There was a lot of truth to the old showbiz joke that the French loved Jerry Lewis and thought of him as a comic genius and cinematic trailblazer, even while his fellow Americans considered him a manic buffoon, a pratfalling clown whose act was strictly kid stuff. What was odd wasn't the reverence of the French but the revulsion of his countrymen; after all, he’d once been one of the most popular entertainers in America, one who’d found commercial success in nightclubs, with TV, movies, and records, and on Broadway. And yet, we seemed embarrassed that we’d ever liked him, as if we’d outgrown the awkward and impulsive child-like character that Lewis himself never did. Fortunately for Lewis, before he died on Sunday at age 91, he got his due from the Oscars, the Emmys, the critical establishment, and the countless entertainers he influenced.
Lewis was born Joseph Levitch on March 16, 1926 in Newark, the only child of two Borscht Belt performers—his father was a Catskills emcee, his mother a piano player. Young Joey was an occasional part of the act from age five. Still, his parents were often away on the road. They even missed his bar mitzvah. By 15, he’d taken a stage name and developed his own comedy routine, lip-synching to records played offstage.
Lewis’s big break came in 1946 in Atlantic City, where one of the singers on his bill dropped out at the last minute. As a replacement, Lewis suggested Dean Martin, a singer he’d met a couple of years earlier. When they’d shared a bill at a Manhattan nightclub, the two would playfully disrupt each other’s act, but in Atlantic City, they turned those ad-libbed disruptions into a planned routine, and the result shot them both to stardom as the most successful comedy duo of all time.
Martin and Lewis complimented each other perfectly. Lewis brought out the suave crooner’s inner prankster, while Martin brought out Lewis’s musicality. Their routine was deceptively simple—Martin would croon, Lewis would mock and interrupt him, and they’d volley back and forth. Lewis, who was always quick to praise Martin’s comic timing and self-deprecating wit didn’t think of Martin as a straight man. Rather, he referred to Martin and himself as “the handsome man and the monkey.” Lewis had found in Martin, nine years his senior, a paternal/big-brother figure to replace his often absent father. Indeed Lewis’s naked hunger for attention and affection, contrasted with Martin’s aloofness, was built into the act.
Martin and Lewis spent the next decade ruling the nightclub circuit, conquering the new medium of television as two of the rotating hosts on The Colgate Comedy Hour, and starring in 16 movies together (including such hits as Sailor Beware, The Stooge, and Artists and Models). Martin continued to hone his persona as an easy-going playboy, while Lewis perfected his own character, whom he called “the Idiot” or “the Kid,” a man-child who had no control over his id, his rubbery face, or his klutzy body. But they were evolving in different creative directions, and the tension led to their eventual split in 1956, 10 years to the day after they first teamed up.
The breakup could have been career suicide; instead, it pushed both entertainers to even greater fame. While Martin continued to shine as a pop crooner, a casually charming movie leading man, a TV variety host, and Frank Sinatra’s lieutenant in the Rat Pack, Lewis began proving himself a serious artist, in his uniquely unserious way. His own successful pop records and comic film roles led to him signing what, in 1959, was the most lucrative deal ever offered a performer: $10 million up front and 60 percent of the profits to star in 14 comedy features for Paramount.
It’s that series of 1960s comedies, several of which Lewis also wrote and directed, on which his reputation now largely rests. The Bellboy, The Ladies Man, The Errand Boy, The Patsy, The Family Jewels—all were wildly inventive, even surreal, making maximum use of the medium’s gifts of sound, color, set design, and editing. He pioneered the use of monitors that allowed him to watch instant playback of the footage he’d just directed and performed in, a technology that’s now a standard tool for film directors. He taught a graduate-level filmmaking class at the University of Southern California in the late 1960s to such pupils as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. He compiled his lectures into a how-to textbook, The Total Film-Maker.
Lewis’s magnum opus was 1963’s The Nutty Professor, a Jekyll-and-Hyde comedy about nerdy chemist Julius Kelp, who transforms himself into Buddy Love, an oily, smooth, arrogant lounge lizard. Many viewers saw Buddy Love as a jab at ex-partner Martin, but the character was really a dig at Lewis himself, an expression of the performer’s fears that fame had transformed him into a monster.
By the late 1960s, however, Lewis had largely fallen out of favor with film audiences at home. His juvenile comic persona hadn’t grown with the times, and he was increasingly seen as a creature of the old-school showbiz world he had so vividly satirized and deconstructed in earlier films. He turned down the lead role in Woody Allen’s directing debut, Take the Money and Run, thus inadvertently launching Allen’s career as a comic leading man. His directing career ground to a halt with 1972’s The Day The Clown Cried, a feature in which Lewis played a circus clown forced to entertain children at Auschwitz, distracting them from the horrors in their midst as he marches with them to the gas chamber. The film’s post-production was never completed, and legal disputes over the footage’s ownership and Lewis’s own embarrassment over the project have kept the film from ever being completed or released. It became a Holy Grail of unseen cinema, with potential viewers wondering if the film was a masterpiece, a disaster of bad taste, or both. Comic Harry Shearer, one of the few people who claims to have seen a rough cut of Clown, has called the film a “perfect object,” a misfire that transcends all expectations.
Lewis remained ubiquitous, however, thanks to his philanthropy. For 45 years, every Labor Day from 1966 to 2010, Lewis would host an epic-length TV telethon to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. He would be accused throughout those years of maudlin self-congratulation, of using “Jerry’s Kids” as props, but he raised $2 billion to fight the disease. It was during the 1976 telethon that Sinatra snuck Martin onto the stage and engineered a brief but sentimental reunion for Martin and Lewis, on stage together for the first time in 20 years. (The two would reunite on stage just once more, when Lewis surprised Martin by delivering him a cake on stage at Bally’s in Las Vegas, where Martin was performing during his 72nd birthday in 1989. Martin died in 1995.)
In his 50s, Lewis returned to directing his own slapstick comedies with the films Hardly Working and Smorgasbord (a.k.a. Cracking Up), which were modest hits but critical disappointments. Still, he managed to astonish everyone with his dramatic performance opposite Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 1983 film The King of Comedy. He played Jerry Langford, a Johnny Carson-like late-night talk show host who is kidnapped by would-be comic Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) and ransomed for Pupkin’s 15 minutes of fame. The movie bombed (though years later, it would be recognized as an eerily prescient classic), but everyone agreed that Lewis, playing the straight man for once, was masterful. Certainly, it wasn’t a stretch for him to play someone so famous that he was used to receiving both gushing praise and vituperative insults from complete strangers.
In his later years, Lewis was still sought out by European film directors, including Emir Kusturica and Peter Chelsom, yielding his fascinating, offbeat performances in 1990s indies Arizona Dream and Funny Bones. He finally made his Broadway debut in 1995 and triumphed as the Devil in a revival of Damn Yankees, a production with which he toured the world for two years. He directed a stage musical version of The Nutty Professor in Nashville in 2012.
Lewis (who was married twice and had seven children, including 1960s pop star Gary Lewis) lived long enough to find a few measures of vindication in the admiration of his showbiz acolytes. He won the Governors Award, the top honorary Emmy, in 2005, and an honorary Oscar (the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award) in 2009. Presenting him with the latter was Eddie Murphy, who had remade The Nutty Professor in 1996, along with a sequel, both smashes that introduced a new generation to Lewis’ handiwork. Modern-day film comics, boy-men like Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, and Roberto Benigni (whose Life Is Beautiful essentially took the premise of The Day the Clown Cried, translated it into Italian, and ran with it all the way to the Oscars) owed a clear debt to the persona that had made Lewis a movie icon—and then a pariah. Meanwhile, the cringe-worthy humor he’d helped pioneer in The King of Comedy—the painfully awkward pause followed by the wincing chuckle, where the meta-joke is how unfunny the nominal joke is—became a staple of TV, from The Larry Sanders Show to the British and American versions of The Office to Modern Family to Louie to Girls.
Lewis had his own explanation for why audiences outgrew him and why it took so long for critics to recognize his merit. “When the masses loved Laurel and Hardy nobody ever proclaimed them of any worth,” he said in 2001. “When the masses chose to grow and get on to other things to love, the critics silently at night snuck in and discovered what the masses had already abandoned.”
