April 1, 2014

"April Fool!" says Joe Besser at 9:59 in "Quiz Whizz."

It's just by chance that Episode 1 of Season 25 of The 3 Stooges has a reference to the special day that is today:



I ran across "Quiz Whizz" when I was writing the post I published at 7:11 this morning: "Andrew Breitbart's ghost said it, I didn't. don't blame the messenger." I said the 3 Stooges helped me with that post, and: "Bonus points to the reader who can guess what question I had, writing the text above, that led me to Google and resolved my question with help from The 3 Stooges."

No one stepped up to this challenge. The question was how to spell "whizz" in the line "Jennings is more of a quiz-show whizz than a comedy writer." Some might say "wiz," short for "wizard," but there's also "whizz" and "whiz," which seem to refer to the sound of speed. The rhyme with "quiz" is so obvious that you know it's been used, but how is it spelled? It's the title of the 3 Stooges short, so I say that nails it.

If you're reluctant to watch a 3 Stooges short with one of the Joes, perhaps it will interest you to know that at 3:09 the Stooges are confronted by an IRS agent, J.J. Figby. When the Stooges try to evade taxes by joking, Figby says, "No levity please."

11 comments:

Chuck said...

Were there "seasons" for the 3 Stooges?

The old ones were all shorts made for showings at double and triple features at movie houses, right? Not television "seasons."

Were ANY of them made for television? I suppose some of the last "Curly Joe" episodes were...

Ann Althouse said...

They look really old in this one.

Fandor said...

The 3 Stooges are always welcome…after all we live a a world full of them. Stooges, that is!

Fandor said...

"They look really old in this one".
Yes, but they still have their edge.

Ann Althouse said...

Here's Wikipedia's 3 Stooges filmography, divided up into years, beginning with 1930, which has only one short film ("Soup to Nuts"). There's nothing in 1931 and only one film in 1932. "Quizz Whizz" is the first episode in 1958, the second of the 3 years with Joe Besser.

I doubt if it's conventional to refer to 1958 as "Season 25," but that's what it said at YouTube. It is the first episode of that year though.

glam1931 said...

The Three Stooges, as we remember them today, are primarily known for the 190 theatrical short subjects they made at Columbia Pictures after parting ways with frontman Ted Healy at MGM. In the Healy shorts, the Stooges are merely idiot sidekicks to the highly annoying Healy, and these films are occasionally seen as filler on Turner Classic Movies. They are without exception pretty terrible.
The Columbia short subjects, beginning in 1934 with WOMEN HATERS, were the first films to star The Three Stooges as a team. They are the films we grew up with on TV, but they were never "television episodes", despite the erroneous Youtube listing. There were no "seasons" either. Columbia closed down their short subject unit in 1959, ending the series.

glam1931 said...

People posting clips on Youtube often do so with amazingly inaccurate and often ridiculously false descriptions. Never trust them.

Ann Althouse said...

Yeah. This is 183.

Wilbur said...

I had a nephew who at age 5 used to refer them as "The Three Students". But then, he liked Shemp better than Curly, blazing a trail as the first recorded human to do so.

Johanna Lapp said...

My male classmates say a whizz is whipping it out to urinate in a non-restroom space (though trying not to be observed in the act).

A whiz is a public spectacle of a performance, as in "Captain Billy's Whiz Bang."

So a wizard may also be a whiz, and an incautious whizzer may become a whiz.

At my next break between lectures, I'll try to gather evidence for these usages and report back here.

Anonymous said...

"whiz" means a whole 'nother thing in the philadelphia area