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Hey, Laaaaady! It’s the King of Comedy
THE braying id of the American movie screen, Jerry Lewis has been making people laugh and squirm for most of his life. These
days this underloved genius of modern cinema — a box-office giant and
critical punching bag, a fetish figure for French cinephiles and
enduring bewilderment for middlebrow tastemakers of all provenances —
remains better known for his annual television fund-raisers, along with
his off-color slurs about women and gay men, than for the more than 50
movies he’s made during his improbable career as a star, writer,
director, producer and technical innovator. Ladies and germs, here’s to
Jerry Lewis, seriously.
On Sunday the Academy of Motion Pictures
Arts and Sciences will try to make up for decades of neglect by giving
Mr. Lewis the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Officially, this Oscar
is doled out to those whose “humanitarian efforts have brought credit
to the industry.” Unofficially, this award, like the honorary Oscar,
can sometimes be a consolation prize for fading heavyweights who have
never won in the regular race. Paul Newman was a six-time loser for best actor when he was given an honorary Oscar
in 1986. He didn’t bother to pick his up (and won best actor the next
year, for “The Color of Money”).
It’s hard to imagine Mr. Lewis, who has never been nominated, giving
the academy the brushoff. He needs the applause too much.
You can
hear that need in every convulsive laugh and see it in a smile that
stretches across his face like an abyss. Comedy is an art of
desperation, feeding on the laughter and love of the audience, and few
screen comics have worn that hunger more openly than Mr. Lewis has. To
watch one of his early romps, including those with his longtime
partner, Dean Martin,
is to witness not just the pathos of that need, but also its horror.
When Jerry Lewis laughs, his rubber-band lips widen across his cheeks,
creating an enormous hole, a cavern of dark. It’s as if he were
simultaneously splitting himself open for our delectation and trying to
swallow us whole, maybe both.
Over the years the enormity of that
need, or perhaps its transparency, has turned off as many as it’s
turned on. Though he remains important to academics and cinéastes, like
the director Martin Scorsese, who cast him in the 1983 satire “The King of Comedy,” his reputation as a major auteur has faded. His influence on comedy may
be obvious, evidenced both in the frenzied physicality of Jim Carrey and in the comedy of mortification of Larry David and Ben Stiller.
(Directors who use video assist, whichallows them instantly to watch
what they’ve just shot, owe him too: Mr. Lewis invented the
technology.) But his impact reaches beyond comedy because of how he
pushed against the very systems — studio and cultural — in which he
became a star.
He was born Joseph Levitch in Newark on March 16,
1926, the only child of vaudevillians who, during the school year, left
him with relatives while they hit the road. He didn’t stay behind for
long: by the age of 5 he was warbling the Depression standard “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” in the borscht belt, where, as a teenager, he worked as a tummler, a
hotel social director cum court jester whose job it was to keep guests
entertained at any madcap cost. By 19 he was a high-school dropout with
a wife (the first of two), a baby (the first of seven) and a struggling
career lip-synching to records in funny outfits, making like Carmen Miranda with a fruit-bowl hat as “Jerry Lewis — Satirical Impressions in Pantomimicry.”
The
partnership with Martin, with whom he joined forces in 1946, turned
them into a national phenomenon. There had been plenty of comedy teams
before — Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby — but
Martin and Lewis added something to the mix. They were sexy, for
starters (well, one of them anyway), as well as sexed up. (Jerry liked
to plant kisses on Dean.) And they were overtly ethnic: the suave
Italian-American and the jittery Jewish American who, with a sprinkling
of Yiddish, seduced mainstream America. By 1950 the dream team was so
popular thousands of screaming fans waited outside their Times Square
hotel, a scene that’s self-reflexively captured in their 1953 musical
comedy, “The Stooge.”
Though
neither musically or comically memorable, “The Stooge” has enough
autobiographical resonance to make it a fascinating curio. (As far as I
can tell, it’s also the first movie in which Mr. Lewis, dangling from a
balcony, utters his trademark cri de comedy: “Hey, laaaaady!”) Though
the story of an egotistical singer and his adoring stooge — the guy who
comically disrupts the show from the sidelines — was based on a
vaudeville team, it seems tailor made for its stars. That might be why
Mr. Lewis calls it one of his favorites with Martin and why it’s the
only one of their 16 official titles in the DVD box “The ‘Legendary
Jerry’ Collection,” which was released the same year as his memoir,
“Dean & Me” (2005).
Much like the nightclub act that made
them famous, their movies essentially recycled this same stooge
dynamic, with Martin playing the singing straight man foiled by Lewis’s
comic interruptus. This dynamic remained pretty much in place as they
took off, and their screenplays, female co-stars, production values and
directors all improved, culminating with the great
animator-turned-filmmaker Frank Tashlin assuming ringmaster duties in 1954 with “Artists and Models.” A vulgar modernist, to borrow the critic J. Hoberman’s excellent
description, Mr. Tashlin unleashed Martin and Lewis in wide-screen
comedies that, with their splashes of eye-gouging color, dogs the size
of ponies, cars the size of boats and rocket-shaped female breasts big
enough to launch Sputnik, finallygave them room to cut surrealistically
loose.
One year and two movies later the partners were no longer talking on the aptly titled “Hollywood or Bust.” There had always been tension between them, not all of their own
manufacture. Part of the problem was that Mr. Lewis’s was the deeper
talent, and that became the wedge that split them in 1956. The crooner
kept crooning. The funnyman, meanwhile, after recovering from the shock
of separation, quickly turned into an industry powerhouse. His first
solo venture, “The Delicate Delinquent” (1957), with Darren McGavin in the big-brother role usually reserved
for Martin, isn’t much to look at, but it was a hit. So were the next
one and the one after that. In 1959 he signed a multipicture deal with
Paramount for $10 million — more than $70 million in today’s dollars.
Some of these were directed by Mr. Tashlin, including “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” “CinderFella” and “The Disorderly Orderly,” with varying interference from their increasingly ambitious star and
producer. Though Mr. Lewis meddled in the editing of “CinderFella,” a
modern spin on the familiar fairy tale, the movie is an astonishment,
despite some draggy moments and a little late-act sentimentalism that
threatens to turn his character, an orphan in servitude to his greedy
stepfamily, into a figure of pathos. Few scenes show the Tashlin-Lewis
union better than the knockout musical number in which Fella, swanked
out in a crimson jacket for his initial meet-and-greet with the
storybook princess, dances down an impossibly long staircase to the
big, brassy sounds of Count Basie and His Orchestra.
By the time
he makes his way to the understandably stunned-looking princess (Anna
Maria Alberghetti), Fella has captivated the entire ballroom. He
awkwardly takes the princess’s hand, and the two begin to move
harmoniously around the white polished floor. They separate, then join
together, hitting the floor in synchronous, jazzy motion until Fella
suddenly motions for her to stand still. And then, as the horns keep
blasting and blaring, he begins jumping around her, drawing circles
with his hands while his legs turn into airborne right angles. It’s a
ridiculous expression of pure kinetic energy and — as is often the case
with this performer — a blast of untamed, untamable libido that
threatens to destroy the carefully controlled gathering like a bomb.
The
bomb doesn’t go off — it never truly does in his films — but he does
throw it. That, in part, is what the French recognized about “le roi du
crazy” before the Americans got hip to his transgressions. “In the
homogenized and pasteurized, chlorophyll America of today,” a French
admirer wrote in 1956, “Jerry Lewis will continue to offer this
unfailing formula for the little man in the face of mechanization.” He
added, “It’s much easier and funnier to drive people crazy than to let
yourself be driven to distraction by them.” Funnier, yes, though surely
not easier; in 1960 he made his feature directing debut, “The Bellboy,” a formally audacious grab bag of sight gags with no real narrative, at
the same hotel where he had just finished a stint performing.
It’s
hard not to wonder if all that frantic energy, which suggested his vast
ambition and had a whiff of desperation, is what repulsed so many. It
doesn’t help that comedies, cartoons and children’s movies rarely
receive the respect they deserve here, even in Hollywood, which is
generally too busy taking itself seriously to notice the comic geniuses
it its midst, especially those who hold up a mirror to the industry’s
own vulgarity. Mr. Lewis has never been one to let bad taste stand in
the way of his art. He embodied a certain kind of American exuberance
bordering on the grotesque. He was likable and a bit pathetic, but he
was also a little scary: you never knew when he might go off. He helped
make comedy dangerous.
Resistance takes many forms, and sometimes
all it takes to push back — against the guardians of good taste and
those gatekeepers of the social order who keep skinny kids who looked
like Jerry Lewis from joining their club — is a well-timed pratfall, a
bit of slapstick, a yowl. In 1963 Mr. Lewis directed his masterpiece, “The Nutty Professor.” As the bucktoothed scientist Professor Kelp and the scientist’s
chemically induced alter ego, a lounge lizard called Buddy Love, Mr.
Lewis embodies two seemingly contradictory impulses, characters who
alternately seduce and repulse. Buddy Love is often taken to be a
parody of Martin, though it has been suggested that he bears close
resemblance to the real Mr. Lewis.
This hardly matters because,
like any performer, Mr. Lewis is as much mask as man, if not more so.
The search for the authentic person behind the famous personality is a
favorite pursuit of tabloid readers and serious writers alike. After
publishing his biography of Mr. Lewis, Shawn Levy wrote, “I still
really can’t say who I was dealing with or if it was even a single
human being.” I suspect that, like the rest of us, he was overwhelmed
by the many Jerrys he discovered, each of whom (including the comic who
made the notoriously unreleased Holocaust drama, “The Day the Clown
Cried”) has its truth. For Jerry Lewis, who played the fool even as his
genius gaudily bloomed, the only true thing has probably been our
laughter.