‘Three Sappy People’ (1939) is the 43rd short subject made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Thursday, April 6th through Monday, April 10th, 1939 and released on Friday, December 1st of that year. The film is a sharp-as-a-stiletto Curly-era outing, perfectly paced, inventively violent and absurdly plotted (the Stooges pose as Psychiatrists?) all of which leads to a good old fashioned food fight, which really means ‘creampuff’ fight. The title appears to be a play on a hit song of the previous year ‘Two Sleepy People’. Certainly it has nothing to do with the plot of the movie.

The actress who plays the dizzy society matron wife who’s the cause of all the trouble is Lorna Gray. She appeared in several Stooge films, a couple of Buster Keaton Columbia shorts and some pre-‘Stagecoach’ John Wayne B-westerns. In 1945 she was busted on a Marijuana rap along with a stuntman (of course) named Ruel Taylor. Taylor turned out to be a good guy after all and convinced the authorities that Lorna hadn’t known what the reefer she was smoking was filled with, thus exonerating her. She lived to the age of 99, dying in 2017 and appeared at a annual Three Stooges convention in Pennsylvania in 2011. Enjoy the movie and–in the words of Ms. Gray’s dizzy society heiress–“Last one in’s a Republican!”