There was something of a love-in taking place at the 92nd Street Y on Friday night. Jerry Lewis, one of the quintessential figures of pre-1968 brass and Brylcreem, could, if the lights had gone out, been the center of an orgy spinning out into a maenadic fury that would have made Woodstock look like a backyard cookout. Jerry Lewis, who was onstage to celebrate his eighty-sixth birthday in the company of a few friends from the Friars Club (Buddy Teich, Paul Shaffer, and the emcee, Richard Belzer) and nearly a thousand adoring strangers, sparks a fanatical, deeply personal response from his audience that is due to his artistic genius but isn’t limited to admiration of it.
Lewis told some terrific stories about his career: how he mastered the crafts of movie-making in intensive detail when he got to Hollywood (he has fourteen union cards), how he became a director (he made “The Bellboy” in 1960, writing the script in a week on location at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach), how he invented video-assist for movie cameras (videotape didn’t exist yet, so he scattered “fifteen or twenty” TV monitors around the set so that, wherever he was, he could keep an eye on himself in action in the frame), how he came to make “The Nutty Professor” (he had had the idea for many years, but in 1954 a stranger approached him on a train and spoke to him in a small, nasal voice that Lewis knew at once would be that of Julius Kelp), and he talked about how much they love him in France (explaining that, during the run of a thirty-day, thirty-concert series at the Olympia in Paris in 1971, “fifteen or twenty thousand people” stood outside the theatre nightly with no hope of getting in).
(Here, time for a parenthesis on why the French love Jerry Lewis. The French—thanks to the young critics of Cahiers du Cinéma—discovered Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, and, for that matter, Jerry Lewis’s primordial directorial influence, the comic genius Frank Tashlin. And their love for Jerry Lewis coincides with the launching of Lewis’s own directorial career. The Lewis of the fifties, Dean Martin’s partner and co-star, would have been, in France’s eyes, a fascinating curiosity, but wouldn’t have gotten much more attention from those critics than Jayne Mansfield, who also shone in Tashlin’s comedies. And, as for the way Lewis the director is appreciated here: before the discussion, a clip from the recent documentary “Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis,” which I wrote about it when it was broadcast in December, was shown. It contains snippets of Lewis’s films, and a gag from “The Ladies Man”—a work of colossal comic invention—brought spontaneous applause from the audience.)
Lewis talked about the great set in “The Ladies Man”—the huge cutaway house, for which two entire soundstages were required. It featured sixty-four rooms on three floors, and Lewis embedded microphones in the ceilings. And he talked a lot about the Telethon, from which he was evicted in 2010, and, overall, about his overwhelming need “to help someone else.” He went into detail about his “inner government,” and, within that, his “core of character.” He explained that it was crucial for him to “present [himself] as a good man,” that he seeks to be funny for people who share his values, for “people who understand you”—and added, “and it’s also profitable.”
There’s something strange about comedy. Belzer and Lewis talked about the inherent intelligence involved in comedy, and they’re exactly right. Comedy is a grid of unsuspected associations; the synaptic leaps are corrosive abstractions, no less than social or biological science, which threaten the familiar order of things by pointing out its absurdities. But they’re abstractions delivered with the voice and with the body, and the desire of the comedian to be loved—to generate love—is a sort of survival instinct, because the alternative is to be feared and hated and even suppressed. Lenny Bruce knew that.
In the question-and-answer session with the audience that followed the formal interview, Lewis was, at times, as caustic as Don Rickles with his adoring questioners, but he explained, “I’m nine, I was always nine,” and he described comedy as the communion with the inner child—who is no innocent, but a troublemaker in need. That’s the source of his primordial stage experience, he said, at age five—when he was put on stage in his vaudevillian parents’ act, singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” When he was sent out to take a bow, he stepped into a footlight, which blew up in his face, spewing smoke over the stage. As he stood frozen in fear, the audience burst out laughing, and he said to himself, “I’m gonna do that again!” (And he gave a profound yet charming explanation for why he’s still doing it: “It’s too late not to do it anymore.”)
Spectator after spectator, taking the microphone, declared their deep personal connection to Lewis. One watched his movies with her father, another remembered him from the Catskills in 1941, another asked him about a theatre in Brooklyn he frequented (he responded with the name of the street it was on). In a video tribute, Jerry Stiller (who was also there in the audience) caught the key to Lewis’s success: “Everyone thought you were from their block.” (I had that experience, too—my parents told me that Lewis’s grandmother lived in our building in Brooklyn in the nineteen-fifties and that he used to come in through the back way to avoid being seen.) Lewis’s rampant anarchy is also a radical democracy, celebrating the most humane impulses of the despised and downtrodden, exalting the noble intentions of pathetic bumblers, elevating the humble bearers of common virtues to heroes—and, along the way, giving the world a good guilt trip for not noticing these things on their own.
The great paradox—the one from “The Nutty Professor”—is that Lewis distinguishes his comic persona, Jerry, from himself, because, in real life, he is no more Julius Kelp than he is Buddy Love. The simpering Jerry that puts viewers in stitches isn’t the director, the family man, the philanthropist. It’s these suave incarnations (which he parodies in “The Bellboy”) that render him attractive, but it’s the pathetically overlooked nebbish who, via Lewis’s fearlessly self-revealing, even self-abasing artistry, gives him the symbolic feet on the ground (and ass on the floor) that renders his milieu of Hollywood, Las Vegas, television, and the whole world of slick and even vulgar display infinitely, universally touching and ordinary. It turns him into the boy next door, rendering the gleaming hero, and the world-conqueror, safe to love.
P.S. The subtitle for the Friday-night event could have been “Funny Jews.” Lewis, Belzer, and Stiller are not only Jewish, they could be walking stereotypes. (Look who’s talking.) It’s one of the great ironies of history that these very despised of history should be the masters of laughter. Seeing Lewis onstage Friday night, I was struck by his resemblance to another eighty-six-year-old Jew who’s playing New York this week, Claude Lanzmann (who will be speaking at Columbia on Tuesday and at the New York Public Library on Wednesday). Neither has much of a neck; both are somewhat hunched; both fix a questioner with a witheringly intense gaze; and then there are the spit takes. O.K., not that. But they both made Holocaust films. One, of course, is “Shoah,” one of the greatest films (and one of the most heroic shoots) ever. The other is Lewis’s “The Day the Clown Cried”, which Lewis shot in 1972. Like “Shoah,” the idea for Lewis’s film came from someone else: a backer, who proposed the project to him. (Here’s a background post by David Konow about the film; here’s the 1992 piece from Spy magazine that he refers to.)
I’ve never seen it. Few people have. But the subject is a German clown in a concentration camp who amuses Jewish camp inmates through a fence, gets himself recruited by camp officials to entice the children to enter the gas chambers, and decides to join them there. Amazingly, Lewis’s film (according to published descriptions) parallels “Shoah” in incarnating the action that no one could emerge from, in bringing viewers to imagine what none could ever actually see: the moment of death inside the gas chambers. If I could have asked Lewis one question, it would have been: When will this movie be released?
