He gets demeaned so often for being the replacement for Curly in the Three Stooges. Shemp was very funny! If he hadn’t left the Stooges early on and been replaced by Curly, the Stooges would have still been an iconic and successful part of comedy history. Curly was so unique that he will always be everybody’s favorite stooge, but it’s not fair to insult Shemp’s considerable comedic talents because of it. Just a random Saturday morning thought…
Shemp had his own character and charm. It’s Joe that everyone hates.
Shemp was always my favorite. I liked Curly too, but there was something about the faces Shemp made. Now that face got him declared as the ugliest man in the world also. If that wasn’t enough humiliation, he’s also related to Barney Frank.
I just watched The Invisible Woman the other night- a fun silly movie. Shemp played a henchman for the big bad. He was funny.
I’ve seen him in a few other non-Stooges roles, none that I can recall at the moment. He was always good. His talent was always more apparent when he could stretch outside the Stooges’ material. I think he returned to the Stooges out of a familial sense of obligation.
He was in Abbott and Costello in the Navy, a movie I watched infinite times as a kid. You can find lots of others on the IMDB.
A sad thing about Shemp is that he got called in to replace Jerome (Curly) after his stroke, and didn’t really want to go – he had his own career. I gather that family came first, though. Although, top be honest, all his other roles were pretty minor – he made a much bigger impact as a Stooge than he did elsewhere.
One of the only Shemp movies I liked was a Dragnet parody.
Moe: “I’m Halliday.”
Larry: “I’m Faraday.”
Shemp: “I’m Christmas Day.”
One of my favorite W.C. Fields exchanges was from The Bank Dick:
Fields: Say, did I give you a twenty dollar bill last night and spend it all on liquor?
Bartender: You did.
Fields: Well, that’s a load off my shoulders! I was afraid I’d lost it.
The bartender was Shemp Howard.
When I was a kid, my brothers and I liked Shemp. We thought that in contrast to the others, who had bizarre, distinctive looks*, Shemp looked fairly conventional but there seemed to be about 1% of craziness in him. We used to say that Shemp looked “almost normal”.
Years later, when I took up the mathematics and engineering trades, I always got a chuckle when a data distribution was close enough to the standard Gaussian normal distribution to treat it as such, and was therefore described as “approximately normal”:* the Shemp distribution.*
- Beatle haircut (Moe), “dirty tennis ball”** (Curly) and “Porcupine” (Larry).
** Moe’s description of Curly’s 'do.
In fact, the studio refused to have Shemp replace Curly in the Stooges. Moe told them, “He’s my brother. He was in the Stooges originally. And if we don’t have Shemp, there won’t be any more Stooges. Me and Larry will retire.” He was only intended to replace Curly temporarily, until Curly got better Unfortunately, he never did. Shemp remained in the Stooges until his own death.
The short subject Hold That Lion had all three Howard brothers in it (as well as Larry Fine). Curly was feeling well enough to visit the set and the director gave him a cameo in the film. He was the train passenger who was sleeping with his hat over his face and when the hat was removed he began to snore, Stooge style.
He was also in the good Olsen and Jonson movies. In Hellzapoppin’ he’s the projectionist. I only vaguely remember Crazy Street, but I think he was a shady street salesman - “want to buy an anchor? Right off the boat.”
He was my favorite Stooge also.
My brother wanted to name his son Shemp. My sister-in-law, however, declined. 
Was Shemp his real name or a nickname like Curly?
His name was Samuel, written and pronounced “Shemuel”. His mother used to call him “Shems”, which became “Shemps”, then “Shemp”, so it’s a legit diminutive of his real name.
When I was a kid, watching the Stooges on Officer Joe Bolton’s show on WOR TV, he explained that it came from Shemp liking “champagne” – not, I suppose, wanting to get into ethnic versions of names.
His name was Samuel. “Shemp” came from his mother calling him Sam with an old country accent.
Shemp came to Thailand once and was interviewed by the local veteran American newsman Bernard Trink. Trink always said it was one of his favorite interviews and that Shemp had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Art of Comedy, issues of timing etc.
Shemp was ALWAYS my favorite Stooge! I thought he was the most subtle of the bunch, and the funniest.
“Give me another drink. I can still see her face!”
“I feel like a piece of French toast!”
Curly Joe… even worse
Ah, so kind of like “Geddy” Lee (his grandmother’s heavily accented version of “Gary”).
By the time Shemp joined, the scripts were recycled and the people who wrote for them originally had left. So those featuring Shemp were weaker overall, though Shemp was often the best things about him. Few fans hate Shemp – he just wasn’t as good a Curly. (Joe Besser was a terrible stooge, but by the time he joined, things were so bad that he was often the only thing funny in them).
I love Shemp!