A RARITY: The final incarnation of The Three Stooges with the underrated Joe DeRitsa as Curley…live on TV in their 1959 “comeback.” DeRita was with the trio in the final years of their act when the Stooges played clubs, Vegas and did feature films with the violence toned down.
You can now buy a set that has ALL of the Stooges’ iconic Columbia shorts (made in the 30s 40s and 50s):
CORRECTION: In the first version of this post due to a typo (see further on here) the post said it was Joe Besser. These clips feature Joe DeRita. We regret the typo, which is due to being on an 11 day trip which has me driving 2800 miles and doing four shows a day in my other incarnation at a Texas fair. Yes, I KNOW it was DeRita: I’m a lifelong Stooge fan and in the early 80s I convinced my employer the San Diego Union to let me do the feature on the Three Stooges getting a star on Hollywood Boulevard. I met DeRita’s wife (he was ill and blind and could not attend) and I also met Joe Besser, who was a scream as “Stinky” on the old Abbott and Costello Show but who never really seemed to fit in with the Stooges (partially due to his contract saying they could not hit him).
So that was a typo — but I put this post up because it illlustrates how good De Rita was in as the final “third Stooge.” He had a long stage comedy career and also did his own Columbia shorts for a while. Here’s one of them:
Part II:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.