The king of comedy and the master of slapstick
Jerry Lewis, American comic actor, aged 91.
Jerry Lewis was a comic actor whose rubber-limbed pratfalls, squeaky voice and pipsqueak buffoonery made him one of the most uncontainable screen clowns of all time.
His partnership with the suave and assured crooner Dean Martin made them a sensation, easily the most popular comedy team of the mid-20th century. After their bitter break up, which devastated their millions of fans, Lewis embarked on a solo career of dizzying summits and desperate lows, including an addiction to painkillers as years of physical comedy took their toll.
Fascinated by the technical side of film, he became one of the first sound-era comedians to write, direct and star in his own movies. He was credited with laying the groundwork for later comedic writer-director-actors such as Mel Brooks and Woody Allen.
Few comedians have been so beloved and so derided as Lewis, who amassed devoted fans and stunningly hostile reviews from critics. Few have been so accomplished as humanitarians his annual muscular dystrophy telethons had raised almost $1.5 billion by the late 2000s - or so polarising as personalities.
Lewis could be candid and coy, insightful and insulting in the same sentence. He was tireless, demanding and insecure - in his own words ‘‘a neurotic, temperamental imbecile.’’
Lewis was, for better or worse, one of the most unforgettable entertainers of his generation.
A struggling comedian at 19, Lewis surged to stardom at 20 after partnering with Martin in 1946 at an Atlantic City nightclub. They made 16 films together.
As an actor, Lewis brought an antic joy to hundreds of millions of people who saw him play a role he called ‘‘the Idiot,’’ a cross-eyed innocent who bested bullies despite his nasally voice and gangly appearance.
The Idiot was the sort of uncontrollable character that set the loony standard for later generations of comedians, including Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler. The Nutty Professor, Lewis’ 1963 comedy about a shy professor who invents a formula that turns him into wolfish swinger modelled on Martin, was remade with Eddie Murphy in 1996. With a manic energy that often landed him in hospital from overwork, Lewis made more than 50 films, countless club and television appearances and several popular recordings.
Lewis was such a financial powerhouse at Paramount Pictures in the 1950s and early 1960s that one executive there was reported to have said, ‘‘If he wants to burn the studio down, I’ve got the match.’’ When prominent American critics bothered to review Lewis’s films at all, they generally dismissed them as recycled sight gags and plotless pratfalls that lacked continuity.
Lewis gained the grudging respect of some reviewers in 1983 when Martin Scorsese hired him for a dramatic part in The King of Comedy as a talk-show host kidnapped by a fan (played by Robert De Niro).
To some French cinema theorists, Lewis was a ‘‘total filmmaker’’ in the comic moviemaking tradition of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, who also created and starred in their own projects.
He was born Jerome Levitch on March 16, 1926, in Newark, the son of Jewish vaudevillians who performed at New York-area resorts. He debuted in 1931, when his parents brought him onstage at a hotel to sing the Depression-era anthem Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Once, he slipped onstage, and his foot went through a footlight bulb. ‘‘There was this big laugh, relieved laughter when the audience saw I wasn’t hurt,’’ he told The Post. ‘‘So I went after a second bulb. I’d been hit by the poison dart. I knew how it felt to get a laugh. When my parents got their next booking, the manager had to add, ‘‘No kicking bulbs out.’’
In summer 1946, Lewis was doing his act at the 500 Club in Atlantic City. When the singer on the bill was fired, Lewis suggested the still-obscure Martin as a replacement.
‘‘Jerry, who was supposed to be the funny one, couldn’t stand it if Dean got any laughs,’’ the writer and producer Norman Lear, who wrote for the team, once said. He said Lewis often got physically ill when Martin stole a scene and baulked when writers revealed that Lewis alone was not responsible for the jokes on the show. The Lewis-Martin split was acrimonious. They did not speak to each other for 20 years, until a mutual friend, Frank Sinatra, prodded them to appear together on Lewis’ muscular dystrophy telethon. Martin died in 1995.
Lewis’ movie career went fallow after filming what he considered his unreleased masterpiece. The movie was The Day the Clown Cried (1972), in which Lewis played a concentration camp clown who entertains children as they are led to the gas chamber. Considered by those who have seen it as one of the most offensive films ever made, the film was indefinitely withheld from release amid lawsuits among its backers and writers.
Lewis remained a television star as host of muscular-dystrophy telethons, for which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized the actor with its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2009.
The telethons were the subject of enduring debate. Television critics and some advocacy groups lambasting them as tasteless spectacles that exploited the children they professed to help.
At this late-career peak, Lewis was still unpredictable in interviews - clowning with a slightly menacing touch. ‘‘Let’s put it this way,’’ he told a Post reporter. ‘‘You will remember we met.’’ He then threatened to cut the reporter’s tie. He was half-joking.
— Washington Post