World mourns two comedy legends
Dick Gregory broke racial barriers by blending incisive humour and civil rights activism starting in the 1960s. Later, he also became an evangelist for good nutrition. Gregory died Saturday at 84.
Jerry Lewis had a career that spanned decades. Teaming with Dean Martin for famous forays on television and as a Las Vegas headliner, he later forged a film career with a breadth far beyond ”The Nutty Professor.”
Jerry Lewis, the manic, rubber-faced comedian who burst onto the postWorld War II show-business scene with partner Dean Martin and together became the hottest comedy team of their era before launching his own highly successful solo career a decade later, has died. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by his publicist, the Associated Press reported Sunday.
Lewis’ reputation as a comedic filmmaker in America never matched his canonization in France, where he was hailed as a cinematic genius for his self-directed comedies of the 1960s.
Known nearly as much for his philanthropic work as for his comedy the last few decades of his life, Lewis was a Labor Day weekend fixture for 44 years as host of the annual Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon.
From 1966 to 2010, the telethons raised more than $1 billion for what Lewis referred to as “my kids.”
At the Academy Awards ceremony in 2009, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his fundraising work on behalf of the MDA — the reason for which he always refused to say.
“The important thing is that I do it, not the why,” he told The Los Angeles Times some years ago.
In May 2011, Lewis announced that the upcoming Labor Day telethon would be his last as host. But that August, the MDA unexpectedly said the 85-yearold comedian would not appear as host on the telethon and would no longer serve as its national MDA chairman, a position he had held since the 1950s.
“Jerry Lewis is a worldclass humanitarian and we’re forever grateful to him for his more than half century of generous service to MDA,” MDA Chairman R. Rodney Howell said at the time
A spokeswoman for Lewis told The Times that the comedian had no comment on his dismissal, which prompted an outcry in some show-business quarters.
In a show-business career that spanned more than 70 years, Lewis at various times was said to be the highest-paid nightclub comic, television entertainer and film director in the world.
And with Martin for 10 of those years, he was half of what has been called the most successful comedy duo in history.
They teamed on stage for the first time in 1946, in a boardwalk nightclub in Atlantic City, N.J. Audiences had never seen anything like them: Martin, the handsome Italian crooner with the laid-back style; Lewis, the skinny, animated “kid” with the shrill, adolescent whine.
On stage together, Martin and Lewis were known as a super-charged mix of jokes, routines, singing, dancing and, most notably, ad-libbing. The wildly unpredictable Lewis thought nothing of cutting off customers’ neckties, flinging food off their plates or setting the musicians’ sheet music on fire.
“I have been in the business 55 years, and I have never to this day seen an act get more laughs than Martin and Lewis,” comedian Alan King once recalled in the New Yorker, decades after seeing the team perform at New York City’s fabled Copacabana nightclub in 1948. “They didn’t get laughs — it was pandemonium.”
Martin and Lewis created pandemonium off stage as well, generating the kind of frenzied mob scene previously reserved for the likes of bobbysoxer heartthrob Frank Sinatra and unheard of for a comedy act.
At the Paramount Theater in Manhattan in 1951, Martin and Lewis performed six sold-out shows a day (seven on Saturday) for two weeks. With lines forming outside the theater as early as 6 a.m., more than 22,000 people a day flocked to see them.
On television from 1950 to 1955, the comedy duo regularly hosted “The Colgate Comedy Hour.” And Lewis’ signature lines became national catch phrases, including “I like it! I like it!” and “La-a-ady!”
Excluding uncredited cameos in Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s “Road to Bali,” Martin and Lewis appeared in 16 feature films together — from “My Friend Irma” in 1949 to “Hollywood or Bust” in 1956. In 1952, they landed in first place in the annual Motion Picture Herald listing of the top 10 movie stars.
Lewis continued to score at the box office after going solo, beginning with “The Delicate Delinquent” in 1957. Two years later, he signed a record-breaking contract with Paramount Pictures: $10 million to appear in 14 films over seven years.
Lewis, who had made a point of learning about every phase of filmmaking from camera lenses to editing, went on to star in, direct and co-write a string of his own films.
In late 1962, he signed a lucrative deal with ABC to host a weekly, two-hour, live Saturday night varietytalk show.
Despite great fanfare from ABC, “The Jerry Lewis Show” was a legendary flop, canceled by the network after only 13 weeks in 1963. Lewis then took out full-page ads in the show-business trade papers that said simply, “Oops!!! jerry lewis.”
It was a rare public acknowledgment of failure from a star whom many considered to have one of the biggest egos in Hollywood, a man who in later years was given to referring to himself in the third person and calling himself “an American icon.”
“I don’t give a … if people think I have a fantastic ego,” Lewis told the New Yorker in 2000. “I earned it! I worked my heart out! And you know what? I’m as good as they get.”