Some observations:
1. "Mrs. Gotrocks," a large, matronly lady--I cannot help observing her resemblance, in voice as well as form, to Julia Child--approaches Moe and Larry and peremptorily claps her hands at them as she says, leaning down toward them:
"Stop it! Stop it this minute--you disGRRRACEful vagabonds!" Moe and Larry exchange a quick glance and then synchronously whack her in the face with hunks of pie.
That much by itself is enough to make me laugh out loud every time I watch this short. But it gets even better. In one of the most sublime moments of the Stooges' dealings with the fair sex, the Julia Child
Doppelgänger wipes the pie filling from her eyes (as Moe mutters,
sotto voce, "Who do you think you're talking to?") and says,
"SO! You want to play ROUGH, do you? WE-E-E-ELL!" as she dives for a pie, sending Moe and Larry into flight.
That lady is one of my favorite bit players in the Stooge shorts. I thought that this was the only short in which she appears, but I learn from the page on this short that the actress,
Helen Dickson, appeared earlier in
Slippery Silks (more pies!). She is also listed as appearing in a couple of subsequent shorts, but I think she does so only in reuses of this same footage.
2. Barbara Slater. What a lulu! I am entirely in agreement with what Metaldams said about her.
3. The reading lesson: When Moe starts reading the book upside-down, I would transcribe his utterances thus:
"Tar yittrady eeth say. Glug zap snorglots rammits. Ronnessonce kebairts--" (interrupted by Vernon Dent turning the book right-side-up). The second and third "sentences," if they can be called that, are, I believe, indecipherable nonsense. But the first four words compose the sentence
"Yes, the dirty rat!"--Moe's line to Larry a few seconds later--read backwards. Neat, eh? In the corresponding scene in
Hoi Polloi, when Larry does the reading and Moe slaps him for aiming the line "Yes, the dirty rat!" at him ("Don't get personal!"), Larry points to the book as if the words were printed there. Perhaps they actually were!
4. There's a nice touch at the end of the same scene, when Professor Quackenbush (hmm, I wonder where they got that name from--he said, wagging his eyebrows like a certain famous member of another comedy trio and flicking ash from the end of an imaginary cigar) tears his hair out in exasperation and Curly picks up the bits of hair and tries to attach them to his shorn pate. Moe gives him a slap on the head as the scene fades out.
5. Finally, there is something in this short that sends me on another of my flights into high-cultural comparisons. I believe that the plot has about it something of the dramatic arc of a Greek tragedy. First, bear in mind that, unlike most of the shorts, it is based on a single action: a bet. Bets by nature concern things that cannot be known or predicted with certainty. But Professor Quackenbush bets Professor Sedletz that he can do something that nobody has done before. He presumes that he has superior insight into the connections of causes and effects--exactly the sort of
hubris that the Greek gods are wont to punish with ruin.
Now think of the climax of the short: the pie fight. How does it start? Surprisingly, the ostensible initiator of the culinary violence is one of the guests, the lofty Mrs. Smythe-Smythe (Simona Boniface). Of course, she is not so much the initiator of the pie fight as its first victim: she merely flings off a bit of the pie that has hit her in the face after Moe, in a bizarre move, has flung it against the ceiling. So really it is Moe who is the cause of the pie fight. But why did Moe fling the pie against the ceiling? Because he saw Curly try to eat it while it was still in its pan and needed to get rid of it in a hurry. A few seconds later, he sees Larry doing what Curly tried to do and knocks the pie out of his hand and into the face of another guest, thus precipitating the full disaster that, up to that point, might have been averted. Moe saw that trouble was afoot and acted, in however unwise a manner, with the specific intention of averting it. Like Oedipus, his very attempt to prevent catastrophe is what brings the catastrophe about. The pie fight causes Professor Quackenbush the loss of the bet that he and the three boys have been working for two months to win.
If the structural affinities of the action with that of a Greek tragedy are not enough to make my point, there is also what Mrs. Smythe-Smythe says when Moe keeps trying to run away from her: "Young man, you act as though you have the sword of Damocles hanging over your head!" The writers obviously had some knowledge of Shaw's
Pygmalion--a modern comedy based on an ancient myth. Tragedy and comedy differ not so much in plot structure as in tone and perspective. As Mel Brooks has said, "Tragedy is when I scratch my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."
