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How respected and revered was that genius of cinema, Charlie Chaplin, “The Little Tramp”? In his review of “The Great Dictator,” which ran in the New York Times on Oct. 16, 1940, Bosley Crowther wrote: “No event in the history of the screen has ever been anticipated with more hopeful excitement than the premiere of this film… No picture ever made has promised more momentous consequences… Whatever fate it was that decreed Adolph Hitler should look like Charlie Chaplin must have ordained this opportunity, for the caricature of the former is devastating.”

It’s doubtful that Crowther — or any other respected critic of the day — knew that the Three Stooges had beaten Chaplin to the Hitler punch. Some nine months before the debut of “The Great Dictator,” in which Chaplin portrayed Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomania, Moe Howard appeared as Moe Hailstone, dictator of Moronica, in the short “You Nazty Spy!,” a slap in the face, poke in the eyes and punch in the stomach of the Third Reich that cast Larry Fine as the minister of propaganda and Curly Howard as as Gallstone, a field marshal with a resemblance to Mussolini. ”A parasite — that’s for me!” cackles Gallstone, a former paperhanger happy to live off the people.

“You Nazty Spy!” and its semi-sequel, “I’ll Never Heil Again” (1941), are among the 23 short films collected on the two-disc set “The Three Stooges Collection, Volume Three: 1940-1942,” the latest in the definitive series of chronological Stooges sets being released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. (In other words, 66 Stooges shorts down; 124 — including another 31 with Curly — to go!)

The sets apparently are selling very well: “The Three Stooges Collection, Volume Two: 1937-1939″ appeared in May, seven months after Volume One (1934-36). But only three months separated Volume Two and Volume Three (which was released Aug. 26); a fourth volume is scheduled for Oct. 7.

Volume Three might have been subtitled “The Stooges Go Global” (or, “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze,” to cite the title of a 1963 feature). The shorts collected here relocate Moe, Larry and Curly to not just Moronica but to the island of “Rhum Boogie” (“Some More of Samoa”); “Cucaracha, Mexico” (“Cookoo Cavaliers”); ”anciet Erysipelas” (“Matri-Phony”); and “Vulgaria” (“Dutiful But Dumb”), where Curly engages in an epic battle of wits with the oyster in his bowl of stew. At least twice, the trio travels out West. In “Cactus Makes Perfect,” Curly lands on a cactus; Moe pulls the spines from his pal’s posterior with some sort of pliers, but Larry simply trims them with scissors. “Hey, you’re leaving the ends in,” growls Moe. Explains Larry, pleased with his cleverness: “Well, they don’t show!”

These shorts find Moe, Larry and Curly operating at the height of their art, if it’s not too highfalutin to describe their slapstick humor as “art,” and I would argue that it’s not. Curly is such a familiar figure that some Stooges fans now prefer his eventual replacement, the less celebrated Shemp; but watch any of these films (such as “Three Smart Saps,” in which Curly is hit with SEVEN successive shoes in the face), and you’re likely to be astonished at his agility, his nonstop inventiveness, his elastic face, his gracefulness as he slides backwards in a proto-Moonwalk, one leg pumping up and down at the knee in a sort of tomahawk chop.

These shorts also begin to up the violence ante to grotesque levels. In “An Ache in Every Stake,” Moe applies a pair of ice tongs to Curly in about the same way psychopathic killer Michael Gough applied them on a victim in “Horrors of the Black Museum” (1961). In the nerve-wracking “Sock-a-Bye Baby” (the Stooges as babysitters!), Moe grabs Larry by the nose and Curly by the ear with a pair of scissors. In a painful-looking bit in “Matri-Phony,” Moe jams a sculpted clay finger into Curly’s ear. Whatever the mayhem, the shorts on these discs look great; in fact, several of the films on Volume Three (as well as Volume Two) were photographed by Lucien Ballard, who later achieved fame as the cinematographer on such features as “True Grit” and “The Wild Bunch.”

Many of Volume Three’s shorts add satire to the slapstick. In the absurdist “So Long Mr. Chumps” (1941), the Stooges are charged with finding an honest man, an impossible task that causes Moe to moan: “Maybe all the honest men are in jail.” The same year’s “All the World’s a Stooge” reveals that rich people were collecting needy children long before Madonna and Angelina Jolie. In this short, Howard, Fine and Howard are disguised as grotesquely oversized tykes, to serve as props for a society matron eager to show her friends that she’s adopted “a little waif from the war-torn battlefields of, of, uh, somewhere…” Says the matron to her husband, explaining her sudden interest in orphans: “Everybody’s doing it, dear. It’s really quite the thing socially.”

Written by Clyde Bruckman, “In the Sweet Pie and Pie” casts the Stooges as wrongly convicted murderers, awaiting execution on what a radio announcer describes as “a beautiful day for a hanging” as he brings his listeners “a jerk-by-jerk description of the triple hanging of the Mushroom Murder Mob.” When the ropes break, the Stooges are freed, and they find themselves in high society. “Are you familiar with the Great Wall of China?” snooty Symona Boniface (the Margaret Dumont of Stoogedom) asks Curly, who replies: “No, but I know a big fence in Chicago.”

Of course, the Nazi-themed shorts are the most pointedly satirical. “You Nazty Spy!,” especially, has lost none of its relevance. Directed by Jules White, the head of the Columbia shorts department, and scripted by Bruckman and Felix Adler, the film finds a trio of munitions manufacturers (named Ixnay, Onay and Amscray) plotting to oust the popular monarch of Moronica and install a dictatorship because, as Ixnay says, ”There’s no money in peace!” Adds Onay: “We must find someone who is stupid enough to do what we tell him.” Enter the Stooges — in particular, Moe, who actually is a much closer comedy ringer for Hitler than Chaplin was, especially when he musses his hair, rubs a small piece of black tape below his nose and begins ranting in nonsense faux German. “Peace, we want peace!” the Stooges hypocritically chant in unison at a “peace” conference, where they assault the other delegates with golf clubs. They also order an old man into “a concentrated camp,” flirt with a sexy spay named Mattie Herring (Memphis Film Festival guest Lorna Gray), and show a suspicion for education that remains alive and well in the American electorate today. “What do you mean by reading a book?” Moe asks Curly. “Suppose you learn something. Loyal Moronicans shouldn’t read.” Later, Moe orders a blitzkrieg; responds Curly: “Oh goody, I just love blintzes, especially with sour krieg!” For his trouble, Curly gets a blitzkrieg bop on the head.

The national slogan “Moronica for Morons!” morphs into “Moronica Uber Alles” for the sequel, “I’ll Never Heil Again” (also from White, Adler and Bruckman), which begins with this threatening disclaimer: “The characters in this picture are all fictitious. Anyone resembling them is better off dead.”

The short was released on the Fourth of July, 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, but “I’ll Never Heil Again” makes it clear that the military threat of Hitler was on everybody’s mind. Reports Field Marshal Curly: “We bombed 56 hospitals, 85 schools, 42 kindergartens, four cemeteries, and other vital military objects.” Later, at a dinner attended by a Japanese representative, a Stalin lookalike and a Mussolini stand-in called “Chiselini,” the Stooges make their expansionist intentions clear with a series of food puns. ”Our first move is to kick the stuffing out of Turkey,” Moe says, reaching for the bird in the center of the table. “I’ll wipe out Greece,” adds Larry, using a piece of bread to mop up the serving platter. In a bit clearly borrowed from Chaplin’s famous dance with a balloon of the Earth in “The Great Dictator,” the Stooges play football with a globe of the world; like Chaplin, they accidentally destroy it. (Today your laughs, tomorrow the world.)

These “Nazi” shorts are the only films in which the Stooges aren’t sympathetic characters; as such, they meet cartoonishly grisly fates. “You Nazty Spy!” ends with the boys devoured by lions; at the finish of “I’ll Never Heil Again,” their heads are mounted on a wall, like trophies in the Barry Brooks collection at the old Memphis Pink Palace — or in Count Zaroff’s castle in “The Most Dangerous Game.” Moe, Larry and Curly braved many a haunted house and battled their share of mad doctors, but this may be the only shot in a Stooges short that seems more appropriate for a horror movie than a comedy.

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