Still Shilling for Shemp

Today happens to be a notable comedy history day for two reasons: 1) it is the centennial anniversary of the released of the Buster Keaton comedy Seven Chances (1925). But I wrote about that movie back in 2014, though, and I honestly have ought to add on the subject. 2) it is the birthday of the great comedian Shemp Howard (Samuel Horwitz, 1895-1955) , whom I have also written about, but on the topic of whom I DO have something to add. Though I did discuss him in my original post on Ted Healy and the Three Stooges, and some of Shemp’s early solo shorts for Vitaphone, that’s far from the full megillah.

True classic comedy aficionados know Shemp to be the most significant and respected of the bunch, in spite of the greater popularity of his younger brother Jerome (a.k.a. Curly). Shemp was the oldest Howard brother, a sort of founder of the family foolishness. For many years, when old Three Stooges shorts were still popular on television, there was a widespread misconception that Shemp was a johnny-come-lately, to be ranked with Joe Besser and Curly Joe DeRita as a lesser stooge. The reality was that Shemp was a FOUNDING Stooge, at the core of the act with Healy, younger brother Moe, and Larry Fine during their vaudeville days and some of their very earliest film work. He broke off to do his own thing because he was fed up with Healy…but also because he COULD. He was the most talented of the brothers as an actor, and he had a puss so ugly and “real” that it ironically made him castable. So he enjoyed a terrific solo career until the fateful day when Curly had a stroke, and Shemp was asked to replace him in the act. Once upon a time, the public assumed Shemp was copying Curly, and bore a damning resemblance to Moe. The reality was that Curly, though highly original himself, had also aped his older brother’s antics. And, in all justice, the actual truth chronologically was that Moe resembled Shemp.

At any rate, for about a decade (roughly 1935-46) Shemp Howard had a prolific career as a character actor in classic comedies and B pictures. I always perk up when he comes on the screen. He was a very self-assured performer, with a kind of infectious and plainly evident enthusiasm in whatever scene he is expected to do. His characters were rough but friendly, sort of breezy and familiar, and he usually played things like bartenders, taxi drivers, and fight managers. Shemp was a big time talent all by himself, and it’s more than likely to my mind that if he hadn’t taken that detour into Columbia shorts in the late ’40s, he would have wound up in some top quality main features in the years that followed.

As it played out though, he was in dozens of classics of their kind. The comedies include The Bank Dick (1940) with W.C. Fields; the Abbott and Costello pictures Buck Privates (1941), Hold That Ghost (1941), In the Navy (1941), and Africa Screams (1949); the two Olsen and Johnson features Hellzapoppin (1941) and Crazy House (1943); the Dead End Kids movies Hit the Road (1941) and Keep ’em Slugging (1943); Meet the Chump (1940) with Hugh Herbert; Damon Runyon’sTight Shoes (1941) and Butch Minds the Baby (1942); and some team-ups with Billy Gilbert and Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom: Three of a Kind (1943), Crazy Knights (1944), and Trouble Chasers (1945). He’s in more than one musical film with the Andrews Sisters, and at least a couple with Marlene Dietrich, notably Rene Clair’sThe Flame of New Orleans (1941). As well as pictures in the Blondie, Lone Wolf, Invisible Man, Thin Man, and Charlie Chan series. His last feature was The Gold Raiders (1951), in which he appeared as one of the Stooges.

Shemp re-joined the Three Stooges in 1947, and appearing in those shorts pretty much consumed the rest of his career. And…beyond. Famously, Shemp was in some posthumous Three Stooges comedies, which were cobbled together from orphan footage he’d appeared in, and new scenes that feature Moe and Larry…and a double whose face was obscured from the camera. This technique is called “Shemping” nowadays. It’s the same technique Ed Wood used in Plan Nine from Outer Space after Bela Lugosi died early in production.

Sometime (in the ’90s, I think) Shemp became the hipster’s Stooge of choice, with a huge boost from the genius caricaturist Drew Friedman.

Believe it or not there are a couple of dedicated biographies on this topic! There’s Shemp Howard: Much More Than a Stooge by Geoff Dale (Bear Manor, 2024) and also SHEMP! The Biography of the Three Stooges’ Shemp Howard, the Face of Film Comedy by Burt Kearns (Applause, 2024).

For more on classic comedy films, including the Three Stooges, please check out: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube — now also available on audiobook. Long live Dead Shemp!