Cinema: The Joker Is Wild

The Joker Is Wild (Paramount) depicts in no uncertain terms the horrors of the hard stuff. Joker is another saga of the sawdust trail, and will be enjoyed by people who enjoy watching drunks.

To others, this bottle biography may seem all the more embarrassing because its subject is a living person, a nightclub comedian named Joe E. Lewis.* In his youth on the Chicago nightclub circuit, Comedian Lewis distinguished himself as one of the very few who could make Al Capone laugh. He failed, however, to amuse a colleague of Capone’s named Machine Gun Jack McGurn, who in a fit of pique caused Lewis’ brains to be rearranged with pistol butts and his voice box to be sliced very fine indeed. After that, hardly able to talk. Lewis took a dive into the nearest bottle and pulled the cork in behind him—or so the script says.

Out of the bottle, the script continues, rose a genial genie who was carried to fame on an alcoholocaust of humor. (“I only drink to steady my nerves. And sometimes I get so steady I can’t move.”) He has long been known as “the comic’s comic”a polite way of saying that he has never been widely popular with the public—and as a famous heckler-heckler. (“Come down to the pool in the morning, and I’ll give you lessons in drowning.”)

Such crude wisecracking is perhaps not inappropriate in a nightclub act, but in a movie house—even with Frank Sinatra, an old friend of Joe’s, serving up the master’s material in showmanly style—it quickly produces an unpleasant sensation known to both medicine and show business as “the gag reflex.”

*Not to be confused with the former heavyweight boxing champion or with Comedians Ted Lewis, Jerry Lewis, Robert Q. Lewis, Joe E. Brown or Joey Adams.