Oddly enough, Joe Besser wasn't bad with Abbott & Costello; he can be really funny as "Stinky" when he works opposite Lou.
But he just wasn't true Stooge material, because you had to be willing to take slaps, pies, seltzer shrpritzes, mallets to the head, explosions, and whatever else came up. Joe B. didn't want to do the full Stooges routine, getting slapped and pied and bonked, and so he's not much of a Stooge.
If I can say anything in his defense, Besser was following directly in the footsteps of two of the greatest comics in American film history: Curly and Shemp Howard. He deserves a lot of credit for even
trying to fill their shoes, but I'm still not buying Vol. 8.
At that point, the Columbia Comedy Shorts were just about finished (as in
kaput), and it shows.