This morning on Facebook, I posted a photo of the Three Stooges in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Larry Fine, Moe Howard and "Curly" Joe DeRita. In response, I received a couple of really nasty e-mails from people who couldn't resist telling me how much they loathed Joe DeRita. And what was the horrible thing Mr. DeRita did to warrant such hatred? Why, he'd committed the cardinal sin — one of which we are all guilty to some extent — of not being Curly Howard.
Some history. Leaving aside a few short-lived configurations of the group when they supported Ted Healy, Moe and Larry were always two-thirds of the Stooges. It was the third guy who kept changing. First, in their pre-movie days, it was Shemp. Then Shemp left and he was replaced by Curly. (As everyone knows, Moe, Shemp and Curly were all brothers.) Curly was the guy when they started making shorts for Columbia and Curly was the guy when their films were made on decent budgets and weren't just quickly-shot and/or retreads of what had gone before.
Then Curly had a stroke so Shemp came back to the act and took his brother's place. Then Shemp died and his spot was taken by Joe Besser, and he was the third Stooge until they came to the end of their contract to make pictures for Columbia.
After that, the only prospect for the Stooges was to tour, and that's when Besser pulled out. He said it was because his wife was ill and he had to stay home in Hollywood to take care of her. While Mrs. Besser may have been ill at the time, it's pretty obvious to me that Besser was using that an excuse. He could and did get plenty of work in town as a character actor but at the moment, no one was rushing to hire the Stooges. If you'd been Joe Besser's agent, you would probably have told him it was a good time to jump ship and go it alone. Besides, he was never really a full-time member of the act. Even while making the films with Larry and Moe, he still went out and did non-Stooge roles in movies and on TV programs.
If Moe and Larry were going to make any further money as the Three Stooges, they needed a third stooge…and they got DeRita. I am now going to commit what some will deem as heresy by suggesting he was the best possible choice and that he was probably no less funny than Curly or Shemp would have been in those films, given the writing, production values and the ages of everyone at the time. It also didn't help that given those ages, and their growing following among children, they toned down the physical comedy and what some called "violence."
No, 1960 Curly Joe was not as funny as 1940 Curly…and guess what! 1960 Larry was not as funny as 1940 Larry, and 1960 Moe was not as funny as 1940 Moe, and the scripts and budgets of 1960 did not allow for Stooges films as funny as the ones from 1940, either. Joe DeRita was not the reason Snow White and the Three Stooges was a snooze and a half.
I met Joe DeRita once. He was at a one-day comic convention around 1973, signing autographs. I think the idea was that he'd charge $5 or $10 for a signature, which seemed like a lot of money at the time. He signed a few at that price and then I think he felt bad about it because a lot of little kids were coming by and he didn't want to say no to them or demand money. So suddenly, the autographs were free…and I'm not sure about this next part but I think he sent someone out to look for the people he'd charged and refund what they'd paid.
I remember a couple things about him. One was how he brightened up when I told him I'd visited Larry out at the Motion Picture Country Hospital. He also brightened up when I asked him some questions about his non-Stooge career, particularly his days in burlesque. He obligingly answered all the fans' questions about whether they ever got hurt in their films, and he was polite to those who didn't seem to understand that he wasn't Curly. But when I asked him about his solo shorts at Columbia — he made quite a few before he hooked up with Moe and Larry — he invited me to sit and actually have a conversation. He loved being part of the Stooges but it was, after all, just one thing he'd done in a very long show biz career.
Another thing I remember is what terrible shape he was in. He had not-that-long a walk from the car to his table and he was exhausted and wheezing. He was also much more overweight than I'd ever seen him on screen. The Stooges had not made a film in quite some time and with Larry recovering from a stroke and Joe looking the way he did, it was pretty obvious they never would again. Mr. DeRita didn't seem to think so but that's understandable. When you spend your whole lifetime as a performer, it's hard to ever admit it's over.
The chat was pleasant and largely unmemorable except that I got bragging rights to say I'd met another Stooge. He told me a few great stories about working in burlesque revues in Las Vegas in the late fifties and he said that when he signed on for the Stooges, Moe told him, "Remember…most of our fans are kids so you can't do burlesque shows anymore." Joe said he wouldn't miss it and he thought Moe had missed a bit of irony there. An awful lot of what the Stooges did was burlesque, including some hallowed burley-q routines. They just didn't have the sexy stuff and the scantily-clad women.
I didn't talk with him long because he had a lot of people — young kids and also folks my age and older — who wanted autographs and the above-mentioned bragging rights. A few wanted to tell him their favorite Stooge film or routine…which was usually something with Curly, something that had nothing to do with him. So I left and since then, I've always had a little warm spot for the guy.
Yeah, he wasn't part of the great Stooges era but that was ancient history by the time he hopped aboard. The Stooges made funny shorts in the thirties and early forties…and then as two-reel comedies became increasingly less lucrative, they hung in there by making them cheaper and faster and faster and cheaper. The quality of their films was a pretty steady descent over the last 10-12 years, enlivened only by brief bursts of good comic acting from Shemp and then from Joe Besser. Like the last few years of Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers, the best thing you can say about their last films is that there are moments that remind you of their best work.
None of that was Joe DeRita's fault. Matter of fact, I think he was the best thing in some of those films…which admittedly, was not hard to be. I just think Stooges fans have given him a lot of undeserved raps. One of the Curly Joe haters who wrote me said, "He ruined the wonderment of the Stooges." This person has obviously never seen the last few years of Shemp shorts and all the Joe Bessers. And I'll bet you he can't name a better performer who would have enlisted in that act when DeRita did and enabled the franchise to keep going.