I don’t know why I feel compelled to speak about this, but I might as well come
clean.  I love the Three Stooges.  I’ve always loved them.  I bought them for the TV station I programmed, I’ve watched them anytime and anywhere I could…I love them.  Maybe all of us Stooge fans love them for different reasons, but love them we do.  I’ve never particularly subscribed to the notion that females don’t like them much, but come to think of it, I don’t know many gals who do.  Their loss, of course.  The Stooges are wonderful.

Of course I loved them back when I was a kid; I even had a little 8mm silent movie of the short “A-Plumbing We Will
Go” and definitely recall getting together with a neighbor friend, also a girl, to record a soundtrack for it.  I
particularly remember the big bowl of water we secured to make splash and dripping noises.  I don’t know how the boys of my age
liked the Stooges; I had only girls on my block to play with and we all loved them, at least.  Only I never stopped.

In L.A. they had made the rounds of all the local TV stations,
ending up finally, about the time I was in college, at a smaller
independent which by virtue of being smaller had the kind of film
library that became all the rage as the classic movie revival era
dawned.  Very old WB movies, all the Ed Woods, the Stooges — it
was great!  When I got out of school and started working in TV
programming, I sort of made a vow that I would try to work with all the
great series that I could get my hands on, during my career.  So
when the contract for the Three Stooges came up, I was right in there
advocating for its purchase (same thing when Star Trek was up
for grabs), and KTLA got the rights.

I was thrilled.  I became buddies with the Lenburg
brothers who had written a couple of superb Stooge books and we did a special on the Stooges, and featured the shorts to much success on
weekend afternoons.  I think we really did the shorts proud.  Now, that was um…twenty-five to thirty years ago, and since then the Stooges have never left the air — I regularly watch them now on Boston’s WSBK on Sunday mornings (right before their incredible appetite-inducing food show The Phantom Gourmet!) and it still makes me so happy when one of my favorite shorts comes up. 
It’s like meeting an old, very silly and very dear friend — the best kind.

My Favorite Stooge?  It has to be Curly, just for his all-around adorableness, but boy, I really think Larry Fine is something terrific, too.  So
often kind of quiet, but if you really concentrate on him he makes the
most amazing faces and has a charming put-upon seriousness that is completely brilliant.  Moe I like too, of course, and Shemp has completely grown on me, but Curly and Larry would be my top two.  And it’s not necessarily about what
they say, the Stooges weren’t verbal comedians like the Marx Bros., but their physicality was tops — I’m thinking about the
moment when in “Boobs in Arms” they’re marching in a drill and gradually the military cadence gets transformed into a carefree skipping romp with the Stooges at the head of the group, or Curly’s brilliant battle with the
oyster in the soup in“Dutiful But Dumb” (where he wears
that hilarious hat with the tassel), and a million others.  Or
their “Lowland Shim” dance in “Pardon My Scotch” where, as McSniff, McSnuff and McShort they don kilts and go at it, or a bunch of funny Curly stuff, like swimming in the sand, in “We Want Our
Mummy” where they battle with the remains of
King Rutentuten and Queen HotsyTotsy. 

How about their little songs?  “Swinging The
Alphabet” from “Violent is the Word for
Curly” or “Ze Lollipop” from
“Wee Wee Monsieur” (where they
also dress up like Santa)?  Adorable!  In terms of great Larry
moments, there’s a crazy sequence in “Punch
Drunks” where Larry has to play the violin to make
Curly box and his violin gets broken, and Larry has to run like crazy
down deserted streets to find a replacement, eventually ending up with a
radio which he takes to the ring.  Just the shots of Larry running
down the street are hilarious.  Which short is it when they are on
train and they get served crab, and Larry especially is completely
hilarious chewing and swallowing the crab, shell and all? 
Larry’s facial expressions are amazing.  One thing you also
get from the Stooges is a sense of the down-and-outness of life during
the Depression; the boys were always out of money, looking for food,
just trying to get along.  Not particularly funny, all that
too-real drab existence stuff, but an interesting historial perspective,
I’ve always felt.  (Note:  It’s “Pain in the Pullman”)

 
What can I say? 
I love ‘em all.  There are some marvelous Three Stooges sites
on the web, including the exhaustive The Three Stooges Online Filmography
which is full of wonderful information
compiled by Stooges scholars and fans, The Three Stooges
site which sells a lot of licensed items but
also has good information, the sweet My Pal
Moe site which chronicles a friendship between
Moe and a young correspondent back in the late 1960s, and many others.  Reading about them again and recalling the specific shorts will certainly now
send me into a Stooge fever dream where I’m going to have to watch
a whole bunch of them.  Their output was prodigious, their talent
indisputable, and the laughs neverending.  Thank goodness for The
Three Stooges!