A brief look today at Larry Fine (Louis Feinberg, 1902-1975), today known almost exclusively as the vaguely catatonic member of the Three Stooges with the Brillo pad on his head.
Larry is often known as the “Middle Stooge”, for he occupied that conceptual limbo space between Moe Howard, the aggressive and sadistic boss character, and the various nuts (Curly, Shemp, Joe, and Curly Joe) who occupied the other pole. If he weren’t so distinctively crazy looking himself, you might think of him as a “Zeppo“. But there is most assuredly a “there” there. Billy West has done a killer impression of him for decades, and built the voice of Stimp (Ren and Stimpy) on it. Sean Hayes, having played Jerry Lewis a decade earlier, played Larry in the Farrelly Bros. 2012 reboot. The point is: there is a character to be played. A little whiny, head full of fog, possibly on downers. It is a face you don’t want to see standing over you in a hospital operating room.
Furthermore (the principal point in posting about him at all today) Fine actually had a solo career for several years, impossible to believe as that may seem. Fine grew up in Philly, where his dad ran a watch repair shop. Some acid fell on his arm one day, and so his parents sprang for fiddle lessons to restore the destroyed muscle tissue. By young adulthood he was a professional level violinist. Like Jack Benny, that was his original act in vaudeville. He was performing on the circuits by the early ’20s. Throughout the middle of that decade he was an emcee at the Rainbo Gardens in Chicago, and had pushed comedy to the fore. With that kinky long hair and tailcoat I have always envisioned Fine’s solo comedy to be something like Harpo Marx’s or Professor Irwin Corey’s. (On at least one occasion though he stole Mel Klee’s act). Anyway, Ted Healy and the Howard Brothers caught him at the Rainbo Gardens. By 1929 he was a full-time Stooge.
The rest is hysterical history. Although my mind was fairly blown to learn that as late as 1967, the Stooges were playing Rocky Point amusement park in Warwick, Rhode Island (that was my local amusement park, the first one I ever attended). It was there that Larry learned that his beloved wife Mabel had passed away and had to leave Moe and Curly Joe to fool around onstage without him. To think of those two old movie comedians, two thirds of a team, playing a second-tier beach attraction in the age of The Tonight Show fills me with mixed emotions. Sad, because, how the mighty had fallen. But maybe not so sad, because they loved what they did, enjoyed doing it, and it was in the ancient tradition of all troupers, taking it to the people at the grassroots level. One stop’s as good as another if you’re making people happy.
Believe it or not, the Stooges were a going concern as late as Moe Howard’s death in 1975, though Larry’s involvement had ended five years earlier due to a massive stroke. He worked right up until 1970, for much the same reason that Chico Marx never stopped working. Problem gambler. He needed to keep going to survive. But, then, we all do, don’t we?
You will find more about Larry Fine and The Three Stooges in my books No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.
(Travalanche) 
You must be logged in to post a comment.