The Tooth Will Out (1951) Spoiler-Free Summary – What It's About

In the chaotic world of The Tooth Will Out, Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Shemp Howard navigate a life where steady employment is fleeting and disaster is always just around the corner. After a streak of bad luck involving broken dishes and angry employers, the trio finds themselves dodging cleavers and seeking sanctuary in the unlikeliest of havens—a dental office. Desperate for a new direction and a place to hide, they decide to swap their lives of manual labor for the white coats of dentistry, embarking on a career change that seems destined for trouble from the very start.

Training under the guidance of Dr. Keefer, the Stooges attempt to absorb the intricacies of oral hygiene with varying degrees of success. Their journey eventually takes them far from the city's chaos to a quiet western town, where they hope to establish a frontier practice free from the ghosts of jobs past. The frontier setting promises a fresh start and a forgiving audience, yet the transition does little to mitigate their inherent propensity for slapstick mishaps, creating an atmosphere where professional ambition constantly wars with natural incompetence.

As they hang their shingle and await their first customers, the mood shifts from hopeful to hilariously tense. The arrival of patients seeking relief brings their lack of training into sharp focus, particularly when Shemp’s reliance on questionable reading materials threatens to turn routine procedures into construction projects. With a town full of potential patients and a manual better suited for building birdhouses than pulling teeth, the stage is set for a comedic confrontation that tests the limits of their new profession.