An Ache in Every Stake

(Short # 57 in Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk: The Columbia Shorts of The Three Stooges)

The Stooges are icemen this time. There’s a job from the past; before the era of refrigeration began, an iceman would bring blocks of ice to put in an icebox. The setting is the Los Angeles area during a heatwave. First, they attempted to move a block of ice up a LONG flight of outdoors stairs up to a house. Note that the stairs look like the ones seen in the Laurel & Hardy short The Music Box, but they aren’t the exact stairs; rather, this was shot a few miles away at a similar location. The heat melts the ice, you see…

Then, at another house they get in a kerfuffle w/ the chef, who quits in disgust. They offer to be chefs for the afternoon instead for a birthday party. As they don’t understand such terms as “separate two eggs,” “a pinch of salt” or “a loaf of bread, well-soaked” (Curly instead punches the loaf!), it is disastrous. Oh, and Vernon Dent also has a supporting role where he is an unwilling victim of the boys; of course he returns later in the story.

The laughs never stop in this short, from the beginning where the implication is that the horse pulling the ice wagon is smarter than the Stooges, to all the antics in the kitchen where the highlight is that Curly is told to “shave the ice,” resulting in a scene at least a minute long where he uses shaving cream and a razor-treating the block of ice as if it was a customer at a then-modern barber shop. That was a tremendous bit from Curly.

Mix in an explosive finale and this is a classic short from the trio.