For some reason, among websites devoted to classic comedians, some of the best and most industrious ones seem to be those devoted to The Three Stooges. I was thinking this as I was fiddling around with www.stoogeworld.com, which is still a work-in-progress but has much to recommend it. I've often felt that we like most timeless clowns because of their films and — assuming we like the Stooges — we like the Stooges almost in spite of their films. As I grow older, I am more aware of the craft and care that went into the making of the works of Laurel and Hardy, Keaton, the Brothers Marx, etc.
And I am more aware of how all-fired cheap most of the Stooges' shorts were, especially the later ones which relied on reused footage. A lot of them were, literally, a case of filming just enough footage so that the producers could edit it into an old short and pass the result off as new. This way, they saved enough funds to occasionally do something wholly original…but not very. You can also save money on writing by recycling old material.
Back when I watched them on Channel 11 in the early sixties, the prints were bad and the films were often hacked into near-incoherence so that two could be fit in a half-hour, along with the host's segments, plus endless commercials for Maggio-brand carrots, Bosco chocolate syrup and Mr. Bubble bubble bath — a tasty combination, by the way. A couple times, without (I assume) realizing it, Channel 11 ran a double-feature of two Stooges shorts, one of which was a close remake of the other. It was like sitting through the same film twice but with a change of Third Stooge.
I guess I just kind of assumed that the cheapness of the proceedings and the endless repetitions and the bad, splice-filled prints were not the Stooges' fault. My assumption was that Stan and Ollie were actors playing dumb but that Moe, Larry and Curly [or Shemp or Joe Besser] really were a band of knuckleheads. As such, it was almost like, "Well, the Stooges weren't smart enough to have been responsible." So even when their films were crummy, we liked them — enough to keep their names and fame alive today, even on the Internet. How ironic that the lowest-I.Q. comics of them all should be so well represented on a computer network.