With that setup, I recently caught (for I believe the first time) Tassles in the Air in which, owing to both the Stooges' incompetence and a bit of coincidence, the trio of basic tradesmen are mistaken for a highly sought-after interior decorator. The expected chaos ensues and the short ends with the Stooges having full paint buckets dropped on their heads. But of note for my purposes here is the opening shot, in which actor Bud Jamison is seen relaxing while reading the comics portion of the newspaper...
He's shown reading the funnies specifically to set the character up as Jiggs-type of person. That is, he's wealthy but only very newly so and he still enjoys the pleasures of his working class roots. Note also that he's got his shoes off and his feet kicked up. That, and reading the comics, are all signs that he's not a "real" artistocrat and when his wife enters, her intention to hire a famous interior designer becomes one born more of making appearances than an actual interest in aesthetics.
But, hey, that's a reasonably clear shot of the back side of that newspaper! Can we figure out what he's reading?
As it turns out, yes, pretty easily in fact. Because of those aforementioned obsessiveness of some Stooges fans, we know this particular short was filmed between November 26–30, 1937. So the newspaper is likely from around that time. Secondly, a good portion of the comic's title header is visible. The letters "POLEON" are pretty legible. And what do you know? There was a comic called Napoleon and Uncle Elby that ran from 1932-1957! It's also pretty clear the comic takes up at least half the page, so we're talking about a Sunday strip most likely. So, in theory, all we have to do is look at the Napoleon Sunday strips from November 1937!
And, hey, we're in luck again! "Jon the Scanner" has uploaded scans of all the Sunday strips for 1935-1937 to Comic Book Plus! Working backwards from the last strip, we soon come across one that has a header image that looks strikingly like what we see in the Stooges short. The pipe and deerstalker profiles are pretty unmistakable!
You can see the strip is clearly dated October 31, 1937 so the timing mostly lines up as well. (Although, if filming started on November 26, I don't know why they'd be using a newspaper that's nearly a month old at that point. I would normally have expected one from November 21 or maybe 14. Although maybe using a slightly older one meant the paper was more supple and less likely to make noise picked up by the studio mics?)
Question asked and answered!
I'll note, too, since Napoleon and Uncle Elby isn't especially well-known these days, the strip was created by Clifford McBride in 1932, originally just titled Napoleon. McBride had actually introduced the characters as sporadic regulars in his previous strip Clifford McBride's Pantomime Comic before spinning them off into their own feature. The Uncle Elby character was in fact there at the start but only given title billing after the first year. The strip has basically the same setup as Marmaduke -- a large ungainly dog doing doggish things much to the consternation of his owner -- although McBride often kept his strip wordless, leaving the actions to stand on their own. McBride continued the strip until his death in 1950 (or '51 -- I've seen conflicting dates) at which time his wife, Margot Fischer McBride, picked up writing the strip while hiring at various points artists Roger Armstrong, Joseph Messerli, and Ed Nofziger to illustrate it. The Sunday strip ended in 1955 and the daily one in 1960.
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