Jerry Lewis
The King of Comedy
A spectre is haunting Comedy
— the spectre of Jerry
Lewis. All the Powers of Comedy
have entered into a holy
alliance to exorcise this
Jap-bashing, cripple-imitating
spectre whose hair requires a
visit every three months (or
3,000 miles) to the Bel-Air
Jiffy Lube. Whoopi Goldberg and
Louie Anderson, prop comic and
"monologist," the Upright
Citizens Brigade, and Kids in
the Hall all would like to
pretend Dino's better half never
existed. This only underscores
how deeply indebted the famously
jealous bastards really are to
the genius who, with turkey
trifectas like The Big Mouth (1967),
Which Way to the Front? (1970), and
Hardly Working (1980),
systematically deconstructed his
own reputation with films every
bit as disturbing, pretentious,
and unwatchable as anything by
Peter Greenaway, Todd Solondz,
or Norman Taurog.
Despite the general dissing of
Lewis as an embarrassing
anachronism, we are all Jerry's
Kids now. How else to explain
these seemingly unconnected
recent journeys to the har-har
of darkness: Jakob the Liar and
Life Is Beautiful, two
crying-on-the-inside clown
movies bathetically set during
the Holocaust, ride the rails
laid by Jerry's own avant-garde
attempt to go pffft! in der
Führer's face with the
famously unreleasable The Day the
Clown Cried. Adam Sandler, it's
rumored, has had his teeth
surgically altered to look more
like Jerry's gag choppers, not
realizing that Lewis' were only
a prop. And the one irresistible
force sufficient to budge the
immovable object that was Eddie
Murphy's career was a remake of
Lewis' own The Nutty Professor.
And yet, like biblical gagmeister
Saint Peter, they'd deny Jerry
three times and more. Hence, the
current issue of Vanity Fair
features a cover story about
Jerry-Come-Lately Jim Carrey,
whose frenetic spastications of
unleashed id, involuntary
rubber-faced contortions when in
proximity to even a Nintendo
Gameboy camera, and increasingly
public musings about wanting to
be both funny and serious are
unmistakably Lewisian in style
and substance. The profile even
begins with Carrey's anxiety
that he has "nothing to say,"
suggesting Jerry's own
magisterial turn in The Bellboy
(1960), in which the eponymous
hero doesn't speak until the end
of the film. But Lewis, both as
source and influence, is the
abusive father, the incestuous
mother, the dark, family secret
that dare not speak its name in
the piece, which instead focuses
on Carrey's respectable love
affair with Milos Forman and the
corpse of Andy Kaufman (himself
a Jerry by-product whose
post-mortem overexposure proves
the adage that there is no good
comic like a dead comic,
especially if you're friends
with Tony Danza).
The modern entertainment business
is made up of fleas living off
Lewis' not-quite-dead-yet
corpse; indeed, his presence and
influence are so dominating as
to have become invisible. If
it's out there, Jerry did it
first — however badly,
sadly, or madly.
An early dadaist in the straight
entertainment world, the
pre-Dino Lewis employed a
self-designed advertising
postcard featuring such phrases
as "Platter pantopatter!" and
"Naive Frank Sinatra
imaginational imagery," like a
man playing surrealist word
games with himself and losing.
His films regularly broke the
fourth wall, with the "real"
Jerry entering the action and
insisting that he was only
acting (often badly), even when
pitching cancer sticks (during
his disastrous early-'60s ABC
variety show, his cigarette
pitch involved holding up a pack
of L&M smokes and shrugging,
"Here it is. You wanna smoke it?
That's your business"). When
ersatz tough guys like Joe Pesci
and James Caan brag of mob
connections, they are not
impersonating Sinatra so much as
ripping off Cinderfella, who
helped usher in the age of Mob
Chic every bit as much as Ol'
Blue Eyes (Lewis performed a
similar trick for Jewish
consciousness as well). Indeed,
Jerry has always puffed up with
pride regarding his connections
to La Cosa Nostra, bragging that
goodfellas and goombahs galore
give generously to the Muscular
Dystrophy Association. Need we
point out that through his
yearly self-immolation for the
MDA, Jerry is the
Australopithecus africanus from
which all glory-hound,
"altruistic" stars ultimately
trace their ancestry?
He was an innovative technical
"genius"; in his own day as
daring and innovative as his
student — yes — George
Lucas. Le Jerk practically
created the prototype of the "I
can do it all" performer —
without Jerry, there would have
been no '70s Woody Allen, '80s
Emilio Estevez, or '90s Vincent
Gallo. He was the first
director, with the 1960
Bellboy, to shoot closed-circuit
video concurrent with the film
camera, so he could watch
real-time rushes on the set; for
his '50s tour, he built the
first "Bridges to
Babylon"–style runway across
the orchestra pit to the
audience, effectively allowing
the Rolling Stones and Metallica
to be hailed as visionaries for
doing the same thing 40 years
later and getting even fewer
laughs. Theremin fans — you
know who you are — remain
indebted to Jerry's famous scene
(1957) for the popularity of
that electronic bagpipe.
He made a TV version of The Jazz
Singer starring himself, in
which his decision to become a
clown upsets his Jewish father,
thus giving the world Krusty the
Klown. He repeatedly collapsed
from overwork through the '50s
and '60s, preemptively
substantiating Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome and the cancellation of
any number of Black Crowes
tours. As a lecturer at USC's
film school in the late '60s and
early '70s, he influenced
directors like Coppola,
Spielberg, and Lucas, and he
articulated a cinematic credo
even more minimalistically
fascinating than the Dogma.
"MAKE FILM, SHOOT FILM, RUN
FILM," was Jerry's all-caps
philosophy, and it provides the
key to perhaps 99.9 percent of
all movies worth a crap. His
rants about the decline of
Hollywood were every bit as
avant as his filmography: In the
'70s, he presciently and bravely
noted that the industry was
increasingly interested only in
sex, violence, homosexuality,
and matricide, claiming that all
the scripts he received featured
"Jerry as a psychopathic
homophile held on matricide
charges" or as a "cross dresser
who's a transvestite accused of
matricide."
To understand why Jerry cannot be
openly crowned King of Comedy by
anyone funnier than Scorcese, we
must return to the laurels
heaped upon Andy Kaufman. There
are no second acts in American
life, said F. Scott Fitzgerald,
an observation all-too-true for
a washed-up, booze-hound
novelist whiling away his days
knocking back aftershave
highballs in Hollywood. In a
superficial sense, Fitzgerald is
dead right: John Belushi, Sam
Kinison, Lenny Bruce, Gilda
Radner, Freddie Prinze, Andy
Kaufman — all died
relatively young. He was wrong
in suggesting that this was a
bad thing for the artist's
legacy. Dead comics —
including Robert Kennedy —
benefit hugely when the Grim
Reaper hooks them from the stage
and keeps them from finishing
one more Continental Divide, one
more episode of The Brave New
World of Charlie Hoover, one
more "obscene" live performance
(obscenely unfunny, that is),
one more Haunted Honeymoon, one
more iteration of "Looookin'
Gooood!", one more go-round with
Jerry Lawler. If you don't
believe this, go ask Dan Akroyd,
Bobcat Goldthwait, Mort Sahl,
Gene Wilder, J. J. Walker, and
Emo Philips. We can only
speculate that Mel Robin Hood:
Men in Tights Brooks (who
started off working for Jerry)
or Blake That's Life Edwards
(who will work for food) would
agree. Indeed, who can doubt
that even Woody Allen — the
man who begged Jerry to direct
both Take the Money and Run and
Bananas — periodically
wonders whether he would have
been better off blowing his
brains out after Annie Hall or
living long enough to shtup his
stepdaughter?
But Jerry won't get his due. He
has committed three Cardinal
Sins of Comedy. First, he was
actually original and daring,
creative and influential, in a
field that hates true genius
even as it relentlessly picks
its pockets. Second, he was
embraced by the French — no
less a has-been than Jean-Luc
Godard called Jerry "the only
American director who has made
progressive films." Third, and
most important, Jerry Lewis has
lived long enough and openly
enough to show what happens to
clowns with pretensions of being
more than Señor
Wences–level yukmeisters
— a category that includes
virtually every comic over the
age of 35. With a flat seltzer
canister in one hand and a
curdled custard-cream pie in the
other, they stare at Jerry
prancing his way through
Broadway revivals of Damn
Yankees, dying a thousand deaths
every Labor Day weekend, and
unironically declaiming his
genius to Larry King — and
they see their futures mapped
out in excruciatingly painful
relief: Clowns in the
concentration camp that is show
biz, denied the chance to go out
with exquisite, even heroic,
comic timing.
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief, and Brian Dohert is a senior editor of reason. This story originally appeared in Suck, and can be viewed in that format here.