I'm Loving Shemp

The other day I made the necessary transition from Curly to Shemp in my quest to watch all the Three Stooges' Columbia short films. Curly had to go and have a stroke on me, meaning he dropped out of the group. (Just because it happened a long time ago, before I was even born, I still take these things very personally.)

I've seen Shemp over the years. I'm sure I remember some of these from childhood. We always watched the Stooges on TV at my grandparents. And definitely the one about "I have a sister this high, I have a brother this high" ("Fright Night"), to me is the classic Shemp scene. Very memorable to me. Some of the others, just speaking of the first Shemp episodes, I've seen on video cassettes, since "Six Pants" and "Brideless Groom" are, I believe, commonly duplicated, being out of copyright somehow.

Reading up on it, in "Brideless Groom," I read Shemp actually had his nose broken in the scene where the young lady is slapping him and finally slugs him.

These are very funny films. Shemp does a marvelous job. There's quite a different vibe from the Curly films. But Shemp is not lacking anything when it comes to being an entertaining and wonderful Stooge. And Larry and Moe never lost a thing either. I laughed out loud several times, but once unexpectedly, when Shemp has a fishbowl stuck on his head (in "Hold That Lion"). He's going "glub, blug," etc., trying to tell Moe and Larry to get it off. Moe says, "What'd he say?" And Larry just repeats the nonsense "glub" stuff. Moe's mad. It's a funny funny scene.