Rancher Rusty Williams is away at agricultural college and leaves his spread in the hands of his older cousin Shorty. Shorty wants to do more than run a ranch, however -- he wants to prospect for gold, but he has no money. He recruits a pair of partners in the guise of two runaway vagrants and a pair of backers in two stranded singers. But then Rusty shows up, and his four somewhat bumbling hired hands manage to compound Larry and Curly's deep ineptitude, and Rusty wants them all out of his hair.

Three inept firemen try to avoid being fired by their increasingly exasperated chief.

Harold Hall, an accident-prone young man with little or no acting ability, desperately wants to be in pictures. After a mix-up with his application photograph, he gets an offer to have a screen-test and goes off to Hollywood. At the studio, he does everything wrong and causes all sorts of trouble, but he catches the fancy of a beautiful actress. Eventually, the studio owner recognizes him as a comic genius.