A Further Scientific Look at The Three Stooges

I recently took a scientific look at the Three Stooges. You can read all about that here.

Now, I’ve broken down the same analysis per third stooge to see if there is any trend.

Here are histograms for all of the episodes per third stooge:

From the above plots, you can see that the Curly and Shemp distributions are somewhat normal; Shemp’s is skewed lower slightly, but both of these contribute to the distribution seen overall, as they account for the majority of the episodes (174). Since the highest rating for the Joe Besser episodes is a 2, all of his episodes just manages to skew the overall distribution lower.

For those who forgot, here’s what the overall distribution looked like:

Here’s a table summarizing the important statistical parameters overall, and per each third stooge:

The results in this table manage to corroborate the data in the above plots.

So, as a result of this whole analysis, it’s safe to say that as far as my opinion goes, Curly is the best third stooge, followed closely by Shemp. In a distant third is Joe Besser, but I’ll go on the record saying that you’re better off avoiding any short films with him. Those films are obviously not great…