Comedy legend
The darkness at the heart of Jerry Lewis
In 1965, when I was five, my parents dropped me off one Saturday afternoon to watch Jerry Lewis’s “The Nutty Professor” on a makeshift screen in our elementary school gym.
Released two years earlier, no one knew this was the film that would ultimately become the late comedy legend’s acknowledged masterpiece, a tour de force that would sum up, in ways large and small, the Lewis mystique.
The problem, in 1965, is that I wasn’t laughing.
In fact, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde parody — about a bumbling chemistry prof who turns into a suave Rat Pack-styled hipster — gave me nightmares for months.
I liked the timid, bucktoothed college instructor, played by Lewis, who accidentally blows up the science lab and whose arms stretch like spaghetti while lifting weights.
That was within my orbit of understanding.
But Buddy Love? As a five-yearold, this arrogant, self-serving opportunist with hair like an oil slick, also played by Lewis, terrified me.
Buddy wasn’t, I learned years later, a riff on Lewis’s laid-back former comedy partner, Dean Martin, as critics assumed at the time.
He was the REAL Jerry Lewis, distilled into a sarcastically deployed archvillain whose monumental charisma and prodigious talent didn’t detract from the fact he was — as one critic put it — “a narcissistic, narrow-minded, arrogant, mean-spirited, temperamental, socially-antiquated boor.”
“You rude, discourteous egomaniac,” Stella Stevens’s college coed tells him when his conceited come-ons become too much to bear.
Responds Buddy with a devilish grin: “You’re crazy about me, right? And I can understand it. Only this morning, looking in the mirror before shaving, I enjoyed seeing what I saw so much I couldn’t tear myself away.”
He kisses his own hand: “Have some, baby?” I have to give Lewis credit. Not only did he satirize a particular type of American male who, only a few short years later, would find himself cast aside with the rise of civil rights, women’s rights and a dozen other campaigns for equality. He predicted his own stubborn, change-resistant future as well.
“Jerry Lewis Is Still Alive (and Still a Piece Of Sh--),” trumpeted the headline of a 2014 Vice story that detailed with painstaking clarity how the unrepentant comic, then 88, verbally abused adoring fans during his one-man show, “An Evening with Jerry Lewis.”
“One woman, after dishing out requisite praise, asked how Lewis got his start in the business,”
writes Megan Koester in her scathing account. “He told her to read a biography.”
“‘Have you always been a son of a b-tch?’ he asked her. As a woman, she was confused by this inquiry. ‘Am I a...son?’ she confusedly replied.
“Another praised him for how much he genuinely cared for the kids he helped via his telethon (for the Muscular Dystrophy Association). Zoning out, he rested his head in his hand. ‘When somebody puts their head in their hand,’ he told her, ‘that means you’ve been on too long.’”
This, sadly, was not a unique situation.
When his annual telethons were criticized as condescending pity parties by the very people he was raising money to support, he responded with a vulgarity that undermined his good intentions: “You don’t want to be pitied because you’re a cripple in a wheelchair? STAY IN YOUR HOUSE!”
Asked about the employability of female comics at a comedy festival in Aspen, he replied, “I as a viewer have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.”
Interviewed by the Hollywood Reporter for a piece that came to be known as “Seven Painfully Awkward Minutes with Jerry Lewis,” he spat out a series of abrupt, one-word responses that revealed an embittered 90-year-old wallowing in barely concealed rage.
But that was Lewis: a talented, ambitious striver who, in true American fashion, was also thin-skinned, sexist and exclusionary — the personification of the so-called American Dream.
Driven by chutzpah and desire during the booming postwar renaissance, he and straight man Dean Martin were catapulted to the top of the comedy heap, mostly by Lewis’s manic antics.
When internal tensions drove them apart a decade later, Lewis embarked on a polarizing film career that saw him, on American turf, showered with the same derisive adjectives later heaped on Adam Sandler: juvenile, slapstick, overwrought.
But to the French, he was “le Roi du Crazy” (the King of Crazy), the Alfred Hitchcock of Comedy, a brilliant auteur who revolutionized the form with his creative vision and absurdist flights of fancy.
For Lewis, it was never enough.
As he nurtured a chip on his shoulder — stemming, he later explained, from negligent parents — it became clear that what drove him, like many of his generation, had nothing to do with traditional definitions of success.
“Comedy comes out of pain and uncertainty,” he confided to Rolling Stone.
I was going to say that when he died last week at 91 the incendiary comic had outlived his time, an old-school iconoclast out of step with modern mores.
But then I remembered Donald Trump, whose efforts to re-create the Mad Men era of white male supremacy have defined his presidency.
But Trump is one-dimensional, a blustery cartoon incapable of sober second thought.
Lewis, like Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack, was conflicted, double-edged, the victim of competing forces that pointed to a troubled soul within.
“If you add up everything that makes the totality of the comic,” he told GQ, “there’s a lot of sh— there, pal. And you can’t ignore it.”
Sure, he was politically incorrect, perennially insulting, with little patience for those who didn’t play by his rules.
He also raised $2.5 billion for muscular dystrophy, influenced a generation of filmmakers — including Steven Spielberg and George Lucas — and turned in sobering, gravitas-spiked performances in films like Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” and last year’s introspective “Max Rose.”
“Mr. Buddy Love is here to see you,’’ the receptionist informs the college dean with a girlish swoon in “The Nutty Professor.” “And is he ever a gasser!” He was a gasser, all right, who shone brightly, scared little kids, then turned back into the meek, lovable book nerd that spawned him.
This duality, of course, was the secret to Lewis’s enduring appeal.
“Did you have a good time at the movie?” my mom asked when she picked me up on that long-ago Saturday afternoon. “Was it funny?”
I mused to myself before answering? “Sort of,” I replied thoughtfully.
Shivering slightly, I added as an afterthought: “And sort of not.”’