This is jumping the gun, maybe to the point of being completely off-topic, but, I'm interested, Metal, in your comment that the writer gave the mother nothing at all to do in the sawfish scene. To my mind this is absolutely correct, and it's something we should all bear in mind much, much later with Curly-Joe. By the time of the '60's features, Moe and Maurer were in charge, and the scripts were obviously slanted to Moe. Nobody wrote much of anything for DeRita, and as a consequence, as has been noted, many times he is just left standing there.
Remember, everybody, wild as they sometimes seemed, very little ad-libbing went on: they were actors running scenes. When DeRita was given something to do, like the cigar scene in Outlaws, or the Operation sketch or the Stand-in sketch, stuff that had been written for a dynamic Curly Howard ( I actually don't know where the Operation sketch originated, but Stand-in was from George White's Scandals ) stuff that had a good Curly part, why DeRita was fine, he did a good job. Not Curly, of course, as has been said a million times, but a good enough job that you can hear a happy, laughing audience on T V. Curly and Shemp were both self-starters ( I was about to say that they could both make chicken salad out of chicken shit, but the fact is that they both had their share of chicken shit, too ) and for sure DeRita was less inspired, but IMHO he was far from the blivet that he has sometimes been made out to be, and was often poorly served by the writers.
