I've read a lot of reviews on the IMDb (well, all five of the ones that have been written at the time that I'm writing this) and I'm surprised at the amount of praise heaped upon The Brideless Groom, which is undoubtedly one of the lesser comedies performed by the Stooges. I prefer the older ones where it was Larry, Curly and Moe, although Shemp gets credit for most of the funny scenes in Sing a Song of Six Pants, another Stooges short which is only moderately amusing but far superior to Brideless Groom. Indeed, there is a single slightly amusing scene in the film, the "don't-hit-a-lady" scene, which is barely amusing at all and is 15 minutes into the film. Not very promising in a 17-minute comedy.<br /><br />Shemp is a voice trainer whose uncle has passed away and left him an inheritance of $500,000, provided he get married within 48 hours, which is short enough notice as it is, but by the time Shemp learns about it he has only 7 hours left. This is a premise that had been done and redone before, but was not, I don't think, a massive cliché at the time this film was made, as it is now. There are a series of gags throughout the film, none of which are even close to the level of comedy for which the Three Stooges are so widely known. It seems that the Stooges have run into the same troubles that plagued so many of Shirley Temple's films – there is too little reliance on content and too much reliance just on the fact that they're there.<br /><br />The standard characteristics of the Stooges are here, Moe is the mean one, whose meanness is certainly not used sparingly in this film, and the slapstick sound effects (although with more exceptions than usual) are fairly amusing, but are plugged into their standard slots in this film. The line "Hold hands, you lovebirds" is immortal. The rest of the film is not.<br /><br />There is much talk among the other people who have reviewed this movie for this site about this being one of the best of the Stooges shorts, that you won't find one weak moment, about how this is their best since the early 30s shorts. It's just not true. I can certainly understand a level of automatic respect for milestone classics and for the giants of early comedy, which the Three Stooges certainly are, but that respect is damaged when poorer films are praised more than they should be. The Brideless Groom deserves some respect because it is a Stooges film, but for exactly the same reason, it should have been better. The Three Stooges were just better than this.