Jerry Lewis

Cafe Society
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I just saw a documentary on Jerry Lewis, who at the time of the show was 85. I think it was around 2009, because he was a Cannes promoting his new movie. I have to admit, he looked pretty good, and he seems to have boundless energy. Almost as if he is on speed on a 24/7 basis. I hope to have half his energy at 85.

However…

This is the first time I’ve seen Lewis in years, and also the first time I can remember seeing him outside of the MDA marathon or an old movie. And as an adult, I was willing to watch this show with an open mind.

I still don’t get his appeal.

They had a list of comedian after comedian singing his praises, and referring to him in the most glowing terms. One called him the Beatles of the comedy world.

Really?

I do get that i grew up after his heyday, but he reminds me of the original Robin Williams. His whole routine is nothing more than sad, old jokes followed by either a smattering of uncomfortable laughter followed immediately by a weird face, or a bit more laughter, followed by a weird face.

In every clip they showed of his comedy “genius”, he makes a face. Ok, he makes funny faces. He has some great skit ideas. I can see it being funny the first time you see it if you like that type of humor… However, after 45 seconds of the typewriter routine, I had enough. It wasn’t funny. Clever, sure. Original, yes. But uproariously funny? No. Not even close to making me smile. And yet, one comedian (it might have been Carol Burnett or Carl Reiner, I’m not sure) said they could watch the typewriter routine on a repeating loop. Maybe if they were high, or in a coma. But they cannot honestly mean what they say.

I think this could be used to drive enemy combatants crazy, similar, but maybe more effective than water-boarding.

So, does anyone out here truly love Jerry Lewis? Can’t get enough of him? I can’t wrap my head around it. Jim Carey makes great faces, and even he has an act that goes beyond the faces. Robin Williams, as i mentioned earlier, does similar facial gyrations when a joke bombs, and he uses it to often bail himself out of dead silence. But he still has an act that doesn’t always include making a face as part of the routine. Both of these guys also can act straight in a movie and pull it off. Lewis can’t. Even when being interviewed, he makes faces constantly. It is enough to make me wonder if he just suffers from muscle spasms and ticks, or if it’s all he has left in the tank. Or worse, it’s all he knows how to do.

His jokes are often on the sexual side, which can be funny once or twice, but not every time he makes a comment. He often acts like a dirty old man on stage, but one who gets a laugh by scrunching up his face and/or crossing his eyes. If you had a neighbor or twisted uncle who acted like Lewis, you would kick him out of your house the first time he said one of his one-liner sexual comments to your wife, and the second time, you’d deck him.

30 minutes into the show, I was looking for the remote. I love the stories, and the great history of show business that he is a part of. But his appeal and his success remain largely a mystery.

Even when he was with Dean Martin, I could not understand how Martin could play the straight man to Lewis’ high pitched squeals, goofy face, tongue wagging moments. I know Dean was making great money with Lewis, but i would have never made it in that partnership as long as he did.

My only memory of him in a movie that i enjoyed was when he did a cameo in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, when he swerved his car and ran over Culpeppers’s hat. And even THAT couldn’t be pulled off without the Jerry Lewis facial contortion*.

Ugh.

That 15 second clip is all you need to see to get the gist of every one of his comedy routines.

Also, he surely can’t need the money, can he? What is keeping him going? Is he one of these emotionally broken people that needs constant attention and affirmation that he is funny? Or is he afraid that once he stops, he’s going to die? I can’t imagine anyone under the age of 65 or 70 every paying to see him perform in Las Vegas, or where ever else he shows up.

So share your opinions on Lewis, dopers. Tell us if you love him, hate him, or somewhere in between. And if you feel like it, tell us why.

I know I am not an expert on comedy, but I do know what makes me laugh and what makes me shake my head. And i do think i like a fairly wide range of comedy genres… I like slapstick as much as anyone, and visual humor is great when done right. Lewis has been making my head shake for decades now.
*patent pending

2

Jerry Lewis turned 85 in 2011. The last photo I’ve seen of him was a few years ago, and he looked awfully bloated and swelled up, the result, I read, of steroids he was taking for some condition. Dunno what he looks like nowadays.

I have never liked Jerry Lewis. He’s as funny as a heart attack. His humor just does not appeal to me in the slightest. Worse, growing up I had a friend who bore a striking physical similarity to the young, thin Jerry Lewis and so was always trying to emulate Lewis’ zaniness. This was never a very close friend, needless to say.

3

Have to agree. I’m old enough to have watched him in movies, on tv, and heard his records.

There’s a place for zany. I like zany. I love the Animaniacs. I love the old Daffy Duck (too hoo too hoo!) I even kinda like the Three Stooges. (I don’t love 'em, but I can go with 'em.)

But Jerry Lewis never managed to hit the spot.

(Robin Williams is hit-and-miss. Sometimes, I love him, but other times, he has the same uncomfortable, self-aware, awkward vibe. But Jerry Lewis always does.)

Still, credit for fundraising for MD.

4

I would like to add to my request (again, if you feel like it, it’s not a requirement for participation in the thread) if you know of anyone who likes Jerry lewis, even if you don’t.

I do not know a sole who likes Lewis, and this includes all of my older relatives who I have asked this question to.

I also have neighbors in their 70’s, and they both gave the thumbs down to Jerry and his comedy.

Nobody gets him as far as I’ve ever known. I know we only have two responses thusfar in this thread, but I am interested in seeing where this goes, if anywhere. I can see this thread sinking quickly, as many young people don’t have a clue of the type of comedian he was, and may not even know him at all if he has stopped doing the MDA telethons (is he still doing these or not? I remember the last time i saw him he was “moon-faced”, probably the same thing Siam Sam was referring to.)

5

I was never crazy about him but I did and do see his early work as pretty good physical comedy … not on par with those of the silents before him, like Buster Keaton, but of the tradition. And did the uncomfortable as comedy pretty well pretty early on.

But no he was not my thing either.

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Going to slide this over to CS.

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Back in the day, when the world and he were much younger, when he made movies like Visit To A Small Planet and Cinderfella (both 1960), it was good juvenile slapstick humor, well suitable for a juvenile audience (me at the time, for example).

As he and I and the world all grew older, that didn’t work so well any more. But it’s the style he’s always seemed to have had. So, I guess adults who were still into juvenile slapstick humor continued to glom onto his schtick. For other viewers, he became meh ever since.

So, he was great, in the day, for the younger audience of the day.

9

(Raises hand).

I’ve only seen very little of his schtick, but I enjoyed what I saw. The beyond manicness.

Edit: Also, The Day the Clown Cried.
I don’t understand the hatred that just the very concept evokes. The concept is solid as hell. The absurdness, the pathos. Now I understand that it supposedly wasn’t done well, but I think the concept is solid.

10

In the documentary I watched, Lewis touches on this French love thing.

He claims in the show that his popularity is highest in Italy, and he goes through the countries he’s most popular in. All were in europe, the USA wasn’t in the top 6, and France was number 6.

Thr Netherlands was on the list, as was Germany. I can’t remmber the complete order, except for number one (italy) and six (france)

11

When I was about ten years old, I loved those Jerry Lewis movies and so did all my friends. I can’t stand that stuff now, but I did then.

12

Read Nick Tosches’ biography of Dean Martin, and you’ll learn a lot about his days together with Jerry. It’s no wonder they ended up hating each other the way they did.

My older brother was a big Jerry Lewis fan, and he usually had to drag me along with him to the old Saturday matinees when we were kids. I can remember Jerry as the crying clown and Dean and Jerry shooting up the closing credits to one movie while on horseback. But the only movies I have any real memories of are The Delicate Delinquent and Sad Sack, and I don’t think it’s just because I was very young at the time. I simply was not impressed with Jerry’s brand of madcap humor even at that age, and those two movies were (I think) much more toned down.

I tried watching The Big Mouth when I was 13 or 14, and even then I didn’t think it was very funny.

13

I never enjoyed him, but I do admire the way he seems to have handled the role of survivor vis-a-vis Dino. I haven’t read it, but his book was titled “Dino and Me: A Love Story”, and all I’ve heard of him on the subject of his old partner was respectful.

14

Jerry Lewis was my very first celebrity crush . . . back in the early 50s, when he looked like this. I loved seeing him in movies and TV, and to this less-than-ten-year-old the humor was awesome. I’m sure if I saw those today, I’d cringe along with everyone else. The crush lasted longer than his movies, but when I see his younger photos, the attraction’s still there.

15

The Bellboy is pure genius, and it’s all Lewis. He wrote it, he starred in it, he directed it and he produced it. And it totally fucking rocks.

I’m not a huge fan, but this movie and a handful of others (his 1960 trifecta, The Nutty Professor, etc.) I find funny as hell and very compelling films.

As an actor, I think he’s got serious A-grade talent. For me, The King Of Comedy proved that beyond any doubt.

And I think part of what so many people who do like his work find admirable is that Mr. Lewis is truly an auteur. He can handle every facet of film production and do it well, all at the same time. That isn’t easy, and his track record shows that he was not only able to do it, he was able to do it well: his films for both Paramount and Columbia throughout the 1960s were all very popular and profitable. Paramount, however, may have been less than thrilled with the contract they had signed with Mr. Lewis, which gave him 60% of the profits from his films.

If you look at his history as a director, he was quite innovative. In 1960 he started using video cameras and CCTV so he could review his performances immediately, rather than wait for the film to be developed and screened later. Soon after he began using videotape. Hell, if you don’t think he’s got much talent as a director, keep this in mind: he taught both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg how to make movies. That’s right, he did. Most people don’t know that Mr. Lewis taught at USC’s film school; the book compiled from his lectures was one of the standard film school textbooks for at least 2 decades.

And lastly, you have to understand that when Martin & Lewis started out, they were very different from the usual comedy acts. M&L didn’t really do skits, which is what was popular at the time. They didn’t have characters that they inhabited, other than themselves. And that was their act: two guys standing on stage talking to each other; they were a direct precedent to acts like the Smothers Brothers. Before the first year of their partnership was over, they went from making like $300 a week to making $30,000 a week at the Tropicana here in Las Vegas, so they must have been pretty popular and pretty well-recieved by audiences at the time.

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I pretty much have to echo what you said. Lewis himself that the prepared material he and Dean Martin did wasn’t that great (mainly old vaudeville and Borscht Belt jokes) but the seemingly improvised fourth-wall breaking stuff is what made them innovative. I’m not, incidentally, talking about their movies but rather they did on stage and on television. My father, who was a big fan of Martin and Lewis, said their movies only gave you hint of how funny they really were.

Of course, Lewis got a big head and let that bleed into his public persona. In many ways, his reputation never really recovered after his heavily-hyped talk/variety show on ABC bombed in 1963. People saw what an egomaniac he had become that conflicted with the lovable doofus he played in the movies. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his film career fell off after that debacle.

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Never liked him or his work. He is on my personal “huh, dint realize he was still alive” list.

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What Bo and NDP said - some of you are suffering from “backtime syndrome”, like my sister in law complaining that John Ford’s movies were “full of topics”: they became topics when everybody copied them.

I did like many of Lewis’ movies; not all, but many. Was it in Cinderfella that he pretty much seemed to be two different actors? Checks Seems to be. I can tell you it was the work that made me realize that “acting” is not just about remembering the words and saying them right, but a whole-body job.

19

A few decades back, when teaching stem-telemark step turns, all I had to say was “Do the Jerry Lewis knock-kneed walk with a spring in your step.”

I no longer use this analogy, for a lot of folks have no idea who Jerry Lewis is, let alone recall his knock-kneed walk.

Sorry Jerry – you’ve outlived your usefulness in ski instruction!

20

I find some of his movies very, very funny… and others, simply embarrassing. Sometime in the 90s, we saw him in Chicago in a stage production of Damn Yankees. He interrupted the wonderful “Those Were the Good Old Days” song by breaking into a stand-up comedian shtick, which I found very off-putting. Too full of himself to stick to the script, was the impact on me.