A Gem of a Jam

This clever Three Stooges comedy opens, like many of their films do, with a sign: "Drs. Heart-Burns and Belcher." But that's not referring to the Stooges -- they're merely the night janitors, and not very good ones. They have the usual round of mishaps, the funniest being when Curly gets his head stuck in a fish bowl. Even after Larry and Moe free him from the globe, he's not quite right, so they stick him behind the fluoroscope and discover he has swallowed a fish. They retrieve it by sticking a fishing line -- with bait -- down his throat. Their work is further interrupted by a trio of crooks. While escaping the police, one of them was shot in the shoulder, and they insist that the Stooges -- who they have mistaken for doctors -remove the slug. The wounded crook insists on being anesthetized, which confuses the trio until they're told, "That means he wants to be knocked out!" "Ohhh---" they reply knowingly, and they knock him cold with a hammer. But the wounded crook slides off the gurney, out the window and into a waiting police car. To fool the other two gun men (who apparently aren't much smarter than the Stooges), Moe and Larry stick Curly under the sheet. The police finally show up looking for the crooks and both the gunmen and Stooges go running. While the crooks are nabbed, the Stooges wind up in a strange storage area with a bunch of mannequins, a gigantic, spooky jack-in-the-box, a frightened night watchman and a vat of plaster. Curly falls into the plaster and his ghostly white visage scares everyone he encounters until the short comes to a rather abrupt end.