Jerry Lewis, you’ll jamais walk alone

Since the American media agenda looks to be waterlogged for the rest of the week, it might be “appropriate”, faute de mieux, to revisit the recent passing of Jerry Lewis. For my money, the greatest contribution Jerry ever made to comedy was to inspire Martin Short’s deliciously malicious SCTV parody, “Jerry Lewis, Live at the Champs-Élysées”, shown above, during which, among other things, an aging, out of touch Jerry subjects a bewildered French audience to a harangue directed at the damn kids running Hollywood who won’t back his genius, finishing the show off with a bellowing rendition of “You’ll Jamais Walk Alone”, the quintessence of audience-whoredom condensed, really, into a single word.

And for those of you kids in the audience, who don’t know from “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” let me explain that that song, from Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel¹, was the quintessential inspirational throat-catcher back in the fifties, the idea being that if you have faith in your heart, you’ll, well, never walk alone. Marty/Jerry’s substitution of “jamais” for “never*, as an unwittingly condescending gesture of cultural outreach to the crowd—like a gentile saying “mazel tov”—struck me as a touch of comic genius when I first saw the bit back in the early eighties.

My contempt for Jerry is really quite strange, because when I was little—when I was little little—I loved Jerry Lewis. “Martin & Lewis” were to me the most exciting three words in the English language. I loved their movies—even better than Francis the Talking Mule!² Even better!—and was agog whenever they appeared on the “Colgate Comedy Hour” on TV. I looked forward to Jerry’s first solo film, The Delicate Delinquent (1957), with immense anticipation and was stunned when it proved not merely unfunny (completely), but frightening. The film shows poor Jerry in his standard role as the helpless schlemiel/shlemazl,³ bullied by a “gang” into becoming a member. Later, however, Jerry turns the tables on his tormenters, becoming a cop and self-righteously beating the crap out of them in an extended, vicious scene that clearly allowed Lewis to take revenge on his demons.⁴

I never watched another Lewis film again for a good thirty years. I frequently saw him on TV and never found him funny, at all. Instead, I found him needy, overbearing, and compulsively unsubtle. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, I used to read the Sunday New York Times—then a publication of vast bulk—with bizarre dedication—an ineffectual response, I suspect, to my own demons. In the entertainment section, the Times would run ads for the once-famous Jewish resort hotels in the Catskills. The most famous was Grossinger’s, but the “Concord” was also huge. The Concord was Jerry’s preferred venue, and the Concord would run quarter-page ads featuring a head shot of Jerry, not laughing Jerry, but a ridiculously worshipful shot that made him look, basically, like a god, a showbiz god, which is clearly how he saw himself. And I would wonder, who in God’s name would pay good money to watch Jerry Lewis? When I saw Marty’s pitiless takedown, I found it perfect and justified in every detail.

I stumbled across Jerry’s The Bellboy, the first film he directed, on TV sometime in the early nineties. It’s an “interesting” film, though not funny. Lewis made the film because he owed the studio a film, though they were not at all happy with the results. Jerry plays a bellboy, “Stanley”, in a very explicit nod to Stan Laurel, his standard s/s character once more, but also appears as “Jerry Lewis”, the show biz monster he’s proudly become. Is Lewis saying “God I wish I was still that sweet, helpless little kid I used to be” or is he saying “Look at me, folks! I’m HUGE!”

Later, out of curiosity, I watched Jerry’s most famous film, The Nutty Professor, and tried to watch The Patsy, said to be his favorite of the Dean and Jerry pics, and also Artists and Models and Living It Up, and even some of their old “Colgate Comedy Hour” shows, when they became available.⁵ Sorry, folks, nothing. Nothing but trying way too hard. It’s hard to say if Jerry was the white Sammy Davis, Jr. or the other way around.