I didn’t grow up with Jerry Lewis. I didn’t see a single film he was in until I was twenty-four, and even then I didn’t get the appeal. About a year after that, I happened to catch a clip from The Ladies Man, Lewis’s second feature as director, which is often shared now when talking about his directorial prowess, and rightly so. In it, the women of a boarding house rise to meet the day, exercising and brushing their hair and bathing and all the other little things one must do. In a series of shots – broken up by the image of Lewis, keister aloft, trying to sleep – the camera tracks past the rooms constructed in a sort of doll’s-house cutout. The technical feat is more familiar to modern viewers from Wes Anderson’s use of it in The Life Aquatic, and it’d be impressive on its own, but what really sets it apart are the rhythms. The whole thing is delicately choreographed to a jazzy score, each woman’s action hitting a precise beat, complementing those around her. It’s dance.Truly, I thought, watching this, there is more to this Jerry Lewis than I initially perceived. And it’s amazing what a little open-mindedness can reveal. Mainly, that Jerry Lewis is fucking funny.
One of the central ways newcomers misunderstand Lewis is that they think he’s big just to be big. They think he’s over the top. (The other misunderstanding is that only the French love him – Americans made him wealthy well before that). But the more one watches Lewis, especially in his early directed works, the more one sees the kernel, the inspiration that he’s exploring. It might be exhaustion or frustration or nervousness (there’s a lot of nervousness) or excitement, but there’s something real and observed. He sees the tiny ways people adjust to a situation and expands upon that. I get the same joy watching him that I get from Bob Clampett’s Daffy Duck. Neither places a limit on how much there is to mine from a response. There’s a part in The Patsy where Lewis’s character recalls meeting a girl at a dance – he’s been humiliated by all the other kids, but she comes up to him and shows him a bit of kindness. He buries his face in the corner, away from her. It’s a gesture no one would realistically make, but it expresses a lot of what I’ve felt in that situation.
The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946)
Artists and Models (1955)
Lewis came up as a live comedian in a two-man act with Dean Martin, and that live instinct never left him, so much so that when he started directing his own features (beginning rather accidentally with 1960’s The Bellboy), he had what he called an “open set.” Anyone was free to come and visit. I recall him saying at a 2013 Q&A appearance at Cinefamily that he liked having an audience to play to. Consequently, his films play much better in a theater than they do at home. The long pauses, drawn-out gags, and over-the-top performance style are well-suited to a crowd feeding off each other’s energy. I’ve rarely laughed harder at the movies than I have watching his pantomime performance in The Patsy, his pratfalls in The Errand Boy (maybe his best “clumsy” performance), or his nonsense one-liners in Hollywood or Bust. Never mind the whole of Artists and Models, in which Lewis gives an extraordinary performance, arguably the moment at which director Frank Tashlin realized that any of the limitations he might have felt he had moving from animation to live-action were now out the window. He had a real life cartoon right before him.
This observational talent might be most accessibly on display in 1965’s Boeing Boeing, a Martin & Lewis vehicle without Martin. Tony Curtis (rather ably) takes his place as a newspaperman working in Paris whose life is carefully-coordinated around three stewardesses who – unknown to one another – stay at his apartment as his fiancée in carefully-synchronized shifts. Lewis plays his friend, who happens to be in town near the start of the picture. When Lewis first shows up onscreen, I giggled in anticipation, ready for him to wreck havoc onscreen. Instead, having spotted Curtis as he was leaving, he simply goes up and asks someone, “Excuse me, was that Bernard Lawrence?” Who is this normal person, I wondered, and where was my cartoon? Turns out all the talent he’d honed exploding onscreen was just contained into a regular guy looking to get laid. But all his little tics – his corrections, restatements, the way he’ll prattle on through a problem in the background while everyone else in a scene is trying to hurry him onward – are intact, and as effective as ever.
What’s most unusual about that role (or, later and more famously, The King of Comedy) in the context of his career is that Lewis’s character seems completely unaware he’s in a movie. Lewis was always in a movie, and never seemed to mind acknowledging it. Even apart from the blatantly-artificial set in The Ladies Man, there’s a part where the camera is set so far back that you can see where the edges of the floorboard meet the stage. The end of The Patsy finds him fall off a building, only to walk back onto the set and scold the female lead for mourning him in the first place – how could he die toppling from a three-foot ledge? Always for the audience, always to get more on their side, to have a discourse with them. “Look at all the fun we’re having together!”
He could be as personally prickly as they come. By all accounts, he had an ego the size of a mountain and not only didn’t suffer fools, but didn’t suffer anyone he deemed to be a fool, whether they were foolish or not. He most problematically stated enough times to be taken seriously that women can’t be funny (though he was also reportedly the first to acknowledge the insanity of such a claim in the face of his frequent work with Kathleen Freeman). He had, I’m sure, a litany of other sins. All I know is that when he was on, I’ve rarely seen anyone take so much pleasure in their work, and work so hard to find more and more and more pleasure to be had. Even in that 2013 Q&A, a two-hour event for a crowd of however many you can fit in Cinefamily (let’s say 150), he had us in stitches. No courtesy laughs, just that pure uncontrollably energy that emanates from somebody who just is funny. He was someone who could’ve put in no effort and he’d still be funny. But he kept trying to be funnier, sometimes to a fault. But that’s why I can watch a routine from The Colgate Hour from 1952, or I can watch parts of 1983’s Cracking Up, and get whole different sides of Jerry, whole different funnies. There kept being more to do. He’d mourn later that he had to age, that he couldn’t be as physically expressive as he could in his prime. That’s true, and it’s sad. But he was still fucking funny.
I didn’t grow up with Jerry Lewis. I didn’t see a single film he was in until I was twenty-four, and even then I didn’t get the appeal. About a year after that, I happened to catch a clip from The Ladies Man, Lewis’s second feature as director, which is often shared now when talking about his directorial prowess, and rightly so. In it, the women of a boarding house rise to meet the day, exercising and brushing their hair and bathing and all the other little things one must do. In a series of shots – broken up by the image of Lewis, keister aloft, trying to sleep – the camera tracks past the rooms constructed in a sort of doll’s-house cutout. The technical feat is more familiar to modern viewers from Wes Anderson’s use of it in The Life Aquatic, and it’d be impressive on its own, but what really sets it apart are the rhythms. The whole thing is delicately choreographed to a jazzy score, each woman’s action hitting a precise beat, complementing those around her. It’s dance.Truly, I thought, watching this, there is more to this Jerry Lewis than I initially perceived. And it’s amazing what a little open-mindedness can reveal. Mainly, that Jerry Lewis is fucking funny.
