The film is composed of three acts, which are referred to as episodes (a reference to how the original Three Stooges short films were packaged for television by Columbia Pictures).
Act / Episode 1: More Orphan Than Not[edit]
In 1977, the children at the Sisters of Mercy Orphanage are playing soccer with an old soda can in the front yard. But then, Sister Mary-Mengele (Larry David), the meanest nun in the orphanage gets their attention by telling them to go inside and do their work. The kids sing "Everybody is Special", but she tells them to shut up and go to work. Later, Moe, Larry and Curly are dumped on the doorstep of the orphanage as babies. Ever since, the trio have wreaked havoc in the place, leaving the nuns who run it utterly terrified, especially Sister Mary-Mengele who has always hated the trio. Ten years later, in 1987, out of desperation, when a prospective couple comes to adopt, the exasperated nuns bring out the trio as being the only three available, eventually adding a fourth when another boy, Teddy, enters the picture. The couple, the Harters (Stephen Collins and Carly Craig), decides to pick Moe, but when he requests Larry and Curly to join him, he is dropped back off at the orphanage, and they choose Teddy instead.
25 years later in 2012, the trio (Chris Diamantopoulos, Sean Hayes and Will Sasso) are adults and are still living at the orphanage and working as janitors. Monsignor Ratliffe (Brian Doyle-Murray) arrives to give everyone an important message. After Monsignor Ratliffe tells Mother Superior (Jane Lynch) that the orphanage is going to close, she tells Sister Mary-Mengele to get the trio. Sister Mary-Mengele demands Mother Superior tell them who's responsible for the foreclosure of the orphanage, but Mother Superior tells her to just tell them what they need to hear. However, the three stooges injure Sister Mary-Mengele. They head to Mother Superior until they cause Monsignor Ratliffe to fall on top of the nuns. Monsignor Ratliffe gets attacked by Moe, Larry and Curly, who think that Monsignor Ratliffe was making out with the nuns. Monsignor Ratliffe is not going to adopt any of them either, as he is on official business. Curly says "Official business?! Why didn't you say so?" and they take off their blue worksuit revealing their shirts and shorts and present themselves to be adopted. When they are informed that the orphanage will be shutting down unless they can come up with $830,000 in 30 days, the trio volunteers to go out and try to raise the money somehow. Sister Rosemary (Jennifer Hudson) and the Stooges sing "This Little Light of Mine", but Sister Mary-Mengele tells them to shut up and tells them it is only an orphanage, not a revival. However, some of the nuns think that the trio will not be able to succeed because the only people they know are nuns and kids, but Mother Superior thinks otherwise.
Act / Episode 2: The Bananas Split[edit]
A subplot involves a woman named Lydia (SofÃ­a Vergara), who wants to kill her husband so she can be with her lover, Mac (Craig Bierko), and inherit her husband's considerable fortune. She offers to pay the trio the money they need to take care of the job. However, they botch the job and leave the supposed husband (actually Mac) in traction in the hospital. However, when they try to visit to finish the job, they are chased by the cops throughout the hospital and escape by jumping off the roof using a fire hose. They end up running into a now grown-up Teddy (Kirby Heyborne), who invites them to his anniversary party. It turns out that Lydia is Teddy's wife. Their next scheme for raising the money has them selling farm-raised salmon, with them scattering salmon on a golf range and watering them like produce. When the same cops from the hospital came to arrest them, the trio are chased off the golf course and hide in an old building (getting in by using Curly as a battering ram), where they have a slapstick fight. Larry and Curly then scold Moe for not accepting Ted's adoption; they could have used his adoptive parents' wealth to help save the orphanage. After deciding to split up, they leave Moe alone. Then it turns out that they were all on stage in front of an audition crew who select Moe to be the newest cast member of Jersey Shore as "Dyna-Moe".
Final Act / Episode 3: No Moe Mister Nice Guy[edit]
Larry and Curly are getting along well without Moe, but return to the orphanage, where they find out a girl named Murph is very ill, but has not been taken to the hospital because the orphanage has no medical insurance. Sister Mary-Mengele tells them that no one will insure the orphanage due to the trio's numerous accidents and injuries over the years, and the $830,000 is needed in order to cover medical bills that accumulated over the years. Sister Mary-Mengele blames the Stooges for causing the orphanage to close down. Larry and Curly later meet up with Ted's adopted father about what happened at his office. He confessed that Moe wanted him to go back for his friends to adopt them and he didn't want to so he gave Moe back and took Ted in his place. Then Larry &amp; Curly discovers a picture of Teddy and Mr. Harter with Lydia &amp; Mac and realize that Teddy is the husband Lydia wanted to murder. In addition to this, they feel guilty for rebuking Moe in not accepting the Harter's adoption and decides to go find him.
Meanwhile, Moe has been causing a lot of havoc on "Jersey Shore" by slapping the cast members around and not putting up with their spoiled antics. The cast go to the producer and tell him to kick Moe off of the show or they'll sue him. The producer then fills them in on the show is all about ratings...NOT them. Larry and Curly finally go to the set of Jersey Shore to reunite with Moe, and they all head to the anniversary party where they appear to thwart the murder plot, only to get chased by the angry Lydia and Mac after they accidentally ruin the wedding cake while saving a little girl's life. They discover that Mr. Harter was the real mastermind and Lydia was working for him. He married into the money and was incensed to find out the money was left to Teddy and not him when Teddy's mother died years earlier. They are taken for a ride, but the car winds up in the water when Curly's pet rat distracts them; then, they all escape when Curly passes gas, and they light it with "waterproof, strike-anywhere matches" they had, causing enough of an explosion to blow out the windows.
Once they are back on land, Mr. Harter, Lydia and Mac are arrested, and Teddy thanks the trio for saving him. When they request the $830K, he turns them down, stating he refuses to help the same orphanage that gave him up to a father that almost tried to kill him, among other things over the years.
A couple months later, the trio return to the now-condemned and abandoned orphanage, but as they start crying for feeling like failures, they hear kids laughing, swimming, and playing. When they investigate, they find out a whole brand new orphanage was built next door, complete with a swimming pool, a basketball court and a tennis court.
They soon learn that the money came from the Jersey Shore's producers who consider this as an advance payment in relation to a new reality show, Nuns vs. Nitwits, in which the entire trio will be part of. Murph is revealed to be perfectly fine, her illness due to too much iron in the water (which Larry had always suspected, yet no one listened to him), and that she, along with her brothers Peezer and Weezer (the latter thought to have been lost forever to a foster home), will be adopted by Teddy and his new fiancee, Ling (Emy Coligado). In the end, after causing one more incident (namely, Curly accidentally knocking Sister Mary-Mengele into the pool with a folded-up diving board as she says "I'm gonna mash your heads like potatoes!!"), the trio run away and bounce off trampolines out of the orphanage onto mules, where they ride away from the orphanage, off into the distance.
Post-script epilogue[edit]
An epilogue consists of two actors (Antonio SabÃ to, Jr. and Justin Lopez) playing Bobby and Peter Farrelly, explaining that the stunts were all done by professionals, showing the foam rubber props used in the film for the trio to hit one another, demonstrating the fake eye-poke trick (to the eyebrows), and advising children not to try any of the stunts at home.
During the end credits, a music video plays showing the Stooges and Sister Rosemary performing "It's a Shame", originally recorded by The Spinners in 1970, interspersed with excerpts from deleted scenes and a couple of brief outtakes. Though credited to "The Spinners and The Three Stooges", Hudson's own distinctive vocals can also be heard.
Who are Murph's brothers?
Peezer and Weezer