Comedy giant, humanitarian had vast legacy
Jerry Lewis — actor, comedian, director, producer, singer, humanitarian and a fact of American life for nearly 70 years — died Sunday in Las Vegas.
Mr. Lewis, the funny half of the Martin and Lewis comedy team and a box office star for almost two decades, was 91. His representative said he died of natural causes.
Assessing a career such as Mr. Lewis’ is difficult to do, and all the more difficult in the hours after his death. Always the temptation with Mr. Lewis is to be emphatic, to scale the bigness of the opinion to the bigness of Mr. Lewis’ personality, which is why he had been, over the years, so loved and loathed, dismissed as a tiresome, self-indulgent egomaniac and praised as a visionary filmmaker and comic genius.
The enormousness of Mr. Lewis’ career and output, in all its varying quality, makes anything you want to say about
him sort of true, though the whole truth is elusive, or at least nuanced. That French critics love his films has been taken by some as evidence of their quality — and by others as a good excuse to write off the French entirely. But while you’re at it, you might also write off the Italians: Mr. Lewis won a lifetime achievement award from the Venice Film Festival in 1999.
In fact, the Europeans were responding to something real. Mr. Lewis’ films — particularly the ones he directed in the 1960s — broke ground. They included avant-garde set pieces that were even more interesting than they were funny. Like Bob Hope, but also like the French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard, Mr. Lewis enjoyed violating the fourth wall and acknowledging both the audience and that he was making a film. He also didn’t seem to care about crossing the line between making people laugh and creeping them out.
The Europeans — and some Americans — also liked how, in the 1960s, Mr. Lewis seemed to use his films as a means of working through his own neuroses.
But if Mr. Lewis’ American detractors missed some of the intentional artistry of his directorial work, they also picked up on the cultural subtleties the Europeans missed. He created comic set pieces that went on forever — and went nowhere. He radiated an off-putting insularity and egotism that was hard to contain or disguise. Not content to simply play the clown, he also tried to present himself as a ladies’ man — most famously in “The Nutty Professor,” but in other films as well, such as “Three on a Couch.”
Later, he tried to pass himself off as something like a pathetic saint, in “The Day the Clown Cried” (1972), in which he played a clown whose job was to entertain children on the way to the Nazi gas chambers.
“Yes, but” can be appended to almost any statement about Mr. Lewis. Yes, he could be shockingly arrogant and obnoxious with fans. Yet his work on behalf of people with muscular dystrophy was extraordinary, unprecedented and went on for decades. He won the motion picture academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, and clearly deserved it. At the same time, his comedy often seemed ungenerous, without love except for its own reflection.
In 2008, when I interviewed Swedish actress Harriet Andersson, I asked her what it was like working with Mr. Lewis in “The Day the Clown Cried.” She hesitated and then asked, “Is he still alive?” “Yes.” Then, laughing: “No comment!”
Mr. Lewis was born Joseph Levitch in Newark, N.J., on March 16, 1926, to a minor showbiz family. As a vaudeville performer, his father used the name Danny Lewis, and the son started his career as Joey Lewis, then changed it to Jerry. He began work as a comedian in the early 1940s and met singer Dean Martin in 1945. They inaugurated their partnership in Atlantic City’s 500 Club and earned great success with an act that was largely improvised. This led to radio and film appearances, with the duo eventually starring in a string of 16 comedies through the late 1940s and 1950s.
As a screen duo, Martin and Mr. Lewis delighted audiences, but today films such as “Sailor Beware” (1952) and “The Caddy” (1953) seem locked in their time and no longer funny. The monkeyish child man Mr. Lewis played in these films seems more a subject for psychological dissection than hilarity. It was also a type of persona that could not age without becoming grotesque. No wonder Mr. Lewis used the breakup with Martin to extend his range.
As a comedy duo, their dynamic mirrored that of another famous pair, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, not only because Abbott, like Martin, played straight man to goofy Costello, but because Costello, like Mr. Lewis, was the creative force behind the scenes.
Publicly regarded as the instigator of the breakup, Mr. Lewis had to overcome negative publicity through the force of his talent. He maintained his popularity through a series of solo films and then, in 1960, took over their direction with “The Bellboy.” He continued appearing in other films, but he directed and either wrote or co-wrote his most innovative work, such as “The Errand Boy” (1961), “The Patsy” (1964) and “The Nutty Professor” (1963), which is widely regarded as his classic.
You could think of him as self-indulgent or avant-garde, though the avant-garde is often self-indulgent, so that may be a false choice. Mr. Lewis could take a joke well past the point it was funny and then make it funny again through relentless repetition. You can see that, for example, in one of his later films, “Cracking Up,” in which he walks into an office and keeps slipping on a slippery floor.
Mr. Lewis’ boom as a movie star ended with “The Day the Clown Cried,” and yet there is no overestimating the presence he continued to exert on American public life. His movies were on television all the time, and even people who didn’t like them watched them. He was on talk shows, variety shows, comedy shows. He’d turn up singing songs. And then every year, there was the Labor Day weekend telethon for people with muscular dystrophy, which was the strangest cultural phenomenon. No one exactly
liked watching it, and yet everybody watched it, if only to see Mr. Lewis get more and more tired and grumpy.
In 1982, already one of entertainment’s elder statesmen, he had one of his best showcases in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” as a Johnny Carson-type television host who is kidnapped by unhinged fans.
In December of the next year, Mr. Lewis — who had smoked four packs of cigarettes a day for years — had a heart attack serious enough that, for a few seconds, he was clinically dead. But his health rebounded after open-heart surgery, and he lived into his 90s.
Now that he belongs to history, time will decide the extent of Mr. Lewis’ legacy. His films are rarely revived, and his TV appearances have vanished into the ether, but he will certainly be remembered by the people of his time and the generations that grew up with him, and he will absolutely have a place in the cultural history of midcentury America.
The movies he directed in the 1960s are Mr. Lewis’ best chance of immortality as an enduring artist. They’re bad in typical ways, but they’re good in unusual ways, and so they’re guaranteed to stay interesting. And he’s so singular in them — so bizarre, original, annoying, amusing, and relentless — that Mr. Lewis should remain a cultural reference point, perhaps even a source of delight.
Mr. Lewis was married twice and had seven children, including Gary Lewis, who gained fame for “This Diamond Ring,” recorded by Gary Lewis and the Playboys in 1965. He is survived by his wife, SanDee Pitnick, and six children (son Joseph Lewis died in 2009).