortunate party guest, who promptly starts jumping and stomping in an attempt to get it out. The Stooges approach and, seeing a rhythm in the poor man's stomping, start clapping along and quickly start dancing, seemingly abandoning their search until the mouse reappears.
  • A more straight example would be in the failed TV pilot Jerks of All Trades. As the stooges are "painting" the room, their client asks them if they could touch up a painting of her daughter on the wall. Moe walks up to it and winds up peeling the picture off to reveal a picture of the same woman, only with less clothing. The Stooges continue peeling pictures off the frame (as the woman gets gradually less clad each time they do) until it ends with a picture of a Nightmare Face glaring at them, and inexplicably a boxing glove breaks through the painting and socks Moe. After this happens, no attention is brought to the painting (or where the boxing glove came from for that matter) again. (And the client does not notice that the painting of her daughter has been replaced with that of a monster.)
• Bizarro Episode: The Joe Besser-era "Hoofs and Goofs" and "Horsin' Around", if for nothing else than the odd (even for the series) plot point both contain of Joe Besser's recently deceased sister Birdie reincarnating into a talking horse. While the first short had the justification that Birdie becoming a horse was All Just a Dream, the latter short ignores the dream ending and reveals it really happened.
• Broken Base:
  • The short Cuckoo on a Choo-Choo, hands down. This is the short in which Larry is playing a Marlon Brando-esque character who stole a passenger car off a moving train, just so his girlfriend's sister can get her rich drunken boyfriend Shemp to propose, because then they can get married. Unfortunately, Shemp is in love with Carey the giant canary who exists only in his booze-sodden dreams, and who is played by some poor soul in an utterly hideous suit. And Moe is a railroad detective in love with Larry's girlfriend's sister (the one they want to get hitched to Shemp) who finds them and tries to get rid of Shemp so he can marry the sister. There is no middle ground on this one, every Stooges fan either thinks it's terrific or sees it as the worst thing they ever did.
  • Stooges fans are split over the merits, or lack thereof, of Joe Besser's tenure as a Stooge. Although a respected actor in his own right, Besser is felt by some fans to have been a poor fit for the group, especially given his character's reluctance to be the trio's Butt-Monkey like Curly and Shemp. As such he is often seen as the Cousin Oliver of the Stooges. Others, however, see him as a refreshing change from the usual Stooge type.
• Common Knowledge: Joe Besser was contractually Immune to Slapstick during his run with the Stooges. In reality, while he did ask to do relatively less slapstick due to being less experienced with the act than Curly and Shemp (mostly in terms of the Stooges' violence to each other, which wasn't faked), there's still a good amount of times Joe took part in the slapstick abuse and even some elaborate cartoonish stunts, especially in later ones. He even replicates a few gags Curly and Shemp done before. The lower Comedic Sociopathy can also be pinned down to Joe preferring to contribute his own personality gags, as well as the trio as a whole being too old to replicate the same violent energy from twenty years before.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Shemp. At first, he had a rocky start from replacing Curly when the latter had his stroke. But as time went on, he became accepted by all.
  • Curly-Joe, for the most part. It also helped that the guy he was replacing was the aforementioned (and widely hated) Besser. He managed to be an effective stooge in his own right.
  • Some supporting players have sizable fan bases, especially Vernon Dent, Christine McIntyre, and Emil Sitka.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • The Three Stooges are fairly popular in Spanish-speaking countries, where they are called Los Tres Chiflados. (In some Spanish dubs, Curly is oddly given a deep, guttural voice in contrast to his English falsetto!)
  • They're also pretty well-liked in Brazil, where they are called Os Tres Patetas. Brazilian politician and staunch opponent of the Brazilian Military Regime Ulysses Guimarães even infamously nicknamed the Brazilian military junta of 1969 "Os Tres Patetas".
  • When it comes to the US, the Three Stooges are immensely huge in New England due to the fact that several New Englanders grew up with the Three Stooges playing every Sunday morning on Boston's TV-38 WSBK (currently a CBS-owned MyNetworkTV station; it have previously been UPN, then independent again). Billy West and the Farrelly Brothers are amongst those New Englanders who have grown up with the Stooges and were influenced heavily by their comedic stylings7 (West's Star-Making Role was a character whose voice was patterned after Larry Fine).
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In Movie Maniacs Curly jokes about how "if at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking until you do succeed." Par for the course at the time given his usual wordplay, but takes on a new meaning in the 21st century given certain high-profile sex scandals involving Hollywood actors and directors.
  • The moment in "Nutty But Nice" where Curly says "What'll the world do without me?", soon mirrors his being replaced by his older brother Shemp seven years later. Curly being replaced was one complaint for fans that enjoyed the original shorts.
  • Bedlam in Paradise, where Shemp has a nightmare that he dies and comes back as a ghost, was released just a few months before Shemp died in real life. Even more upsetting is that this was a re-release of their earlier film, Heavenly Daze with some new scenes added in; Daze starts out with Shemp already in Heaven, but Bedlam includes a scene that actually shows his character's death. The "come back as a ghost" bit is especially haunting when one takes into account the infamous Fake Shemp.
  • Worse in that regard was For Crimin’ Out Loud, which was hit with this before release. Simply put, this was a posthumous Shemp film, and the last with original footage of Shemp, and the “Remind me to kill you later” gag variation, where the usual response is “I’ll make a note of it”, has Shemp say, “I won’t have time later.”
  • Remember the Stooges' blatant disregard of gun safety in the shorts? In reality, Curly Howard accidentally shot himself in the ankle at age 13 while toying with a rifle. The injury was never properly treated and caused him pain for the rest of his life. In some shorts where his bare legs are shown, one calf is noticeably thinner than the other.
    • His death in 1952 could also count.
  • In "Oil's Well That Ends Well", Moe breaks the fourth wall and says to the audience, "I hate him!" referring to then-Stooge Joe Besser for laughs. Years later, during an interview, Moe revealed that he hated working with Joe, and wasn't the least bit charitable with his comments.
  • The short Heavenly Daze where Shemp dies and goes to heaven, particularly the parts where we see Moe and Larry mourn for him, is harsher in hindsight since Shemp would die for real in only a few short years.
  • The angry husband/drill sergeant from Boobs in Arms frequently laments his terrible luck with a frustrated "Everything happens to me!" His actor, Richard Fiske, was later drafted into service and sadly killed in action during World War II.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the short "Men in Black", a deranged hospital patient (played by Billy Gilbert) claims to see "great, big, giant, green CANARIES!". About two decades later, "Cuckoo on a Choo-Choo" is released, and guess what a hallucinating Shemp is in love with?
    • "Men in Black" also has a horse in a hospital.
  • The short "What's the Matador?" has the trio put on a comedy bullfight down in Mexico. The crowd goes wild for them, which is apropos given the Stooges' popularity among Spanish-speaking audiences (see Germans Love David Hasselhoff above).
  • "Pardon My Backfire" has the line "I am going to kill you to death!"
  • One short dealing with Those Wacky Nazis had Moe dress up as Hitler and order the Nazi guard to shoot themselves in the head for their failure. Looks like the real Hitler ended up taking his own advice years later.
    • Moe was apparently such a good Hitler imitator that years later, the infamous History Channel series Hunting Hitler was fooled into thinking that a picture of an elderly Moe Howard was actually Hitler himself.
  • "A Pain in the Pullman" has Moe questioning about Curly having nightmares, with Curly saying it was in technicolor. Come 2004, a variety of the Stooges' shorts would be colorized on DVD.
  • In "From Nurse to Worse," Moe addresses Curly as "Bowser."
  • In "Termites of 1938," Curly looks at the Formal Full Array of Cutlery and wonders why they're being given so many when "all we need is a knife."
  • In "Fuelin' Around," the Stooges are taken to a fictional country via plane, train, and automobile, in that order.
• Ho Yay:
  • In The Brideless Groom, where Moe and Larry are trying to find Shemp a wife so he can get an inheritance, Moe gets so happy after it seems like they've succeeded that he kisses Larry. A random person walking down the hall as it happens gives them a very disturbed look, and Moe promptly slaps Larry.
  • A Snitch in Time gives us this gem:
    Larry: "I finished the drawer!"
    Moe: "Whattaya want me to do, kiss you?"
    Larry: "Well..."
    [Moe slaps Larry]
  • In Dizzy Pilots, as their plane is about to crash, Moe and Curly end up hugging each other. Larry quips "Hey, you two guys goin' steady?", for which he gets slapped by Moe.
• Hollywood Homely:
  • The women who go after Curly and Shemp tend to be this. Curly's dance partner in "Hoi Polloi", to name one, wears a tightly-pinned hairstyle, coke-bottle glasses, and a pursed, "I just sucked a lemon dry" face. Her actress briefly drops that look to check her makeup and reveals herself to actually be quite attractive.
  • Invoked when Shemp called himself "The Ugliest Man in Hollywood" as part of a publicity stunt. Still contested, since he did actually marry in real life and later on lots of people have called upon his unconventional attractiveness (when wearing a mustache, some have pointed out he carries a certain resemblance to old-school hottie Clark Gable).
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The remake shorts are a common example. They rehash old shorts either because the writers have no other ideas, so they could have an excuse to use Stock Footage from an earlier short as filler, or some other reason. The overuse of Stock Footage in later Curly shorts is due to his ailing health and was used to lighten their shooting schedule; this was a lot easier to get away with when they were originally shown in theaters, before the advent of television airings and home video.
• Jerkass Woobie: Moe becomes this whenever he seems to get more abuse than the other stooges, but most of all in Dizzy Pilots where he gets knocked into a tub of rubber cement twice and becomes a human balloon.
  • Stoic Woobie: Quiet, dedicated Moe was this in real life; he lost both his brothers under the same boss within a few years of each other.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Sony sometimes put the Stooges' shorts on totally unrelated DVDs just to draw people in. A notable example is the colorized "Hoi Polloi" on the Special Edition DVD of Breaking All The Rules.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The various Wacky Sound Effects that added a lot to the slapstick humor: a whip-crack for face slaps and the string-plucking sound whenever someone suffers Moe’s signature two-fingered eye-gouge are just the start.
• Memetic Mutation: The Homing Pineapple. ^note The opera scene in "Pardon My Scotch" ended with Moe throwing a pineapple at the opera singer as he leaves, that curls up in the air and flies around a corner to hit him. Due to how it less looks like the pineapple is being thrown and more that it's hovering towards the singer, it gained meme status and the title of the Homing Pineapple.
• Never Live It Down: Joe Besser got a bad rep with fans of the series partly for his contractual demand that he never be comically hit in his Three Stooges shorts, leading him to be perceived as an Immune to Slapstick third wheel in the films. In reality, Besser did take part in a fair bit of slapstick abuse (especially in his later shorts), it was merely the comedic slaps and bonks from Moe he tended to shirk from, and even then there were exceptions or clever variations to get around this, as evidenced here.
• Nightmare Fuel: Now has its own page.
• Older Than They Think: In the 1935 short "Hoi Polloi", two wealthy businessmen argue over whether heredity or environment makes a gentleman, and they settle it by taking a bum off the street and trying to make him sophisticated. Why does that sound so familiar?
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Shemp replacing Curly after Curly suffered a stroke. Opinions on him vary, however, as the reasoning wasn't that he was a bad actor but rather that he was very different from Curly and the show dynamic changed because of it. Ironically, Curly was actually the replacement for Shemp, who was the third stooge during their vaudeville days, before Curly even began acting. Nowadays, he tends to be found Vindicated by History and more easily accepted as a "fourth" Stooge.
    • In fact, Columbia apparently saw him as something like this, rejecting him for readmission into the Stooges on account of his strong resemblance to Moe. According to Moe Howard's autobiography, Moe put his foot down at Columbia at that, saying either Shemp was hired on or he'd disband the act.
  • On the other hand, Joe Besser is universally hated, largely due to Besser's contractual stipulation that Moe never hit him; this was like a kiss of death for any shorts featuring him since annoyingly clownish characters are tolerable only so long as their annoyance is appropriately punished. Indeed, Joe Besser rather than Shemp personifies this more, as Shemp tends to be more popular than not. Even though Besser did relent somewhat on the "don't hit" thing in his later shorts, many fans find his trademark "whining sissy-boy" shtick to be more grating than funny, and one that doesn't really gel with the Stooges' act. Moe himself stated in an interview that he hated working with Joe.
• Retroactive Recognition: The short "Three Little Pigskins" features a young Lucille Ball in one of her earliest Hollywood gigs. When asked if she'd learned anything from her experience with the Stooges, Lucy replied, "Yeah...how to duck!"
• Seasonal Rot:
  • After their 85th short Idiots Deluxe, Curly had gotten less focus in most shorts and had fewer slapstick moments, especially in not partaking in the pie fight in their last short Half Wits Holiday.
  • Aside from the stooges themselves aging, other contributions to the seasonal rot include Columbia's cost-cutting measures on their shorts department, resulting in overuse of Stock Footage, repetitive gags, and recycled plots. This probably would have happened whether Curly had been replaced by Shemp or not.
• Signature Song: Two, in fact; "Listen to the Mockingbird" from the earlier shorts and "Three Blind Mice" from the later shorts.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • Most of the time, such as when a stooge falling from a large height is obviously a stunt dummy. Also an Invoked Trope: The corny effects were intentionally Played for Laughs and serve to add to the hilarity.
  • Particularly obvious in a scene in which Larry and Moe use Curly as a battering ram to break out of prison. The dummy appears about 80 pounds lighter and has a full head of hair.
  • Some of the editing, when they were using Stock Footage, got pretty bad, to the point where Curly makes unintentional cameos in some of the remade Shemp shorts because of it.
  • The 3-D gimmick used in a few shorts has numerous thrown utensils and baked goods obviously strung up on a wire and wobbling every which way as they fly toward the camera. It looks every bit as funny as it sounds.
  • The shorts "All Gummed Up" and its remake "Bubble Trouble" involve the Stooges and Christine McIntyre blowing bubble gum bubbles but that isn't real bubble gum. Those were actually condoms! Fellow actor Emil Sitka confirmed this in interviews.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Pretty much unavoidable with the classic 1930s and 1940s shorts. References to pop culture, trends and events of old are a given. That being said, the humor and the charm of The Three Stooges is timeless enough that the shorts continue to find new fans to this day.
• Values Dissonance:
  • In The Yoke's on Me, the plot centers on Japanese-Americans hiding on the Stooges' farm after escaping from a nearby internment camp (they are, at least, said to be actual spies and not innocent citizens). The short ends with Curly throwing a grenade at them and exploding (pretty much the only reason it can't be said with certainty that they were killed is that they weren't shown flying in heaven playing harps, which always happens when someone dies in a Stooges short). Quite possibly the most controversial Stooges short ever, this has only recently resurfaced on television after being out of circulation for decades.
  • Interestingly enough, despite the (somewhat justified) anti-Japanese sentiment in their shorts, the Stooges seem to have not bothered using yellowface or faux-Asian gibberish. In one short, "No-Dough Boys", they were mistaken for Japanese soldiers because they were simply wearing the uniforms. A publicity still suggests they might be wearing eye makeup, but it's a lot less grotesque than most yellowface of the era (or, sadly, later).
    • One short does feature the Stooges auditioning for a vaudeville act by caricaturing the three Axis nations. Moe, of course, does Hitler, Curly does his rather good Benito Mussolini... Larry... Well, Larry pulls his eyes back with his hands and says, "Oh, so sorry please, bomb Tokyo, Oh my!" In a faux Engrish accent.
  • Any of their episodes involving Native Americans (such as Back to the Woods and Woops, I'm an Indian!) are clearly a product of their time and might make modern audiences uncomfortable.
  • Moe and Shemp both did blackface in their early vaudeville careers and the occasional blackface joke would pop up in shorts sometimes (such as when one of them would get their face covered in soot). Overall, though, the lack of racist humor directed towards the black actors stands out compared to other shorts of the era. Black comic and friend of Shemp, Mantan Moreland, was even considered as a replacement for Shemp by Moe.

YMMV Tropes that apply to the multiplatform video game:

• Cult Classic: For a game that was never a smash hit on any platform, it has nevertheless been on quite a lot of platforms over the years.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Come the 2012 feature film, the boys are tasked to raise money to save an orphanage, same as the game's plot.
• Porting Disaster: Seeing how the original version of the game was designed to show off the Amiga's strong-for-the-time graphics and sound abilities, it's somewhat inevitable that the conversions to other platforms don't quite stack up. The Commodore 64 version isn't a bad effort, and even the NES version could have turned out a lot worse (butt-ugly graphics aside), but the DOS port really suffers, with unappealing EGA graphics and only a few perfunctory tunes played back through the PC speaker.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: A borderline case. The game definitely puts the Stooges license to good use and integrates it well, but the gameplay also lacks polish, is chock-full of Fake Difficulty, and has a steep learning curve.

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