Honoring Jerry Lewis – mad, mercurial comic genius
Jerry Lewis didn’t just play a nutty professor. For years he reigned as a mad comic scientist of the screen — a brash innovator who exploded conventions and expectations on either side of the camera, and a takeno- prisoners farceur who mixed slapstick antics with a seething manchild persona of his own making.
Like dispatches from previously uncharted corners of the American id, his experiments could make us laugh, make us cringe or just leave us plain bewildered for reasons that critics and audiences have never stopped trying to get a handle on.
They are unlikely to stop anytime soon. The box- office glories and Labor Day telethons of Lewis’ heyday may have ended long before his death at age 91, but his reputation has hardly settled or calcified into consensus. If anything, his is the rare legacy that feels both unassailable and worthy of continual reappraisal — as malleable, in its way, as his famously twitchy and elastic mug.
Lewis’ influences are wide- ranging and well cited. A partial list would include the comic tradi- tions of burlesque and vaudeville, the looming specters of Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati, and his fabled collaborations with Dean Martin and Frank Tashlin. Remarkably, none of these relationships and inspirations can be said to have permanently defined him, much less anticipated his trajectory. Blurring the line between the hilarious and the mawkish, between the joyously lowbrow and the unexpectedly cerebral, his work was forever charging ahead and carving out bizarre new tributaries, as though governed by nothing more (or less) than his unruliest, most unpredictable psychological impulses.
The idea of comedians getting under the skin and tapping into their deepest, darkest selves is no longer especially novel, but it was far from a universally accepted notion when Lewis first took the spotlight. Few comedians before him had so brazenly turned arrested development into art, or held up such a warped f un house mirror t o American identity in its loudest, ugliest, vulgarest excesses. Fewer still had advanced the still-radical notion that comedy doesn’t always have to be funny, just fearless, in order to strike a nerve.