Finishing this extended plunge into the slapstick of The Shorts Department, the spotlight shines on the guy who cranked out numerous Three Stooges shorts in the latter 1940's and early 1950's, longtime Columbia Studio soundman Edward Bernds.
Chicago-born Edward Bernds was a pioneering soundman who, after working with Frank Capra and Howard Hawks, would become a prolific director of silver screen comedies, television series and psychotronic B-films. He lived to be 95 and thus gave numerous interviews.
Mr. Bernds had the unenviable task of directing Three Stooges comedies when Curly Howard's health was rapidly declining in the mid-1940's.
He did a remarkable job working around the NYUK NYUK NYUK king's health issues and getting Curly's last great comedy performances on film.
He also did a stellar job handling the comedy team's transition from Curly to Shemp.
Greg Hilbrich's historical overview of The Shorts Department adds: "In 1944, Edward Bernds, a sound mixer at Columbia since the shorts department's beginnings, began writing scripts for the shorts, only later to find himself in the director's chair. Bernds is responsible for some of the finest two-reel comedies Columbia made."
His Columbia comedy short subjects featured unusual choices of headliners. For example, Billie Burke, ubiquitous character actress known for, among numerous parts, Glinda The Good Witch from The Wizard Of Oz, starred in Columbia 2-reelers. While Billie remains the least likely to headline a Three Stooges style knockabout comedy, it happened!
Ex-pugilists Max Baer and "Slapsie Maxie" Rosenbloom swapped taking punches in the ring for Moe Howard style mega-slaps in the movies!
Edward Bernds directed several short subjects starring character actor and cartoon voice artist Sterling Holloway.
The slapstick team of Gus Schilling & Richard Lane made a series of very funny and very over-the-top comedy shorts in the Three Stooges knockabout school.
Future "3rd Stooges" Joe De Rita and Joe Besser also starred in 2-reelers directed by Edward Bernds at Columbia.
After leaving the Columbia Shorts Department in 1952, Edward Bernds directed films for Allied Artists, including The Bowery Boys Meet The Monsters, starring Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey and Guy In A Gorilla Suit.
Edward Bernds' extended career in movies and TV included psychotronic B-films.
Including the classic SPACE X-7!
Hard not to love a guy who directed Queen Of Outer Space!
Last week's post on rubber-legged slapstick master Leon Errol and silver screen humor essential Mel Brooks, as well as the previous one on The Three Stooges, has profoundly immersed this blog in the pratfall-packed world of physical comedy.
We've been heavily into Slapstickland, both silents and talkies, for the past three months. And many moons ago, back in 2013 (which now feels like 1913), wrote an extended series of Way Too Damn Lazy To Write a Blog posts paying tribute to the Columbia Shorts Department and Jules White.
Lee Weinstein's 2023 article The Rivals Of The Three Stooges adeptly covers the comedy headliners from Columbia 2-reelers at length and gets us thinking of the guy who spent 20 years with The Shorts Department before going on to a successful career in television, former silent slapstick perennial and Mack Sennett stock company player Andy Clyde.
In I'M A FATHER, Andy plays the "cranky old stick in the mud" to perfection.
In such Columbia 2-reelers as OLD SAWBONES, a collaboration between prolific silent comedy creators Del Lord and Jack "Preston Black" White, Andy presents a down-home variant on the physical comedy formula of Moe, Larry and Curly.
Now it's on to character actor supreme, the guy who coached none other than Kate Hepburn in comedy chops during the making of Bringing Up Baby, the great Broadway and movie comedian Walter Catlett.
Here's Walter in Get Along Little Hubby (1934). (Note: the following transfer is very out of sync). He co-stars with Vivien Oakland, very much a key player in the first year of The Shorts Department (and a take-no-prisoners character actress here), as well as ubiquitous slapstick comedy stalwart, future Columbia 2-reelers headliner and Three Stooges co-star Monte Collins.
In case you're wondering why Walter Catlett seems more than vaguely familiar. . .
Indeed, that is a wonderful performance in Pinocchio as J. Worthington Foulfellow A.K.A."Honest John."
In between his numerous character roles in feature films, Catlett turns up periodically in Columbia shorts through the early 1940's; he even co-stars with the popular Guy In A Gorilla Suit, who torments Walt and Dudley Dickerson (the talented African-American comedian invariably cast in grotesque stereotyped parts) in YOU'RE NEXT.
BLONDES AND BLUNDERS has a pronounced Moe-Larry-Curley style knockabout approach throughout, in no small part due to the presence of irreplaceable Three Stooges supporting comics Bud Jamison and Vernon Dent.
Walter Catlett had prominent roles in comedy and musical short subjects long before working for Columbia. Here he is, teamed with none other than gravel-voiced Eugene Pallette.
One of the most memorable Walter Catlett performances is in Mark Sandrich's 1933 RKO opus SO THIS IS HARRIS (1933).
Have devoted many blog posts to the unorthodox and original comedian Harry Langdon over the years.
Like Buster Keaton and Charley Chase, Harry was among the former silent movie headliners making 2-reelers at Columbia. Langdon was one of two Harrys - the second was Harry von Zell in 1946-1950 - to headline short subjects for The Shorts Department.
The Columbia Langdon comedies remain a mixed bag; some - SHIVERS, HIS MARRIAGE MIX-UP (the 1935 predecessor to Saturday Night Live star Mike Myers' 1993 feature film So I Married An Axe Murderer) - are still lost films.
Langdon, an unique and idiosyncratic performer, was especially ill-suited to Jules White's tendency to make Three Stooges comedies with all Shorts Department headliners.
At that point Harry, who was pushing 40 when he debuted in movies, was in his fifties and no longer able to do strenuous physical slapstick. Nonetheless, the comedy-crazed gang here find Langdon's appearances in features and short subjects, more often than not, to be quite funny; check him out in Lewis Milestone's Hallelujah, I'm A Bum (1933).
The following, directed by frequent Langdon collaborator Arthur Ripley and written by the inventive and prolific Harry McCoy, is a sendup of Warner Brothers' Warren William vehicle and courtroom drama The Mouthpiece (1932). Harry sports a mustache!
Harry works quite well with the marvelously and unabashedly over-the-top Hal Roach Studios comedian and cartoon voice artist Billy Gilbert in this 1935 2-reeler. Langdon's the straight man here! Billy reprises the raving loony he portrayed with relish in the Three Stooges opus Men In Black.
For more on this great movie comedian, check out Chicago historian Nicole Arciola's terrific Harry Langdon Archive YouTube channel, a classic comedy treasure trove.
On the comedy beat from Broadway to vaudeville to movies, thinking of two terrific icons of silver screen humor, both of whom crack us up, only every time. One is star of stage, screen, Ziegfeld Follies, etc. Leon Errol, born in Sydney, Australia on July 3, 1881. Here's Leon with Lou Costello in The Noose Hangs High (1948).
The other is Mel Brooks, because the gang here somehow missed the comedy maestro's 100th birthday last Sunday!
While Leon Errol is arguably best known for his later work - his appearance in W.C. Fields' hilarious 1941 opus Never Give A Sucker An Even Break, the Joe Palooka series and the eight Mexican Spitfire feature films co-starring comedienne, singer and dancer Lupe Vélez, he had a lengthy and illustrious show business career as comedian-singer-director-writer before 1930 and even appeared in several silent films (in the following co-starring with stalwart comedienne Dorothy Gish).
Mentioning how expertly the thorough Forgotten Australian Actors website chronicles Errol's five decade show business career, we note that the rubber-legged comedian began performing on stage, acting, singing and directing theatrical troupes as he worked in burlesque and vaudeville, starting at the turn of the 20th century.
He toured Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain and Ireland, worked extensively as a director and writer with Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. and co-starred in sketches with the legendary Bert Williams in the Ziegfeld Follies.
Mr. Errol is also among a slew of comedians in the enjoyably eccentric and unrelentingly grotesque version of Alice In Wonderland directed by Norman Z. McLeod and produced by Paramount Pictures in 1933.
We are quite fond of the 2-reelers Leon starred in during the first year of Jules White's Columbia Shorts Department, consider the uninhibited group to be slapstick masterpieces.
ONE TOO MANY is quite the curio, directed by Our Gang series creator Robert McGowan (on a break from the Hal Roach Studio) and written by the insanely prolific Harry McCoy.
Also love the two Technicolor Vitaphone musical shorts from 1934, both directed by Roy Mack, later a producer of very enjoyable Soundies.
The wonderfully cheesy time-traveling Vitaphone musical GOOD MORNING EVE (1934), one of the last gasps of pre-Code naughtiness, in glorious 3-strip Technicolor, is a personal favorite Leon Errol flick.
Greg Hilbrich of the The Columbia Shorts Department wrote, "upon completing HONEYMOON BRIDGE for Columbia, and after an argument with studio executives who cited "creative differences", Errol left for Radio Pictures."
So, in 1934, Leon began starring for RKO in a series directed and written by legendary gagmeister Al Boasberg.
There are LOTS of RKO Leon Errol short subjects on YouTube. In one produced in 1936, none other than Lucille Ball (who has a cameo as Leon's secretary in the 1934 Columbia 2-reeler PERFECTLY MISMATED) plays a housekeeper. No doubt Lucy was taking notes when working at the Columbia Shorts Department in 3 Stooges and Leon Errol 2-reelers.
Errol's co-star in ONE TOO MANY, ONE LIVE GHOST and many other films is the always formidable former Ziegfeld Girl and Hal Roach Studios stock company player Vivien Oakland, who, along with the equally formidable Dorothy Granger, would be a frequent collaborator.
Our favorite of all the Leon Errol RKO short subjects is THE JITTERS (1938), an astounding version of his rubber-leg routine.
Leon starred in 2-reel comedies for RKO through the 1940's, long after Mack Sennett and Educational Pictures closed and Hal Roach Studios ceased making short subjects. He often played a lecherous philanderer who unsuccessfully attempts to conceal booze, broads and gambling from his wife. Would expect no less from a comedian who starred in the 1933 Paramount short subject Three Little Swigs!
As of July 2026, clips from this series are practically nonexistent online. Fortunately for comedy geeks, all eight Mexican Spitfire features are available as a 4-DVD box set.
Too bad Lupe wasn't around 30 years later to bring her wacky and unabashedly over-the-top sensibility to western deconstruction Blazing Saddles - which brings us to Mel Brooks.
We're thrilled and delighted that comedian-writer-director-producer Mel Brooks made it to his 100th birthday last Sunday!
Here, Mel celebrates his 100th with TV producer-writer (Everyone Loves Raymond), documentary host (Somebody Feed Phil), actor and enthusiastic gastronome Phil Rosenthal.
Noting our June 28, 2021 post celebrating Mr. Brooks' 95th birthday and Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog's February 21, 2026 tribute to the mighty and ridiculously talented comedy writers and performers who created Admiral Broadway Revue, Your Show Of Shows and Caesar's Hour, in closing, here's one of our favorite Mel contributions to a movie, approved enthusiastically by the Psychotronix Film Festival!
Thanks for the laughs, Leon and Mel! Now it's time to re-watch the four Columbia 2-reelers, then watch those Video Yesteryear compilations of Leon Errol comedies, starting with volume 1. Then on to The Flustered Comedy Of Leon Errol volumes 2, 3 and 4.
