Notable as the first Three Stooges short with Joe Besser as part of the zany trio, “Hoofs and Goofs” is one of the most delightfully bizarre things ever captured on camera.
The Stooges are brothers whose sister Birdie passed away one year earlier. Joe is a firm believer in reincarnation – he reads about the subject in a book written by “Swami Baykoe Potaytoe” – and he is convinced Birdie will return, perhaps as an animal. Moe and Larry prank him into believing they will encounter Birdie on a street corner that afternoon, but the prank takes a wild turn when they discover Birdie has returned as a horse pulling a junkman’s wagon. Joe, Moe, and Larry take Birdie back to their apartment, where she gives birth to a foal – Joe refers to the newborn horse as his nephew. Alas, it was all a dream, as Birdie is still alive. But when she hears that Joe dreamed she was a horse, Birdie angrily dumps a bowl of mashed potatoes on his head.
With the launch of the Besser-era shorts, the Three Stooges were moving back to original material rather than recycling old movies. And, quite frankly, you can’t get more original than having the sister of the Three Stooges reincarnated as a talking horse!
Joe’s integration into the act was conspicuously uneven in terms of knockabout slapstick, with Larry bearing the brunt of Moe’s wrath. But that’s not to say Joe didn’t get caught up in the knockabout, with Moe dumping a bucket of water on Joe and later (while in drag as Birdie) crowning Joe with a bowl of mashed potatoes.
Much of the fun in “Hoofs and Goofs” involves Benny Rubin as the Stooges’ Yiddish-accented landlord Mr. Dinkelspiel, who winds up on the receiving end of both Stooges and equine mayhem, while lovely Hariette Tarler decorates the premises as Rubin’s lovely (if decidedly shiksa) daughter. Joe Palma, the “fake Shemp” of their previous four films, appears in an unbilled bit as a drunk, while Tony the Wonder Horse did a gender switcheroo to play the Stooges’ sister.
More laughs (perhaps unintentional) can be found in the too-obvious use of a stuntman for Moe when he trips over a chair and lands in a pail of water, followed later by a non-lookalike double pretending to be Moe when the real chief Stooge is playing Birdie.
The craziness of the concept of the Stooges with a talking horse for a sister was strong enough for this short to generate a sequel, the 1957 release “Horsing Around.” Many Stooges fans dislike this film and the Besser shorts as a whole, but I think “Hoofs and Goofs” is goofy fun.