People must have been desperate for any kind of entertainment in the early 1950s, or maybe it was because television was so new, but the studio audience was constantly going into hysterics even though this episode is nothing but recycled--not to mention poorly done--vaudeville gags, mistimed slapstick and forced and cringe-inducing "jokes" that aren't even remotely funny (example: Moe gets a saw and cuts a cheap piece of painted backdrop scenery, saying "That's the worst scene I ever saw". Wynn points to the saw and says, "That's the worst saw I ever seen"). The cheap and shoddy sets would embarrass Ed Wood and the "writing"--for lack of a better word--wouldn't pass muster in an elementary-school play. The whole thing reminded me of a really bad public-access cable show. I understand that this was live TV and there's always the possibility that things could go wrong, but after watching this for a few minutes I began to wonder if they ever even rehearsed the show before it aired. Wynn constantly stumbles over or even forgets his lines and seems to be overwhelmed by what's going on around him, and compounds that by, for some reason, constantly trying to upstage The Three Stooges. It gets annoying after a while, then frustrating. Singer Helen Forrest puts in an appearance, and the Stooges try to keep things moving and actually have a few good moments despite Wynn's constant fluttering around the stage and trying to talk over them, but overall this is a very poor example of early television. I was never a very big Ed Wynn fan, but even if I was I wouldn't be able to finish watching this mess--which, in fact, I wasn't.
It's not that I have anything against early television--I was a kid when a lot of these shows originally aired, and I remember with great fondness such "Golden Age of Television" shows as "The Honeymooners", "Your Show of Shows", "Studio One", even "The Abbott and Costello Show". Unfortunately, this episode is about as far outside the "Golden Age" as it's possible to get. Maybe some of the later episodes were better than this one. I hope so, because it would be difficult--if not impossible--for them to be worse.