Any film where the boys mix it up with polite society automatically raises my rating by a few notches. And so, this one is possibly my favorite of the Jules White-directed shorts — or pretty near. I’m of sufficient vintage that I began collecting the Stooge shorts when they were available on Super 8 film, and Sappy People was one of the earliest ones I bought.
Yes, I’m fairly sure that Ann Doran’s reaction to Curly’s razor was spontaneous. She was legit, and I’ve often gotten the sense that she improvised a lot of her on-set business in Sappy People. Even the timing when she delivers her declaration about the king feels ad-libbed.
Finally, there’s Lorna Gray — who I was fortunate to sort-of rub shoulders with at one of the early conventions of the Buster Keaton Society (the Damfinos), in either 1995 or 96. Her main connection to Keaton was her appearance as leading lady in Pest from the West — the first and probably best of the shorts that Buster made at Columbia. In the more recent years, Lorna was known as Adrian Booth, and she had sort of a grand-dame presence at the convention — where she mostly hung with Eleanor Keaton. I always liked Lorna in Sappy People, and for my tastes she looks particularly smashing in Nazty Spy.
