The Three Stooges and The Marx Brothers have been compared to each other for longer than either of them probably would’ve ever cared to be. On the surface, it’s understandable: Both comedy teams were made up primarily of Jewish brothers from New York who got their start in vaudeville and found success in Hollywood around the same time. Their respective careers spanned decades, with some lineup changes along the way, and each group achieved show business immortality as their movies were repeatedly shown on TV well beyond their lifetimes. And although there’s a sort of Star Trek/Star Wars rivalry among the fan bases, who are quick to point out what makes their favorite team different, the Stooges and the Marxes will seemingly always be linked to one another due to the similarities they share.
Despite the connection, the two teams don’t appear to have crossed paths much in their lives. In a recording included on the 2023 Blu-ray collection Stooge-O-Rama, Three Stooges leader Moe Howard talks about encountering the Marx Brothers in their vaudeville days and refers to them as “a fine group of people.” No further interactions seem to have been documented beyond that. After breaking through with their movies, the groups worked for rival film studios and ran in separate social circles.
Even with that said, people still compared them. In the 1936 animated short The Merry Mutineers, caricatures of the Stooges and the Marxes are shown battling each other from opposing pirate ships. Also featured are contemporaries of theirs like Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, and Jimmy Durante:
Thirty years later, it would be another animated project that would bring together a one-time member of each team for the only time. In 1966, Groucho Marx served as a technical advisor on what was supposed to be a pilot for a Marx Brothers animated series. Produced by Filmation Associates, the cartoon featured the voices of Pat Harrington Jr. as Groucho and future Caddyshack star Ted Knight as his brother Chico. It also featured Joe Besser, who had a short run with the Stooges alongside Moe Howard and Larry Fine in the late 1950s.
Here’s a refresher for anyone a little rusty on their Stooges history: The group was formed when brothers Moe and Shemp added Larry Fine to the vaudeville act they were doing with Ted Healy. Shemp left, making way for his younger brother Curly, just before the team parted ways with Healy. Shemp later replaced a sick Curly in the 1940s and would be replaced after his death by Besser, who was best known at the time as Stinky on The Abbott & Costello Show. Another Joe, nicknamed “Curly Joe,” then replaced Besser.
Ten years after his stint with the Stooges, Besser was somehow cast in a failed Marx Brothers pilot. Titled A Day at the Horse Opera, the show finds the animated Marxes running a medicine show in the Old West. Meanwhile, some hostile Native Americans are causing trouble for the U.S. Cavalry. Their chief, voiced by Besser, won’t sign a peace treaty until his daughter is married to someone who looks like “The Great Stoneface,” a rock formation with more than a passing resemblance to Groucho Marx. The eight-minute pilot, which was believed lost until 2012, can be viewed in its entirety below.
In an interesting turn of events, Pat Harrington Jr., who voiced Groucho in the pilot here, would go on to do the voice of Moe when the Three Stooges “guest-starred” in The New Scooby-Doo Movies in the 1970s.
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