Film: Hey, Laaaaady! It’s the King of Comedy
William Brownstein
The New York Times
February 22, 2009
Film
Hey, Laaaaady! It’s the King of Comedy
By MANOHLA DARGIS
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, which allows 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, finally gave 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.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company