Can You Keep from Laughing?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Aldous Huxley argued that the reason French poets venerated Edgar Allen Poe, while English-speaking nations relegated him to the children’s corner, was that the Mallarme translations retained Poe’s themes and images but lifted the “curtain of verbal and rhythmic vulgarity.” Huxley thought that foreigners “were en dowed with a fortunate deafness and blindness” to Poe’s “rather painfully popular harmonies.” This insight offers a possible explanation for the Gallic adoration of Jerry Lewis; once again, foreigners benefit from sensory deprivation. They get to marvel at Mr. Lewis’s physicality along with his agile camera movements, hallucinogenic color schemes, and stylish command of pictorial space, while remaining blind to the sanctimonious talking head who sapped the affection of a generation with his horrific television appearances, and enjoying a liberating kind of deafness, as dubbing and subtitles spare or distract them from the jarring excesses of his voice.


One of the more intriguing extras on the new set of 10 DVDs released by Paramount is a French-dubbed soundtrack for many of the films. A spot-check comparison shows that the French not only mutes the manic yelps and grueling self-pity but, more importantly, reduces the gap between them. The discs provide the first opportunity in decades for reassessment. Previous home-video editions were cropped or faded and – love, hate, or admire them with reservations, as I do – Mr. Lewis’s films demand to be seen as he envisioned them.


Mr. Lewis’s bipolar voices underscore his reluctance to create a stable character. Mr. Lewis’s “idiot,” as he calls his screen double, enters with a bang, a model of arrested development pleading not be hit or yelled at, then shows himself as a wounded soul with fragile feelings, then alternates idiocy and sentimentality, and often ends up with a beauty who has inexplicably fallen for him. Only in “The Nutty Professor” did he solve the problem by playing two solid personalities that melt into each other at comically opportune moments.


The classic Lewis character sports a costume – white socks, short trousers, greased hair, a tuxedo when in lounge lizard mode – and relies on familiar gags. These include backbreaking spills, cartoon-like visuals, gratuitous destruction, prop-driven improvisation, a plethora of funny faces, and verbal riffs that combine Catskills intonation with Las Vegas slang. Yet he remains a dolt in transition, striving to learn life’s lessons, so it’s no surprise that Lewis rewired three key archetypes of transformation: “Cinderella,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and “Pygmalion.”


Mr. Lewis’s film persona flourishes with eruptions of his childlike inner anarchist, an effect once loved by children and despised by critics as vulgar. Mr. Lewis lost those children not because he no longer generated laughs, but because his dreaded inner adult demanded equal time. In his new book, “Who the Hell’s in It,” Peter Bogdanovitch complains that Mr. Lewis made former fans squirm because they were taught to keep their “deepest feelings always in check.”


Having once been dragged up a theater’s aisle by my mother, who was worried that I might hurt myself laughing at “The Delicate Delinquent,” I disagree. We turned away from Mr. Lewis for two good reasons. After “The Patsy” and “The Disorderly Orderly,” his films rapidly declined, contaminating memories of the earlier films. And Mr. Lewis manifested his feelings in a way that suggested a frighteningly ominous narcissism. He tells Mr. Bogdanovitch, “When I wake up in the morning, I think of me first and then my wife and then my children. I’d like to meet the guy that can honestly admit he does differently.” This suggests not only a lack of empathy but of imagination, and helps to explain why none of the supporting characters in his films are fleshed out.


The earliest film in the current release, “The Stooge” (1952), is the only one with Dean Martin, and it has no interest beyond an autobiographical plotline in which a haughty vaudevillian flops until he hooks up with an inadvertently funny idiot. Froglike Percy Helton, in an uncredited bit as a song-plugger, gets the biggest laughs – unless you count Dean playing the accordion. “The Delicate Delinquent” (1957), produced by Mr. Lewis and written and directed by Don McGuire, was Mr. Lewis’s first solo flyer.You can’t go home again: This time, my inner child marched me out of the room when Jerry started singing “By Myself” (“Oil face the unknoooown”). Still, Mr. Lewis has terrific moments mugging and miming (with a theremin).


“Cinderfella” (1960) is one of eight films Mr. Lewis made with his mentor, director Frank Tashlin, whose occasionally sadistic sight gags counter Mr. Lewis’s instinctive masochism. Mr. Lewis’s performance was his most nuanced to date, and the first half is rife with inspired bits – combing his hair, squeezing oranges, reading an endlessly inscribed ring, an equally endless pullback on a dining room table, and best of all, Mr. Lewis’s mime to Count Basie’s record, “Cute,” especially Frank Wess’s flute solo. Basie later appears, but by then the film has gone off the rails. For his big transformation, Jerry enters the ball in Buddy Love finger-snapping drag, and then abruptly resumes his yucky voice of humility.


He has no voice at all in “The Bellboy,” which he directed after completing “Cinderfella” but released earlier to fulfill Paramount’s demand for a summer comedy. The first in an informal trilogy of plotless movies in which Jerry and crew move into a playpen and perform a discontinuous series of gags, it was an enormous hit. The setting is a Miami hotel and most punchlines are telegraphed a mile off. Yet they unwind with unaffected whimsy as dozens of second string comics do walk-ons. Mr. Lewis’s next four films, all self-directed, are the heart of his oeuvre, and though only “The Nutty Professor” (1963) is completely satisfying in a deeply disturbing way, each has masterly episodes.


If Mr. Lewis had hired a real writer to provide a plot and a payoff, “The Ladies Man” might have been his masterpiece. Even so, it’s something to see – perhaps the most lavishly colorful Technicolor film since “Meet Me in St. Louis,” for which much credit ought to go to cinematographer W. Wallace Kelley. Nothing is left to chance, from the fiery reds of the sidewalks and mailbox to the choreographed tour of the famous dollhouse set (set to the trombone playing of sexy Lillian Briggs) to the expert timing of the gags. Helen Traubel and Kathleen Freeman are splendid, but they have no real parts, so the film peters out in a pointless, overlong parody of “Person to Person.” No matter: This is the movie with Buddy Lester’s hat, butterflies, a smudged painting, broken glass, and a Bluebeard angle involving Harry James and a spider woman.


With “The Errand Boy” (1961) Lewis returned for the last time to black and white. Nothing is made of the plot, which involves Lewis spying on employees of the film studio, but the visual gags make good use of the Paramount lot. Many are effective, including another jazz-record mime. As the sentiment kicks in, Mr. Lewis muses over the meaning of comedy, reviving a theme definitively explored by Chaplin in “The Circus” and alluded to in “The Stooge,” regarding the difference between inadvertently funny and deliberately funny – a theme he dissected in “The Patsy.”


But first he proved he could combine sight and sound gags with a plot and developed characters in “The Nutty Professor” (1963). In the key scene, he burlesques the point-of-view tracking shot from Fredric March’s “Jekyll and Hyde,” building up expectations of the monster’s hideousness only to show him as Buddy Love, a beacon of masochistic self-revelation. Buddy isn’t funny, but he is compellingly revolting – his verbal seduction of Stella Stevens is as nervy as Richard III – and for once Mr. Lewis came up with a perfectly ambiguous ending that prefigures the campus drug culture, which along with the acceptance of student-faculty intercourse seems very 20th century.


“The Patsy” (1963) has an atrocious it’s-only-a-movie closer, previously used in “The Road to Morocco,” subsequently used in “Blazing Saddles,” and undermined here by Mr. Lewis’s ego. The point he wants to make is not that showbiz is pretense, but that Mr. Lewis – as Ina Balin addresses him – controls the pretense. It sadly undermines his one ingeniously original storyline: A famous entertainer dies and his entourage decides it can mold any idiot into his heir. Two set pieces are justly celebrated – the demolition job the idiot performs on a music teacher’s home, after balletically not allowing any antiques to break, and a left-field pantomime introduced by Ed Sullivan doing an impression of Ed Sullivan.


Though highly regarded now, “The Patsy” flopped, forcing Mr. Lewis back into the arms of Frank Tashlin for what turned out to be one of their funniest films, “The Disorderly Orderly” (1964). Mr. Lewis recalls that Peter Lorre, whose last appearance was in “The Patsy,” referred to him condescendingly as “the face-maker,” and he breaks the bank here, miming sympathy pains with patients and driving Kathleen Freeman into a clenched teeth breakdown. Despite an odd subplot about a suicidal former cheerleader, Tashlin’s cruelty is a perfect antidote to Mr. Lewis’s egocentric torments. The closing chase is a classic in its own right.


With “The Family Jewels,” the rot had congealed. Mr. Lewis became addicted to Percodan around this time, and some observers have blamed it on his bad decisions – maybe it’s also responsible for his bad timing. The great years were over. It had become fashionable to cringe at the mention of his name, a punch line in jokes about France. Has enough time passed? Can we look at the films as films? Can we keep from laughing? I can’t.



Mr. Giddins’s column appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.


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