Boston’s Three Stooges Marathon Was a New Year’s Tradition

What self-respecting knucklehead would celebrate the arrival of a new year without The Three Stooges? You'd have to be a regular porcupine to pass up all of the eye pokes, slaps, insults and shenanigans delivered by our life-long Stooge pals.

Unless there no longer was a Three Stooges New Year's Eve Marathon.

I grew up on The Three Stooges. "The Boys" first appeared on my black-and-white television on Saturday mornings as a kid and then as shorts before double features at New Bedford's Capitol Theater or the Olympia. I saw them live at Lincoln Park in Dartmouth. Joe DeRita was suffering Moe's wrath by that point.

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The Stooges played Pleasure Island in Wakefield, at the Zayre store in North Beverly, Boston and Pittsfield, and likely at other Massachusetts venues until the early 1960s.

Around 1971, Boston's WSBK-TV Channel 38 got a hold of the broadcast rights to many of The Three Stooges shorts and played the hell out of them – weekday afternoons, weekends, Saturday mornings, late at night.

At some point, Channel 38 began its annual Three Stooges Marathon on New Year's Eve. It didn't take a wise guy to understand this was a great idea.

The Three Stooges – silly, foolish, slapstick vaudevillians – appealed to generation after generation of fans. The act never got stale, whether your favorite Stooge was Moe, Larry, Curly, Shemp, Joe Besser or Joe DeRita.

The Three Stooges New Year's Eve Marathon ended in December 2021, when WSBK TV-38's contract with Sony Pictures expired. Though the station sought to renew the deal, Sony reportedly declined.

New Year's Eve hasn't been the same since.

The Three Stooges are available on WCVB 5.2, Boston's MeTV-affiliated subchannel. There is also a Three Stooges+ YouTube channel where you can watch all of the Stooges' shorts and feature films, which also streams for free on Freevee, Sling, Tubi and many other streaming services and sites.