I've only seen a bit of one Besser short. It was one of those two exciting horse ones. I watched it for about 5 minutes before switching off...vomit inducing would be an understatement. I can't say that all the Besser shorts were bad, but frankly I'd rather watch paint dry than watch that piece of turd again. (I think it was 'Hoofs and Goofs,' where Besser thinks his dead sister is a horse, and as I recall, the horse talks.)
The Besser "horse" shorts are absolutely the worst crapola the Stooges ever put on film, agreed. I do like "Outer Space Jitters," though (a guilty pleasure), because by then the budgets and the scripts were so shot to hell that nobody cared about the quality of the product any more, and that brought in a new devil-may-care kind of silliness— it's almost like
Ed Wood was directing the Stooges. Besides, there's "Don" Blocker (his name is misspelled that way in the credits), the future Hoss Cartwright, as the Goon.
Check out the picture in the Filmography section, it's a hoot!
Joe B. was funniest as Stinky in the Abbott and Costello TV show. My favorite scene with him is in "Getting A Job," where Stinky tries to trick Lou into walking backwards into the street so he'll get run over by a car! When the car misses Lou by inches, Stinky says— in total Besser juvenile-type frustration— "Ooohh, ya
missed him!"
Now, that
is funny, and it's also pretty extreme, black humor for 1950's television. Lou and Joe played well off each other because they were both "grown-up little kids," in character.
Joe Derita didn't do much more than take up space, though. The best thing I can say about him is that he gave the Stooges a reason to go on working as a three-man team. An old friend of mine used to call him "the fake Curly," and that about sums it up.