As kids growing up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, the Horwitz brothers -- Shemp (Sam), Moe and Curly (Jerry) -- would stage penny-admission shows for their neighborhood friends, among whom was a boy named Lee Nash. As teenagers Lee, Moe and Shemp performed in a girl's diving act on nearby Coney Island. A few years later (after Lee had changed his name to Ted Healy, and Moe and Shemp changed their last name to Howard) the boys gravitated back together and developed a vaudeville act. Ted was the leader of the act - he was an accomplished comedian and an agreeable song-and-dance man - and the Howard boys were in support as comic stooges.
This act, known under a variety of different names but with Ted Healy always getting top billing, headlined all over the country. In 1925 Shemp decided to try his luck on his own, and Larry (Louis Feinberg) Fine joined the act to take Shemp's place. Shemp rejoined the act in 1926 when the boys appeared in "A Night in Venice," produced on Broadway by the Shubert Brothers. In 1930 Ted Healy and his Racketeers (as they were then billed) appeared in the Fox film "Soup To Nuts," written by Rube Goldberg. On the basis of this appearance the Fox studios offered Shemp, Larry and Moe a motion picture contract, but Ted, fearful that his own act would suffer without the boys, got Fox to call the deal off.
In 1933 the act was one of the biggest in vaudeville, and Ted and the boys (along with sometime Stoogette Bonnie Bonnell) signed a one-year contract with MGM. During this year the act turned up in some of the studio's biggest features - "Dancing Lady" starring Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, and "Hollywood Party" starring Jimmy Durante to name two -- and starred in a series of short-subjects. These MGM shorts lack the crackle and timing of the Stooges' later Columbia efforts, however.
In 1934 the Stooges decided to strike out on their own, and they and Ted Healy parted company. Healy continued at MGM, and essayed ever-larger roles in several major productions before his untimely death in 1937. The Stooges signed with a small, up-and-coming outfit just about to be counted among the major Hollywood studios - Columbia Pictures.
The Stooges were featured in 174 shorts produced at Columbia between the years 1934 and 1958 (the longest running series in Hollywood history). Except for the first few films (when the Stooges were getting settled in their new home) and the last year of shorts with Curly (when Curly had suffered a series of strokes and could hardly function in his role) the shorts were remarkably well made. Those who dislike the Stooges tend to dismiss these shorts as low quality, but they are wrong. Despite low budgets and a lackadaisical attitude toward short subjects on the part of Columbia executives, the films were fast paced and funny, and rank with the best of Hollywood's two-reel comedies of that era. The generally high quality of these shorts (especially those produced in the late 30s and early 40s) can be attributed to the presence of so many seasoned comedy veterans on the Columbia production staff, and the experience and professionalism of the Stooges themselves.