The Stooge

Bill Miller is a singer going nowhere on Broadway. His handlers give him an idea: plant a man in the audience to heckle him and take the jokes. Ted Rogers is hired for it, and within a short time the audience likes Ted better than Bill. Bill's girlfriend and his friends tell him to make Ted an equal partner, and Bill cannot bring himself to do it. It is one of the films Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made together and generally taken as the one closest to their actual relationship. Norman Taurog directs. There is plenty of comedy and something hard underneath it: if one man's success reads as an insult to the other, how long can that partnership last. Martin's songs are very good too.