Originally Published in the November-December 2017 issue of Film Comment
By R. Emmet Sweeney
Jerry Lewis’s comedy tapped the energy of nightclub improv and an anarchic urge to bring the house down at any cost
Jerry Lewis started out as a record act. He would throw on some vinyl and do rubber-faced pantomime to pop hits of the day in front of audiences–the kind of routine Andy Kaufman would adapt to his own absurdist ends decades later. It was one of the lower forms of comedy, employed by those performers without sufficient material to pad out a set. But then he met Dean Martin, and multiple Jerry Lewises emerged on contact: the kid, the spastic, the genius, the monkey, the ego, the depressive, the loner, the sexist, the artist. We lost all of those Jerry Lewises and more when he passed away in August at age 91.
What Martin and Lewis had was something alchemical, and it turned their audiences into screaming mobs, like Beatlemania before the fact. Dean was the eye candy who also happened to possess a rapier wit, while Jerry was the idiot with an innate sense of timing and structure. It was a deconstruction of the usual nightclub routine, as Martin’s suave crooner would be continually undermined and tested by Lewis’s nasal-voiced waiter smashing plates and causing chaos. Early on in their 1946 run at the Havana-Madrid club in New York, Jerry was constantly coming up with ideas to make Dean laugh, and one night he came up with a plan to switch off the house lights in the middle of “Pennies from Heaven.” Though the band stopped playing, Dean didn’t miss a beat, flicking on his Zippo close to his face and finishing the song in rhythm. They had an innate sense of timing, down to each inhale. According to Jerry, Dean “watched me breathe. He knew my breath…knew to lay back until just the right moment.”
The act was largely improvised, and audiences craved the energy and unpredictability they provided, as opposed to the more highly controlled Hope and Crosby team. Whether acknowledged or not, it’s hard to avoid drawing a line from the Martin and Lewis improvisational form to the one pioneered by Del Close for Second City in the 1970s and ’80s. Though Martin and Lewis never codified their method to same degree as Del Close’s “Harold” structure, the duo abided by a general movement in the moment to combine the threads of their improv. As Lewis put it, “the act might have looked like chaos, but we could always get back to where we needed to get on a moment’s notice. We had that down to a gnat’s ass.”
In 1948, Martin and Lewis brought their act to Hollywood, debuting at Slapsy Maxie’s nightclub. The trip was also an opportunity to hear pitches from the movie studios. They ended up signing with Hal Wallis and Paramount, but the best offer might have been the one made by Republic Pictures. In his 2006 book Dean & Me (A Love Story), Lewis wrote that Republic “basically wanted to shoot our act in a nightclub. (An interesting idea–in hindsight!!).” It’s astonishing to think we could have had a feature-length documentary of their legendarily madcap stage routine but instead ended up with My Friend Irma (1949) as their first film appearance.
Nothing against My Friend Irma, which is perfectly pleasant and introduced Lewis’s Barry Fitzgerald impersonation to the world, but it shunted Martin and Lewis into supporting roles, their bits contained in a couple of side sequences. The closest we have to their stage act are their hosting appearances on The Colgate Comedy Hour, which have a flavor of anarchy, things pushed to the point of breaking down. There’s a great bit in an episode from November 12, 1950, where Martin is a dancing instructor and Lewis a student. Lewis dances like a marionette with his strings cut, so to keep any partner from harm he’s given a mannequin to dance with. After the dummy gets flailed to the ground, Martin jibes, “Don’t you know how to pick up a girl?” Lewis cracks a smile, and the audience suffers convulsive laughter. The sheer noise is astonishing.
Martin and Lewis’s movies together provide their own kind of laughter, especially those with director Frank Tashlin that recontextualize their rapport in his Looney Tunes aesthetic (e.g., Artists and Models). They broke up acrimoniously in 1956 over issues of creative control, as both were jockeying to be solo stars. Their influence on the baby boom kids, however, was incalcuable, bringing antic long-form improv to the masses. Lewis provided the vaudeville heritgae (his parents played the circuit) and Martin brought the more modern ironic cool, always distancing himself from the chaos (“I copied Bing Crosby 100 percent,” he told reporter Pete Martin). It was a perfect combination of the old and the new, executed with a relentless, unpredictable rhythm that both stars would try to replicate with others over the rest of their careers. Dean found Frank Sinatra, while Jerry found his other selves.
Jerry Lewis, or what became the common image of Jerry Lewis, was established post-Dean. Martin anchored him to an identifiable reality, but now the spastic loner, the out-of-joint kid with the nasal whine and rubber body, no longer had any physical boundaries. It is this particular Lewis that spawned Jim Carrey, who presents an equally acrobatic take on the idiot, though with more violent tendencies (Carrey wrote a touching memorial to Lewis in Time magazine). Whether it’s Herbert H. Heebert in The Ladies Man or Julius Kelp in The Nutty Professor, the Lewis figure is in a natural state of apartness and is in a fraught, oft destructive battle to join to the main stem of society. Herbert says, “Being alone can be very lonely. But at least with people around, you can be lonely with noise.”
Lewis’s directorial debut, The Bellboy (1960), is a tour de force of being lonely with noise, as his titular character is ignored by the Hotel Fontainebleau customers, rendering him silent as he navigates the labyrinthine hotel space, which he expands and contracts through his imagination–turning an empty auditorium into a chiming orchestra through the force of his conductor’s wand. The Bellboy established Lewis’s disjunctive use of time and space. As Chris Fujiwara wrote in his Contemporary Film Directors book, Jerry Lewis, “in his films, the gag–or, more generally, the moment, scene, episode, event, or block–distracts from and disconnects the plot.”
The Bellboy’s orchestra is unrelated to the action of the hotel, just like the big dance number in The Ladies Man, of Hubert entering one “Miss Cartilage”‘s room only to find that a vast white set and an MGM-musical-inspired sequence await him. His world is a discontinuous one, and the fragmentation extends to his identity, like the Julius Kelp/Buddy Love split in The Nutty Professor, or his portrayal of six uncles in The Family Jewels.
The break with Martin caused a gap in Lewis’s artistic practice, which he filled by other means. Fujiwara wrote that Lewis translated “Martin’s absence into a purely cinematic figure to play against.” He splits personalities and plays off of himself, or fractures the space and time of the film so he can play off an invisible orchestra–or have a heart-to-heart with a Southern Belle puppet as in his improbably moving scene with “Magnolia” in The Errand Boy. The fact that Magnolia might be his most fully realized female characater doesn’t say much for his treatment of women (nor does his late-in-life statement that they aren’t funny), but it does speak to the impossible sexuality of the Jerry Lewis man-child, ancestor of the Sandler/Apatow man-children that audiences so so fervently embraced in the 1990s and 2000s. His fear of women essentially is the plot of The Ladies Man, in which he works as a houseboy in an all-girls rooming house. The narrative gets derailed by gags and digressions and tour-de-force crane shots of the multistory dollhouse set, but in the end he hasn’t changed at all, his masculinity as fragile as ever.
All of which amounts to a fraction of the Jerry Lewises we could mourn. I’d like to think that Martin and Lewis have finally reunited and locked back into their old rhythms, cracking each other up to the roiling roar of a crowd. But just as in his movies, Lewis refuses such a tidy ending in Dean & Me: “I miss him every day I’m still here. I’ve considered the idea of our getting together again someday, but I believe when we die we are just put away and life goes on.”
R. Emmet Sweeney 