‘They Stooge To Conga’ (1943) was the 67th short subject made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Wednesday, May 6 through Saturday, May 9, 1942 and released on New Years Day, 1943. The film is generally considered to be the most hideously, nauseatingly violent Stooge short ever made, filled with electrocutions, eye gouging, scalps being buzz sawed, asses getting flame-torched, hammers hitting heads, wrenches being used on noses etc. Oddly the film was directed by Del Lord who, compared to the Stooges other regular director Jules White, was considered the ‘tasteful’ Stooge helmer, generally given more to cleverly constructed lengthy gag sequences than to one-shot blasts of masochism. In some ways the film seems to be something of an exercise, a study in slapstick violence using every possible gag, style, gimmick imaginable. Could it be that, perhaps lacking inspiration for a new Stooge script, the writers got together and decided (after a fifth of Wild Turkey) to out-Stooge all other Stooge movies, compiling a list of every painful gag and compounding them into the screenplay? The single most violent sequence ever perpetrated in Stoogedom is the telephone pole routine which begins at 7:09 and which still makes me avert my eyes in horror even after the hundreds of times I’ve seen it. By the way, I forgot to mention that the my movie also depicts Nazis and has a patently racist depiction of a house servant (Dudley Dickerson) who Moe freely abuses. Jesus!