Giving a Stooge His Due

Guys, it's that time in the Moviehouse when we hang the "No Girls Allowed" shingle on the door handle, because the topic of the day is The Three Stooges. And we all know what women think of the Stooges.

When it comes to the brotherhood of famous comedy teams, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and the Stooges have always been misunderstood by most women. There is no such thing as an acquired taste here. And even when it comes to the gender-polarzing Stooges, men themselves either love them or hate them.

Moe, Larry, and Curly were the classic line-up, of course, and it should go without saying that Curly remains the most beloved. When a series of debilitating strokes forced Curly, who was Moe's kid brother, to leave the act, Moe and Curly's older brother, Shemp, out of family loyalty, abandoned his successful solo career to fill the absence. What a lot of people don't realize is that Shemp and Moe were the original Stooges.

Shemp Howard was the third-born of five brothers, sons of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants Solomon and Jennie Horwitz (pictured below).

Unlike Shemp, Moe (born Moses Harry) and Curly (Jerome Lester), who adopted the stage name Howard, oldest sibling Irving retained the Horwitz surname. Second son Benjamin Jacob, called "Jack," chose the name Howard, even though he, like Irving, was never involved in show business.

A bespectacled Jack Howard visits mugging
brothers Curly and Moe, with Larry, on the set.

Shemp Howard was born Samuel Horwitz on March 11, 1895. The moniker "Shemp" came about because that's how his mother pronounced "Sam" in her thick Latvian dialect.

Moe was the first of the brothers to enter show business, as a youngster on the vaudeville stage and in films, including a role as a bully in a 1909 short titled "We Must Do Our Best," in which the 12-year-old was credited as Harry Moses Horwitz. In 1919, Moe and Shemp appeared in a short called "Spring Fever," featuring Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Honus Wagner, remembered now mostly for his rare, highly collectible, and very expensive baseball card. Even rarer is the movie, which is now considered a lost film.

Shemp and Moe tried their hands as blackface minstrel-type comedians (which was, sadly and regrettably, accepted as entertainment at the time) with an act called "Howard and Howard - A Study in Black." At the same time, the brothers were working without makeup for a rival vaudeville troupe.

By the 1920s, Moe had teamed up with childhood friend Ted Healy in a knockabout vaudeville act. The wisecracking Healy, who already had an established solo career on stage and in film, was the highest paid performer in vaudeville, making $9000 a week. In 1922, Shemp was enlisted into the act as a heckler planted in the audience who joins the shenanigans onstage. Larry Fine (born Louis Feinberg), a fuzzy-haired violinist-amateur boxer, came on board in early 1928.

Ted Healy, Shemp Howard, and Moe Howard clown around
outside the Schubert Theatre.

Originally, the act was billed as Ted Healy and his Three Southern Gentlemen, then later as Ted Healy as his Three Stooges. Healy, more or less, was a bullying alcoholic who hoarded a lion's share of the act's pay.

In 1930, the Stooges appeared in their first film as a team, along with Ted Healy. "Soup to Nuts," a comedy written by multitalented cartoonist-engineer-inventor Rube Goldberg, cast Shemp, Moe, and Larry as firemen (pictured below), with the emphasis on Shemp, not Moe (credited as Harry Howard), as the trio's leader. Shemp has the most dialogue and does the most jostling and hitting.

Later that summer, the Stooges and Healy parted ways over a dispute about a movie contract. Healy subsequently tried to sue Shemp, Moe, and Larry for stealing his material, but the routines were actually owned by the Schubert Theatre, where they were originally performed, and the Stooges had the theater's permission to use them. In 1932, the Stooges reconciled with Healy, but Shemp had enough of their boss' abuse and left to pursue a solo career. He was replaced by younger brother Jerome "Curly" Howard, and while Shemp remained in New York City, the act went to Hollywood. Two years later, Moe, Curly, and Larry permanently left Healy.

While The Three Stooges launched a prolific series of comedy shorts for Columbia Pictures, Ted Healy found continued work in movies for MGM, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. He occasionally attempted to bring in replacement stooges but was unsuccessful. His last film, 1937's "Hollywood Hotel," a lavish Busby Berkeley musical best known for introducing the song "Hooray for Hollywood," was released a few days after Healy's death, age 41.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, Shemp Howard was hired by the Vitaphone studio in Brooklyn. Vitaphone, utilized by Warner Bros. as its short subjects division, released most of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons for Warner. Vitaphone was also known for tossing together so-so to downright bad vaudevillians in various pairings and permeations of teams during the 1930s.

Initially, Shemp appeared as a bit player in comedian Fatty Arbuckle's two-reel sound shorts from 1932 to 1933. These were Arbuckle's attempt to gain back acceptance into movies after the notoriety of an unfounded sex scandal ruined his wildly successful silent film career and led to a lengthy blacklisting. Unfortunately, Arbuckle, on the verge of signing with Warner to star in a feature-length picture, succumbed to a heart attack in his sleep, age 46.

Vitaphone was eager to establish a comedy team of their own, to rival the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy, but they were repeatedly unsuccessful. Shemp was paired with a number of now forgotten names.

Shemp's most successful pairing was with comedienne Daphne Pollard (best known as Ollie's shrewish wife in the Laurel and Hardy feature "Our Relations") in three shorts, including 1935's "His First Flame" (pictured below).

Throughout his career, Shemp Howard seldom stuck to a script, livening scenes with ad-libbed dialogue and wisecracks, which became a trademark of his performances. He effortlessly proved himself the strongest and most defined personality of the screen comics at Vitaphone, serving up variations on his signature sideshow carny delivery and perfectly timed double-takes and spit-takes, all the while exhibiting speedy boxing-style footwork and contending with a mop of greasy hair that always ended up in his face.

Speaking of that face - that bumpy, lumpy, baggy-eyed, hangdog countenance - Shemp used his homeliness to comic effect, twisting it into grotesque contortions while whipping his long strands of pomaded hair into abandoned disarray. He even played along with a publicity stunt cooked up by his agent that named him "The Ugliest Man in Hollywood." Without hesitation, he told reporters, "I'm hideous."

Come to think of it, as an aside, what made The Three Stooges funny at-first-sight was their appearance. Brothers Moe and Curly, along with the unrelated Larry, were short, comparatively stout imps of disaster. Shemp was taller than his siblings, but there was an unmistakable resemblance to Moe.

In the mid-1930s, Vitaphone acquired the screen rights to the popular comic strip "Joe Palooka," about a countrified, kind-hearted but dim-witted boxing champ and his streetwise, fast-talking, cigar-chomping manager, Knobby Walsh. The studio cranked out seven low-budget programmers to much success, mostly due to Shemp's scene-stealing work as Knobby.

At Hollywood's Columbia Pictures (the home studio of The Three Stooges), Shemp was teamed with comic actor Andy Clyde in a handful of shorts made by directors normally associated with the Stooges, including 1940's "Money Squawks" (pictured below).

From the summer of 1940 to summer 1943, Shemp worked exclusively for Universal Pictures. For the 1941 musical titled "San Antonio Rose," somebody came up with the oddball casting of Shemp alongside monster movie hulk Lon Chaney Jr. ("The Wolf Man") as a poor man's Abbott and Costello in the roles of second-fiddle comedy relief characters Benny the Bounce and Jigsaw Kennedy (pictured below).

Shemp was paired in a handful of films with Billy Gilbert, a rotund comedic actor discovered by Stan Laurel who became famous for his apoplectic sputtering that often climaxed in a cataclysmic sneeze. Walt Disney immediately thought of him when casting the voice of Sneezy in 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Shemp Howard and Billy Gilbert light up in
"Three of a Kind" (1944).

In the 1942 B-movie pastiche of One Thousand and One Nights titled "Arabian Nights," starring B-movie contract players Jon Hall, Maria Montez, and Sabu, Shemp was improbably cast as the legendary seafarer Sinbad (pictured below, center).

Shemp had a role alongside James Stewart's first screen appearance in the 1934 short "Art Trouble" (pictured below).

In a rare dramatic film role, relatively speaking, Shemp portrayed a tailor named Shorty in the 1942 Universal drama "Pittsburgh," starring Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, and John Wayne (pictured below). Shemp also appeared in "Another Thin Man," featuring William Powell and Myrna Loy, "The Invisible Woman," with John Barrymore, and "Murder Over New York," starring Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan.

Overall, however, for the better part of the 1940s, Shemp played to his vaudevillian roots as one of the most requested "go-to" supporting comedians. Notably, he played a droll bartender in the 1940 W.C. Fields comedy classic, "The Bank Dick" (pictured below).

Shemp had supporting roles in five Abbott and Costello comedies during the '40s that might have been regarded as comedic centerpieces were it not for the petty jealousy of Lou Costello, who, afraid that he was being upstaged by the superior comic timing of the former Stooge (especially after partner Bud Abbott vocally praised Shemp as one of cinema's funniest's comedians), ensured that much of Shemp's contributions were left on the cutting-room floor. Shemp was not happy.

In a role similar to his part as "Chef" in the 1941 Abbott and
Costello service comedy "Buck Privates" (top), Shemp Howard,
later that year, supervises KP duties in "In the Navy" (below).

To illustrate further the unchecked egomania of Lou Costello, an oft-repeated Hollywood tale relates that the one thing which drove him completely crazy was when fans approached him to say, "Can I have your autograph, Mr. Abbott?" Costello always felt he should have been billed first, so the duo would have been known as Costello and Abbott.

In happier times, Shemp Howard posed with
younger siblings Curly and Moe.

Truth be told, Shemp Howard would have preferred to remain a solo act but felt a sense of duty to Moe when their kid brother Curly could no longer perform and, after a 17-year absence, rejoined the Stooges in 1947, originally as a temporary replacement. He never left. At one point, comic actor Buddy Hackett was considered as a substitute for Curly, while studio bosses thought Shemp looked too much like Moe. Shemp's first short, 1947's "Fright Night," would always be his favorite.

Incidentally, "Curley" was misspelled with an "e" until the mid-1930s.

Shemp's approach to comedy wasn't like the other Stooges. Moe was the master of mean, Larry was the quiet, much put-upon innocent bystander, and Curly had been a hybrid of a cherubic man-child and a manic missing link. Shemp was a subtler comedian, relying more on improvisation, mugging, and wordplay than raucous slapstick, which isn't to say he couldn't cut loose when he was on the receiving end of antic roughhousing.

Curly's comedy relied on his interaction with Moe; Shemp's comedy was self-reliant. Audiences probably would have agreed with critic Leonard Maltin's summation that Shemp never had Curly's "other-worldliness."

The 1947 short "Hold That Lion!" (pictured above) stands out as a curio for being not only the 100th Stooges short but the only one to feature all three performing Howard brothers onscreen. Curly had a wordless cameo (perhaps due to his 1946 stroke) as a snoring passenger on a train. After two more massive strokes, Curly's health deteriorated until his death in 1952, age 48.

A partially paralyzed Curly Howard poses with his beloved wife
Valerie (he finally got it right with wife #4) and their one-
year-old daughter, Janie, in this 1949 snapshot.

In 1951, Moe, Larry, and Shemp appeared in their sole feature film, a modest western comedy titled "Gold Raiders," directed by Edward Bernds, who worked with the Stooges on a number of their short films as well as several of the slap-sticky Bowery Boys comedies.

On November 22, 1955, Shemp Howard went out with pals Al Winston and Bobby Silverman to a boxing match at the Hollywood Legion Stadium (afterward converted to a bowling alley, then a fitness club). Watching boxing was one of Shemp's favorite pastimes. On the drive home later that evening, Shemp was leaning back and lighting a cigar after telling a joke when he suddenly slumped over onto the lap of Winston, who at first assumed Shemp was kidding. Shemp had succumbed to a massive heart attack, three years and ten months after Curly's passing, age 60.

Besides pugilism, puffing on a panatela was one of Shemp Howard's
passions, as it was seemingly for little brothers Moe and Curly.

When Shemp Howard died, The Three Stooges had four unfinished short subjects they were contractually obligated to deliver. New footage of Moe Howard and Larry Fine was edited into older stock film from earlier shorts, and if the scene required Shemp's presence, a studio contract player named Joe Palma served as a double, wearing a hairpiece and photographed from behind or with a prop hiding his face, while recordings of Shemp's voice were dubbed into the soundtrack.

That would be Joe Palma (center) doubling for the late Shemp
Howard in 1956's "Rumpus in the Harem."

Interestingly, the use of a "fake Shemp" inspired Sam Raimi, an avid Stooges fan best known as the director of the "Evil Dead" movie franchise and the original "Spider-Man" trilogy, to coin the term "Fake Shemp" during production of his first feature, "The Evil Dead" (1981). After delays pushed the filming over schedule, most of the cast and crew bailed, so Sam and star Bruce Campbell, among others, completed the picture as "Fake Shemps." Raimi was so fond of the sobriquet that he often used it in the end credits for his subsequent films.

Infamously phobic, Shemp Howard lived in constant fear of cars. He never drove nor owned a driver's license. He refused to fly in airplanes, insisting on traveling by train. He was terrified of strange dogs, even though he owned a dog. He carried a walking stick to ward off stray dogs that approached him. He refused to swim or venture into a body of water bigger than a bathtub.

Before appearing on stage, he was known to induce vomiting to calm his nerves. Allegedly, he was a chronic bed-wetter. Drafted into the U.S. Army during World War I, his service was truncated due to his bed-wetting.

Although it's been disputed as historically dubious, Shemp's difficulty with a loose bladder, along with his litany of phobias, was addressed in the 2000 made-for-television movie "The Three Stooges," a sort of rushed, Reader's Digest condensation of the team's career, in all their groupings, including Joe Besser and "Curly" Joe DeRita. Directed by James Frawley, a filmmaker with a flair for comedy - he directed several episodes of the series "The Monkees," as well as the cult 1976 spoof of disaster pictures "The Big Bus," 1979's "The Muppet Movie," and the 1985 frat-boy comedy "Fraternity Vacation" - the production was praised for its authenticity and willingness to forsake laughs for pathos.

The cast of 2000's "The Three Stooges" features (top to bottom)
John Kassir as Shemp, Evan Handler as Larry, Paul Ben-Victor
as Moe, and Michael Chiklis as Curly.

Based on the definitive book The Three Stooges: An Illustrated History, written in 1999 by Michael Fleming, the TV movie was co-produced by Mel Gibson, a self-avowed Stooges fan. Fleming noted that in "Lethal Weapon," Gibson "pulled a Curly routine right out of the hat, eye pokes and all," when he’s confronted by a gang of thugs.

Cast as Shemp, John Kassir (second from right) is best known as
a voice artist whose repertoire included the Crypt Keeper on the
HBO series "Tales from the Crypt."

In the introduction to Michael Fleming’s book, Mel Gibson wrote, "For me, there has never been any mixed feelings about the Stooges. I’ve always loved them…and I remember being completely fascinated by the whole thing. These guys bonking each other with a crowbar. My brother and I laughed our asses off, and when we’d hear that ridiculous theme song that sounded like birds chirping, we’d run like it was the ice cream truck. I don’t know quite why we liked it so much. It’s your basic lowbrow humor, and yet I find it immensely pleasing in some primal way." According to Gibson, "The Stooges…had this raw immediacy, this primal humor that hits you right in the gut. And what’s wrong with that, letting your IQ take a holiday every now and then?"


The Last Word

In a piece on the internet titled "Shemp Howard: The Little Stooge Who Could," self-proclaimed "Pop Culture Addict" Sam Tweedle wrote, "Shemp Howard worked continuously from 1932 to his death in 1955. In his career he made 166 films. Only 74 of those films were with the Stooges...That means, on his own, Shemp Howard made an additional 92 films. While the Stooges needed each other, Shemp was able to make it on his own."

Cartoonist-illustrator-painter Drew Friedman created
this stippling-style caricature of Shemp, Larry, and
Moe with frequent Stooge foil, Vernon Dent.

Parting Shots

Of the Horwitz boys, Irving, the eldest, was the first to pass
away, in 1939, age 48. Benjamin Jacob "Jack" Howard outlived
his four siblings, dying in 1976, age 83.

In their later years, Jack Howard (right) turns the tables on his
brother, Moe. Moe Howard died in 1975, age 77.

Solomon Horwitz, pictured here with his three show biz sons -
Curly, Shemp, and Moe - passed away in 1943, age 71.