No one saw it coming. It was only a portion of what made Jerry Jerry, but it had been a key element in his comic toolbox for so long.
He'd shift gears so effortlessly. Wiry man-child, mugging goofball, manic absurdist, balletic clown, versatile post-Vaudevillian, patron saint of slapstick – and due credit fully given; important American filmmaker – Lewis was all those. Along the way he burdened himself with the weight of a worldwide charity, but that's off-topic. His comedy – bristling, unpredictable, zany and oddly dripping with syrupy show-biz savvy – was positively magnetic. He was comedy's lone untouchable in the 1960s.
Lewis achieved a comedian's dream career. He'd pioneered the tuxedoed pratfall, had gone from the saloon filler spot to command performances before royalty. He'd had Hollywood playing by his rules – complimented with full run of Paramount Studios, like the ultimate kid in the grandest candy store, based on a handshake deal that he'd be loyal to the studio that made him.
He left Paramount with artistic indignation when it stopped being Paramount, but "A Gulf + Western Company."
Though scorned by pop-culture 'intellectuals' – as were Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields and others in their own day – Lewis wielded a certain magic on-camera, a sometimes arrogant poetry that was his alone. No other movie comic could milk a gag beyond the over-mark and still hold an audience's rapt attention.
Critic Leonard Maltin once described him, in his wonderful and too-long-out-of-print book The Great Movie Comedians (Crown, 1979), as comedy's 'second big bang' – the sole torch-bearer of the comedic traditions and methodology of Chaplin, Keaton, Stan Laurel and their long-faded fraternity. Lewis had earned Maltin's praises with pictures like The Bellboy (1960) and The Patsy (1964) among a unique filmography of hit-or-miss comedic strides.
When Jerry Lewis hit that stride, he leveled landscapes. When he bombed, it was no less extreme. Such was his artistic polarity. He would ultimately fall out of favor with American audiences because his self-indulgent comedy reflected a similar, culturally childish yankee-ism too accurately. Was it really a surprise the French loved him?
But Lewis's comet arced downward in a heartbeat, during a sketch with Andy Williams. A wet floor. A slight twist of the hip gone horribly wrong. A quick turn that snagged a wayward muscle. It happened like a silent hammerfall, after a few minutes of amusing banter that resembled a strange, alternate-reality take of a Martin & Lewis bit. One in which Jerry dominated the crooner, channeled Buddy Love just a tad. They broke into a dance. They turned a corner. It seemed... off... possibly wrong. Jerry finished the number, with a grimace of poorly hidden agony in his jaw.
He shook Williams's hand for the fade-out to commercial. His leg covertly stretched sideways. Few suspected what had just happened. The universe had revoked Jerry's slapstick license.*
JERRY'S KID
For years following that moment, audiences would silently wonder where Lewis had stashed "Jerry"... for afterward, he'd only offer him up in quick glimpses – sudden flashes of chaos on his telethon, or in subdued form within his steadily decreasing cinema output. The explosive, frenetic Jewish kamikaze had apparently gone down for good.
Lewis's second life, filled with chronic pain and the drug addiction wrought in his battle against it – and the ghostlike comedic mask that only hinted at the "Jerry" of old – had begun. Lewis became known more for his intense sincerity, merely laced with clownishness. He was a businessman in a Vegas tux and white socks. An aloof media figure. A mysterious commodity, famous for being famous. He was still magnetic, but as a conduit to what he'd been – otherwise Lewis was a deep, dark ocean that only the snarkiest wind could make ripple. A spokesman for his causes, a show business icon, a more distant "untouchable."
He was already evolving away from that kid anyway. Age was filling him out. Even The Total Filmmaker couldn't edit around Father Time for long. But unlike Charlie Chaplin, who finally cut The Little Tramp adrift in an attempt to remake himself into a refined screen presence, Lewis adamantly held on to the caricature that had brought him to the dance.
He'd successfully departed from himself before with films like Boeing Boeing (1965) and 1968's Don't Raise The Bridge, Lower The River, in which he merely toyed with the comedic pendulum near its center. Having proved he could pull his shots – at least when directed by others – it's interesting that in the august years of his movie career, Lewis refused to revisit that territory in his own films. Instead, he became the kid enduring middle-age, which required a slight suspension of disbelief on a level most conscious.
After recovering from a sudden heart attack in the mid-1970s, Jerry delightfully stunned his fans with the comeback feature Hardly Working (1980). It was great to see Lewis back on the screen where his diehard supporters had wistfully wanted him, at least attempting a truncated version of his old movie-self. One seeming finally to embrace the onset of age as a new layer of his persona, and fuel for new gags. But unfortunately, he next threw a curve.
Second-guessing himself, a stumbling, full-blast return to his traditional antics followed in 1983 with the aptly titled Smorgasbord (alternately titled Cracking Up), in which Lewis threw in homages to nearly every style of movie clowning he'd ever attempted, with equally mixed results.
Some gags are thundering groans, some are a shade of blue; annoying shortcuts for what Lewis was perhaps trying to accomplish. But at least one shining moment – the "slippery floor" sketch – may rank as the funniest opening credits sequence ever filmed... by anyone. A scene involving over-the-top slapstick, he wisely – subconsciously? – gets it over in the first reel. The fact that he visibly measures each pratfall does nothing to diminish its tack on the laughometer – a turn that perhaps only Lewis could get away with. Fleetingly, "Jerry" returns.
Throughout his career, when Jerry Lewis detoured intentionally from his established screen persona, the sum total usually amounted to an arrogant purge of some inner demon, again in subconscious fashion. That risky formula served him supremely in his comedic Jekyll-Hyde tale The Nutty Professor (1963) as Lewis brought forth his own Antichrist; the vainglorious Buddy Love. Many critics knee-jerked that Lewis was exorcising his resentment of former partner Dean Martin, but with added years of analysis concluded that Buddy was actually Lewis's own darkside being pulled to the surface. Few comedians, even subconsciously, ever had the balls to dish out that kind of self-reprisal as plot fodder.
Lewis's most memorable "Non-Jerry" films, ironically, are ones in which he played parodies of his own showbiz-luminary self: like the nostalgic Funny Bones (1995) and Martin Scorsese's cynical King of Comedy (1982).
The punch behind Lewis's humor was kin to Charlie Chaplin's – a master-class in comedic timing and presentation, framing a window into an alarmingly fragile, ego-driven psyche. Like Chaplin, Lewis liked to occasionally hint that all the trips and tumbles were but the well-oiled dance of a sublime acrobat. Jerry's prowess with cinematic gunslinging, for example, which was part of his nightclub act, showed that he was anything but a clumsy buffoon – in fact, the opposite – possessed of a keen self-awareness. In Chaplin's underrated opus The Circus (1928), it becomes difficult to accept Charlie's moments of comic missteps after witnessing him traverse the high-wire with self-assured grace, and with a fidgety monkey clinging to his head, yet.
In a weirdly cosmic echo moment, according to legend, during filming of the Martin & Lewis feature 3 Ring Circus (1954), Jerry's comic-pathos experimentation was possibly what forced Dean to at last voice the growing tension between them. As Lewis ate up more and more camera time, Dino confronted him, asking why did he "concentrate so much on this Chaplin shit."
SERIOUS TO A FAULT
Just like Chaplin, when Lewis served up an artistic "statement," he swerved dangerously into the maudlin, or manic over-think. One noteworthy comparison is that of Chaplin's and Lewis's respective Nazi-skewering satires, The Great Dictator (1940) and Which Way To The Front? (1970).
Chaplin's film is the story of mistaken identity; a poor Jewish barber, fatefully trading places with a certain brush-mustashioed despot, who attempts to undo the latter's inhumane mandates before he is discovered. Lewis's film is too a switched-identity yarn, of the wealthiest man in the free world, stamped 4-F – who happens to be a physical doppelganger for a high-ranking Nazi officer – defying his non-status and using his riches to stage his own "undercover mission;" kidnap the villain, impersonate him, and like Chaplin's barber, clandestinely turn the tide of the war from within.
Both films are the tale of a disenfranchised soul, one of dour poverty, the other of immense affluence, to affect the fray while fate permits, and turn the entire world around – and each discover, at the risk of life itself, a sense of personal relevance.
Both films begin as a delicious dark lampoon of the times. Where Chaplin's "Dictator" dips into jingoistic rants by the end reel, Lewis's "Front" devolves into burlesque. Both great comedians were reduced to reconcile that the scope of the subject possibly eclipsed the circle of even their formidable radius with the comic rapier.
Both were panned by critics of their day. It was a new experience for Chaplin. In contrast, Lewis's love-hate relationship with the press was hardly newsworthy anymore regarding his films, compared to the battles of letters he waged in the name of his Muscular Dystrophy Telethon's honor.
Jerry would later again lash out at the Godwin Effect, to pierce the Nazi darkness; but the resulting film still hasn't been brought into the light. The Day The Clown Cried (1972) is possibly an unforgettable experience, for good or ill. Jerry plays a once-renowned German circus clown, whose gift for enthralling children is ultimately compromised by the keepers of the deathcamps, to make him a pied piper to the ovens.
Either it is a tasteless ego-fried banquet of poor artistic judgement, as its speculating detractors have suggested... or, as the leaked script I've read may indicate, possibly the most sublimely black – though Hollywoodized – indictment of 20th century fascism, and politically volatile exclamation ever offered by a movie comedian.
We may never know, unless Lewis finally greenlights the film's public release, possibly in his will. Whichever accolade "Clown" earns, revelation or repulsion, it will be worthy of Lewis's immense power to move his audience, not just as a comic, but an auteur. Perhaps he'll realize soon that he owes his audience this controversial work, which would in any case further cement his place in movie history as a creative innovator, in his frustrating, manic way, on par with Chaplin. The critics be damned.
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*About a year prior to the Williams show appearance, Jerry had taken a bad pratfall off of the top of a piano onstage in Las Vegas, which injured his spine. It's certainly possible the major damage was done there – and that the aggravation caused in the dance number was the frosting on the cake. According to Shawn Levy's intriguing book "King of Comedy" (St. Martin's Press, 1996) Jerry had taken a fall on the Williams show set, and struck his head on the floor, though it was not shown on the broadcast.
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