Although they spent more than three decades making films, it was television that turned the Three Stooges into one of the most recognizable and beloved comedy teams in the world. Specializing in unsophisticated, violent slapstick, the Three Stooges slapped, poked, and generally abused each other in more than two hundred short films between 1934 and 1958, when their shorts were released to television, to the delight of a whole new generation of Three Stooges fans.

Formed in vaudeville in 1923, the team's original members were Moe Howard (born June 19, 1897, as Moses Horowitz; died May 4, 1975) and his brother Shemp (born March 17, 1895, as Samuel Horowitz; died November 23, 1955), who acted as sidekicks to their boyhood friend, comedian Ted Healy. In its early years, the act was billed "Ted Healy and His Stooges" and sometimes "The Racketeers." While various "stooges" moved in and out of the act, each virtually interchangeable with...