HEALTHY WEALTHY AND DUMB

Production Information
Title: Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb
Studio: Columbia
Short Number: 31
Release Date: May 20, 1938
Running Time: 16:24

“You wanna cheat, cheat fair. Anything I hate is a crooked crook.”

Short Take

In this rags-to-riches-to-rags story, Healthy, Wealthy, and Dumb, Curly wins $50,000 from writing a catchy jingle for a radio contest. The boys quickly spend their loot and check in at the Hotel Costa Plente. Their suite is furnished with many expensive items which they systematically destroy. In the process, three gold diggers connive their way into the boys’ room, under the guise that they are three rich widows looking to remarry. This works perfectly, as Curly quickly discovers that all the tax deductions reduce his winnings to a minuscule $4.85. The boys hastily agree to marry the ladies, who soon find out the Stooges are broke and render them unconscious with champagne bottles.

Stooge Humor frequently vacillates between the pain of slapstick and the joy of laughter. But Searle Kramer’s Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb ranges widely from the good fortune of getting rich via a radio quiz program to the double tragedies of getting conned and then taxed back into poverty.

Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb

Directed byDel Lord
Produced byJules White
Written bySearle Kramer
StarringMoe Howard
Larry Fine
Curly Howard
James C. Morton
Bud Jamison
Lucille Lund
Jean Carmen
Earlene Heath
CinematographyAllen G. Siegler
Edited byCharles Nelson

Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb Trivia

  • When the Stooges hear a knock on their door, they say “Come in…Come in…Come in” musically.
    Also used in:  I’ll Never Heil Again, Baby Sitter Jitters, and A Missed Fortune.
  • The title Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb is a parody of Benjamin Franklin’s proverb “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”
  • When the short was remade as A Missed Fortune in 1952, the radio quiz program was updated by adding a phone call to The Stooges, a feature that dates back to the 1939 fNBCpRed radio quiz show ‘Pot O’ Gold.’ jean Carmen (Marge) often used the stage name Julia Thayer, and was best known for her roles in B Westerns and serials (The Painted Stallion).
  • When Moe slaps Larry and knocks him backwards, we never see where or how he ends up.
  • Also, when Curly collapses the bed, Moe never gets caught inside; nonetheless, we see him caught in the following result shot

Production Notes

It would be remade as 1952’s A Missed Fortune with Shemp in 1952, with minimal stock footage.