Let’s end this weeks Fascist deep-dive on a lighter note. Here is “You Nazty Spy”, a 1941 Three Stooges short in which the Stooges are paper-hangers who are weirdly chosen to become the dictators of the fictional country Moronica. Now–the words ‘significant’ and ‘Three Stooges’ aren’t generally uttered in the same sentence, but ‘You Nazty Spy!’ (the title is a spin on Joe Penner’s catch-phrase “You nasty boy!”–which was also used by Stevie Wonder, another name that’s not generally used in the same sentence as ‘The Three Stooges’) satirized the Nazi’s and the Third Reich at a time when most movies avoided the subject. The United States was still neutral about the war in Europe and isolationist sentiment was prevalent among the public. During this period, isolationist senators such as Burton Wheelerand and Gerald Nye objected to Hollywood films having anything to do with the subject on grounds that they were anti-Nazi propaganda vehicles designed to mobilize the American public for war. And the studios still had important ties to the German and Italian film distribution industries and were reluctant to lose the money that showing movies in those countries produced. Further, the Hays Code discouraged or prohibited many types of political and satirical messages in feature films, requiring that the history and prominent people of other countries must be portrayed “fairly”. Short films such as those released by the Stooges were subject to less attention than feature films. Thus, the making of this clever, wittily written satire was a true act of courage by, of all people, the Columbia Short Subject department. I posted the colorized version of the film, but black-and-white purists can find the film easily on YouTube…