Swingin’ the Alphabet

Released on July 2, 1938, Violent is the Word for Curly is one of the most celebrated shorts in the entire Three Stooges catalog. The plot, such as it is: Moe, Larry, and Curly are mistaken for distinguished European professors at a women’s college. Chaos, naturally, ensues.

Near the climax of the short, the Stooges lead the entire student body in “Swingin’ the Alphabet” — a rousing phonics song built on a strict repeating pattern. It is one of the best-loved moments in Stooges history and a genuine crowd-pleaser in the classroom eighty-plus years later.

The song works through each consonant in turn, pairing it with every vowel sound:

The pattern is immediately recognizable to anyone who has written a nested loop. That is not a coincidence — it is what an algorithm is: a repeating process applied systematically to a set of inputs. The Stooges just set it to music, added three men in graduation gowns, and performed it with unforgettable energy.

There is also a PHP app in the TNT collection that generates the full song lyrics algorithmically — exactly the kind of string-manipulation exercise the song was always secretly asking for. Enter any phrase and watch the algorithm extract unique consonants and sing a stanza for each one. The S.P.A.R.K. chat log documents the complete PHP renovation, including a teaching walkthrough of every string function and regex the algorithm uses.

One of the best places to start learning a coding language is string manipulation, because it touches most of the fundamental constructs of any language: variables, loops, concatenation, and output. “Swingin’ the Alphabet” puts all of those in a song and makes them memorable before a single line of code is written.

The structure of the song is a classic outer loop / inner loop pattern:

• Outer loop — iterates over consonants: B, C, D, F, G…
• Inner loop — for each consonant, iterates over vowel combinations: A, E, I, O, U, building a cumulative “Bicky-by-Bo-Bu” chain as it goes.
• Accumulator — the growing chain (Bicky-by…) is a real-world example of building a string by concatenation inside a loop.

Ask students to write pseudocode for the song before they write actual code. Then write it. Then have the class sing the output. It works in PHP, JavaScript, Python, or Java — any language with a loop and a string. Curly would approve.

Try the PHP App  •  S.P.A.R.K. Chat Log

The classic trio. Moe Howard (Moses Harry Horwitz), Larry Fine (Louis Feinberg), and Curly Howard (Jerome Lester Horwitz) made 97 short films together for Columbia Pictures between 1934 and 1946. In total, the Stooges produced 190 short films for Columbia across all lineups from 1934 to 1959 — a record that stands to this day. Moe and Larry appeared in all 190. No other comedy duo came close.

Curly was the secret weapon. Jerome “Curly” Howard is widely regarded as the greatest physical comedian of the short-film era. His rubber-faced mugging, his spontaneous sound effects, and his signature move — spinning on the floor on one hip while barking “Woo woo woo!” — were largely improvised. Director Jules White frequently let the camera roll just to see what Curly would do.

The song predates the Stooges. “Swingin’ the Alphabet” is based on a much older children’s phonics mnemonic. The Stooges didn’t write it — they performed it so memorably that most people assume they did. The song is now inseparable from the short, and the short is inseparable from the Stooges.

A top-ten all-time. Violent is the Word for Curly consistently ranks in fans’ top-ten Stooges shorts. The combination of the college setting, Curly’s chemistry with the student actresses, and the sheer energy of the song sequence make it a standout even in a catalog full of classics.

Curly’s decline and Shemp’s return. In 1946, Curly suffered a series of strokes and was quietly replaced mid-production by his older brother Shemp Howard (Samuel Horwitz), who had actually been in the act before Curly. Shemp worked with the team until his death in 1955. He is remembered fondly by Stooges fans, though the Curly era is generally considered the peak.

The TV revival nobody expected. By the late 1950s, the Stooges’ film careers were essentially over. Then Columbia licensed the old shorts to television, and an entirely new generation discovered them. By 1960 the Stooges were bigger stars than they had ever been — on a medium that didn’t exist when most of the films were made. A lesson in the long tail of content, if ever there was one.