He was new and unique when he first came on the scene. We forget (or weren’t around) when that happened, and it was a lot funnier then. Not everything ages well, including comedy routines.
I feel somewhat the same way about Steve Allen. In his prime, he was the hippest thing around and had a funny ad lib for everything. He was hailed as an innovator in many ways. Looking back, 30 years later, it’s not so new and not so funny. Comedy matures and may leave some behind.
Steve Allen never failed to make me laugh. The last time I was able to enjoy his humor was back in the late '80s, when he had a syndicated radio show in the evening. I was working my way through grad school at the time delivering pizzas, and I never failed to have his show on while I was driving.
I think all of Dean and Jerry’s movies are available for free on-line at one site or another. They all include bits from their nightclub act, though of course they would be much funnier in a club packed with tipsy people and full of cigarette smoke at one in the morning.
I watched the very low-budget At War with the Army for the first time not long ago on late night TV. It may have been a big hit with filmgoers back in 1950, but I honestly did not laugh once. Neither Jerry in drag nor the bits from L&M’s nightclub act tickled my funnybone at all.
There are some clips from The Colgate Comedy Hour on YouTube. In one, Dean is trying to do a number and Jerry is running like a maniac through the studio; at one point, he jumps onto Dean’s back and hangs on like a Mongoloid, and you can tell that Dean is ready to kill him. If my partner in comedy upstaged me like that, I would have been ready too.
Like most who grew up with his movies, I moved on with the advent of comedians like Cosby in the 60s. But we eagerly awaited the newest Lewis film when I was a kid. As with The Stooges, boys liked the films more than girls did, probably because it was guys acting out like we really couldn’t do ourselves. His wackier films are stale now (but so are most comedies from that era), and I wouldn’t cross the street to see him perform now. But the guy created a niche and exploited it successfully, and he really was talented in other aspects, as was pointed out by Bo.
It’s really weird to see Jerry Lewis mocked by people who made Adam Sandler the world’s top comedian.
Lewis’s schtick was being basically an overgrown child. It worked OK with Dean Martin, but on his own, he never knew how to dial it back.
Gerald Mast wrote a wonderful book on screen comedy called The Comic Mind and his analysis on Lewis was very good. Lewis’s main fault was that his style was usually a series of unconnected jokes that said nothing and there was no characterization at all in the movie – not even caricature. It was worse that Lewis often directed himself, so he let himself do whatever he wanted.
Andrew Sarris did an analysis of Lewis in his The American Cinema with some good points:
[ul]
[li]Lewis tried to hard to be clever, but he wasn’t clever enough to bring it off.[/li][li]Despite his labored attempts at sophisticated filmmaker, Lewis’s appeal was priarily to audiences that didn’t want sophisticated comedy.[/li][li]Lewis was a poor filmmaker with little attention to detail, especially in the scenes leading to the setpieces.[/li][li]In general, Lewis had nothing to say, and when he tried to include a message, it came off as banal and sentimental.[/li][li]He was not able to put together a successful comedy from start to finish. There were funny scenes, but plenty of duds.[/li][/ul]
I do think The Nutty Professor succeeds as a comedy. Sarris said it was one of his best because it recreated what made Martin and Lewis work: the tension between the two.* Most other comedy teams were teams. Martin and Lewis were antagonists.
But Lewis was never critically well regarded when he was making films, and by the 70s, his popularity had faded away.
*Note that though people think Buddy Love was a parody of Martin, it looks more like a parody of Frank Sinatra. Lewis himself has said that the character was actually based upon his own dark side.
that’s Mister Lewis to all of you.
Except in France, where Cahiers du Cinéma regularly put his self-directed films in their Annual Best Film lists, as chosen by their writers who were critics and sometimes filmmakers themselves.
I would just add that Lewis was not all about falling down - there was a major psychological component to his humor. He did pathos very well, and he excelled at communicating uncomfortable emotional states such as anxiety and humiliation.
My parents loved him, particularly when he was with Dean Martin.
Since I’m the OP, i’ll address this.
I have never thought of Adam Sandler as anything but a toilet-humer, potty mouth comedian. He has a few moments in his career, such as the holiday songs he’s come up with for holidays that don’t have songs, SNL’s “opera man” and one movie, “Happy Gilmore”. In many ways, he is like Lewis without the faces. He uses vocal inflections instead. He didn’t do a bad job in Reign on Me, either, but I doubt he will make many movies where he is not acting like a child in an adult’s body. And he has his own streak of arrogance, ruining a classic movie like “The Longest Yard” by remaking it himself because he wanted to.
Sandler is a one trick pony, and that trick has kong been played out.
Now that we have addressed that issue, let’s get back to Jerry Lewis.
For the folks that like him, are you all over 60? 50? I’m not sure what the cut-off age is for him, and I’m sure there are people that like him that are younger, but I can’t imagine liking him if you didn’t grow up with him and/or see him in his heyday.
I think most of us also understand that tastes change, and comedy does as well. So, I have no doubt at one time, he was popular because people liked him. But his comedic style has been outdated for 40-50 years now. So, I don’t understand his staying power.
Seeing his act on the documentary showed an audience that was almost exclusively retirement age, with a smattering of 40 and 50 year olds here and there.
I dislike Adam Sandler too.
45, I only ever got to see his movies on TV.
Gen X; discovered him when I was in college. Previously I knew him mainly for his Telethon.
I’m right at the cut-off age of 60, and I do recognize Jerry Lewis as a pioneer in many respects. Tastes do change, but Lewis’ wacky, improvised stand-up routines with Dean inspired countless imitators (Allen and Rossi, Marshall and Noonan etc.) and opened up the boundaries of stand-up which we can see in the early stand up of Robin Williams and Jim Carrey, for example. I am much more critical of Williams, for example, because he’s standing on Lewis’ shoulders (as well as Jonathan Winters’)
His solo work was indeed very creative, and funny, at times, but he was able to get absolute control over his solo movies, and it’s to the detriment of his works. But we see a similar evolution with Eddie Murphy, who was so excellent in *Trading Places, 48 Hours *and Beverly Hills Cop, but then becoming such a big star, he no longer had to take direction.
Jerry Lewis was just too smart for his own good. A previous poster, mentioned his innovative use of video, being the first to view the scenes, atop the camera, as they were being shot. And his movie The Ladies’ Man is a magnificent failure… in which he built a set that was, in essence, a 3-story doll-house, to show multiple rooms in a women’s boarding house, and then have a camera on a crane to maneuver from room to room. I’ve watched it multiple times, and I’m always amazed.
Lewis made many performers possible that I’ve enjoyed for many years, from Albert Brooks to Steve Martin to Don Rickles to Sam Kinison. Vive le Jerry!
I am old enough to remember watching most of Jerry Lewis’ films in the theater - as a little kid. I think that was his target market - mostly kids from about 7 to 14 or so who thought he was funny and laughed at the stupidity. Those Saturday matinees were chock full of kids my age.
However, once I was older than 14, I no longer found him funny.
I don’t see his films as any better or any worse than other films targeted to younger age groups. I don’t want to see Muppet films, I don’t care to see Smurf films, not interested in the vast majority of films that are designed to entertain little kids. Still, his films were a hit with his target group of kids (I think it is safe to say young boys who probably found him funnier than young girls back then).
Some of you might have heard of Soupy Sales - a comedian who was often compared to Jerry Lewis and was also popular with (young) kids on television back in the day…and I think you could even say that Pee Wee Herman was an offshoot of Soupy Sales. There is always a market for silly slapstick humor with kids.
As mentioned above, The King Of Comedy was a great movie and I gave Jerry Lewis new respect after watching that film - but my personal opinion is that his comedies didn’t hold up once you reached a certain age.
A personal anecdote…the first commercial movie I ever saw without my parents present was a mediocre Lewis/Martin flick, Hollywood or Bust. Pretty ordinary, even for the time, but I had to struggle with my mother to let me go see it with a schoolmate friend (the schoolmate didn’t see what the fuss was all about; it was only a movie fer chrissakes.) It wasn’t recommended by Parents Magazine, :rolleyes: it didn’t star anyone my mother ever heard about (“Jerry who?”), it wasn’t about a horse, dog or Bambi, :dubious: and the decadent word “Hollywood” in the title (not to mention the possible pun on “bust”) was a major red flag to a Fundamentalist Christian parent. :eek:
After seeing it, I was under no illusion that it was great entertainment, but it was fun, and I went to many movies with friends after, like once a week at the local cinema.
Of course, I had to fire my mother first, and we did have fights.
It was the start of my moral decline into pop culture depravity, or at least my parents thought so. Jerry Lewis, I salute you.
I’m 47. I remember our UHF station would occasionally do Jerry Lewis week along with Ape, Godzilla, Dracula etc weeks. I recall enjoying Visit to a Small Planet, Cinderfella and the one where several people (all played by Lewis) were in the running to adopt or take in a child and others. I enjoyed them as a kid.
I haven’t gone back and revisited any of them so far. Will they age badly? Perhaps. Or maybe they’ll bring back some nostalgic memories and I’ll enjoy them on a different level.
He does seem like quite the jerk in real life and has made some comments (ie. women and comedy) that soured me on him, so I doubt I’ll be seeking out any of his work any tome soon.
Yes, but Sarris points out:
[ul]
[li]Lewis’s lack of verbal sophistication is missed by critics who don’t speak English.[/li][li]French critics loved Lewis because his persona played into their stereotypes of stupid and crass Americans. [/li][li]French critics just lurrrved Lewis, so didn’t care that he wasn’t funny. (Mast pointed out that one of them (he didn’t give a name) looked so much like Lewis himself that it verged on narcissism.)[/li][/ul]
At this point, I think most of the people who voted for Lewis in those days are probably wishing they had their votes back. Other than The Nutty Professor, none of his films hold up. Looking at IMDB ratings, all his self-directed films seemed to be rated at about 6.3 (The Nutty Professor hits 6.7).
The best thing about the French criticism is that they at least made an attempt to differentiate between those he directed himself, those directed by Frank Tashlin, and those done by other directors.
And, ultimately, even The Nutty Professor falls short. Nowadays, people are more likely to remember the Eddie Murphy remake, and it never appears on anyone’s "best comedy"list.
I had a roommate in college, a pre-med student, born about 1960, who adored Jerry Lewis. He was normally a pretty studious guy, but the week the local station ran the Jerry Lewis film fest, he was glued to the TV every afternoon, splitting his sides at The Disorderly Orderly and The Errand Boy.
I didn’t get it at all. But, I never liked slapstick or physical comedy.
Here you have it: I love Jerry Lewis. Love. Even when he was on steroids. He’s my guy. I used to love watching the telethon and attended it once. You never knew what Jerry was going to do. If he came into the audience with a basket for donations to MDA and someone didn’t cough up the money, he would yell at that guy. And he would do things that were hysterical: like singing with an all male glee club and finding the guy who had his hair combed from way in the back of his head and bringing it all to his eyebrows like bangs. Jerry would make faces at the guy and then stick his tongue in the guy’s ear. A few years ago he ended the show by saying to the female producer, “It’s like working with Eva Braun. She has a fat ass with a swastika on it.” No one laughed. You could hear a pin drop. But his wife and daughter laughed. He said that’s all he cared about.
That’s why I love Jerry. We even have the same IQ: 146.
jigsaw
It seems to me Andrew Sarris is making a lot of presumptions. Let’s look at what the French critics actually said about Lewis. Here are two quotes (from translations):
“Jerry Lewis, along with [Arthur] Penn, is the only auteur to have emerged in the American cinema in the last five years. The reason in my view does not lie in some consideration of a thematic order, or in some notion of obsessional characterization. It would be much more accurate to say that it’s because he has created new forms.”
-Claude Ollier, 1965
“Lewis is the only one in Hollywood doing something different… the only one who’s making courageous films… He’s been able to do it because of his personal genius.”
-Jean-Luc Godard, 1967
The French critics also loved Frank Tashlin, by the way.