Jerry Lewis Wins an Oscar at Last

The last time Jerry Lewis appeared on the Oscars was 50 years ago, as one of the hosts of the 1959 show. In the three years since he and Dean Martin had ended their partnership as the country’s all-time hottest comedy team, each had established successful a solo career: Martin as a dramatic actor in The Young Lions, Some Came Running and Rio Bravo, Lewis in the popular farces Rock-a-Bye Baby and The Geisha Boy. Each man had recorded hit singles, headlined in Vegas, guested on many TV shows. Lewis had also emceed the Oscar event twice before, with wit and dignity and without incident. (See TIME’s photos: “Jerry Lewis, Clown Icon”)

The April 6, 1959, broadcast had moved smoothly — too smoothly, it turned out — up to the closing number: a group sing of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” by dozens of the movie elite, including James Cagney, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor. As they concluded, someone noticed that the show had run 20 minutes short. (Implausible but true.) Cued from the wings, Lewis shouted to the group, “Another 20 times!” Some of the stars danced in couples; others wandered offstage. As the tone grew tenser, Jer announced “We’re showing Three Stooges shorts to cheer up the losers.” He grabbed the baton from musical director Lionel Newman and led the orchestra, ad-libbing, “We may get a bar mitzvah out of this!” The Pantages Theatre audience was already heading for the exits. (Read “How to Fix the Oscars.”)

NBC finally euthanized the show and filled the remaining airtime with a sports documentary on pistol shooting. Until Nixon’s 18-1/2, Lewis’s 20 were the minutes that lived in pop-culture infamy. Catastrophe would be one way to describe it. Another would be great live television — the spectacle of tuxedoed Hollywood pratfalling into humiliation, and handing the banana peel of blame to the one man who tried to keep the viewers entertained. But Jer must have done something right: it was the second-highest rated show in Oscar history.

Tonight, after a mere five decades in the doghouse, after some 50 movies as a star and 13 as a writer-director, Lewis, 82, is being allowed back onstage. He’s getting an Oscar, and, wouldn’t you know, it’s the wrong one. The Motion Picture Academy is giving him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award — an honor recognizing charity work, and given more frequently to producers than to actors. Lewis’s commitment as a spokesman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, notably in the 19-hour MDA telethon he fronts each Labor Day, has certainly earned him a hearty Hollywood thank-you. But it’s a minor token, almost an insult, to one of the wildest, most imaginative comic talents in any medium and, without question, the definitive showbiz ego of the mid-20th century. (See pictures of Jerry Lewis.)

He surely merits one of those Life Achievement Awards the Academy passes out to distinguished film folk who never won a competitive Oscar and might die soon. (Recent honorary Oscars have gone to Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet and composer Ennio Moricone.) The slur stings any Jerry Lewis fan — especially Jerry Lewis. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lewis explained the hurt: “Because they didn’t think enough of my work. Because what I did didn’t command consideration because it’s slapstick, because it’s lowbrow, because the Academy’s always been cautious about comedy.”

It’s a measure of his lingering impact that Hollywood is still embarrassed by the very idea of Jerry Lewis, let alone his presence. To the graybeards at the Academy, Jer is not only the demolisher of Oscar’s gravitas but the unkillable specter of his first eminence, in the late ’40s and ’50s, as the goony kid prancing around the cool crooner. (One producer cruelly called Martin and Lewis “the organ grinder and the monkey”). He is the comic whose genius, or even the robust grosses of his movies, nobody in Hollywood took seriously. And because he was championed as an auteur in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, Lewis’s detractors have made him the derisive punch line to every joke about the French that came after postcards and before Freedom Fries.

That’s so small of them. Lewis deserves an armful of awards as a gifted, if problematic, creator of his ’60s movie comedies — and, even more, as the idiot personality and the brilliant creative force behind Martin and Lewis.

The Organ Grinder and the Monkey

Comedy duos had been a staple of vaudeville (Buck and Bubbles, Gallagher and Shean, Burns and Allen) and movies; in 1942, theater exhibitors voted Bud Abbott and Lou Costello the No. 1 “star” in Hollywood. What Lewis saw in Martin, when they first teamed up in 1946, was something unique: a sexpot straight man, a perfect complement to Jer’s goony girly-boy. Dean was Lewis’s public enabler; by acting as the imperturbable wall against which the kid’s maniacal energy kept bouncing, he translated Jer to the mainstream audience.

The two clicked immediately. In less than a year, they were earning $30,000 a week at Manhattan’s Copacabana night club. In live appearances at movie theaters they stoked ardor of Beatles intensity. But it was on the infant medium of TV that Martin and Lewis were awesome. Their appearances on NBC’s Colgate Comedy Hour made the viewer a co-conspirator in their anarchy; they broke the “fourth wall” as blithely as if it were a cardboard prop, and incorporated their famous arguments into gag lyrics for their duets. Their jokes became instant catchphrases, like the running gag where Jerry would hand Dean an ice cream cone and then plead, almost bray, “But doooooon’ lick it!”

Some of this got into the 16 movies they made together in eight years. At their infrequent best, they had the sharpest mixture of foolery and character of all movie comedy teams. In the 1951 Sailor Beware, Jer has been suckered into boxing a much bigger guy. Dean, the kid’s trainer, dispenses pre-fight advice (with many sly slaps to the gut and face) while Jer does such an acute impersonation of a punch-drunk pugilist that the tough guy and his team are scared away. In their seemingly artless but perfectly timed badinage, the two are slick, robust and funny funny funny.

Seen today, their work, especially on TV, is startling not just for its inventiveness but for its almost erotic intensity. They worked literally nose to nose: Jerry would snuggle into Dean’s shoulder; Dean would flick his cigarette ashes in Jerry’s mouth (and lick Jer’s face). It was primal therapy on the 12-inch screen, stripping bare a volatile marriage in all its grotesque intimacy — a bizarre comic display of love and resentment. No way it could last. In 1956, 10 years to the day after they had first paid, Martin and Lewis split, In a decade of famous divorces, this was the most seismic.

The Nutty Director

Lewis the solo movie star quickly found a comedy mentor: Frank Tashlin, whom Jer will surely thank tonight. A writer-director who had worked on some of the best wartime Warner Bros. animated shorts, Tashlin made his mark in feature films by turning such pliable stars as Bob Hope and Jayne Mansfield into, essentially, cartoon characters. Lewis, already rubberized, was the ideal clay for Tashlin to mold, stretch and cheerfully mutilate; he directed two Martin-and-Lewis comedies, six more just with Jer, Geisha Boy and Cinderfella being the ones fizziest with anarchic ideas.

On his own as a director, Lewis put on film some of the most complex comic constructions — The Ladies’ Man‘s open, multi-story set, The Bellboy‘s plot-ignoring series of sight gags (with Jer as the unspeaking hotel employee) — since the early masterpieces of Buster Keaton. Where Lewis went wrong was in also trying to be Charlie Chaplin: laying on the ennobling sentiment, but with a trowel. What the movies lacked was an audience interlocutor; without a figure like Dean Martin, viewers could laugh at Jerry but not always root for him.

Some say Martin showed up in Lewis’s most coherent film, The Nutty Professor, in 1963. A vamp on the Jekyll-Hyde story, it has Jer as ultra-nerd Julius Kelp, who sports goofy bangs (the following year they’d be cool, when the Beatles wore them), prominent teeth, and thick glasses — your basic Mo Rocca look. In love with adorable student Stella Stevens, Julius evolves chemically into Buddy Love, a stud crooner with hair glistening like a patent leather handbag. But this doppelganger was not the lush, uncaring satyr Dino (Martin played that role the following year in Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid). No, Buddy was more likely the Jerry Lewis id: the imperious, demanding, borderline-obnoxious personality Lewis displayed the same year on his short-lived, low-rated ABC variety show.

In the late ’60s, Lewis’s film popularity waned. In his 40s, he had not found a maturer version of the crazy kid audiences had once loved. The low point came in 1972, when he starred in and directed The Day the Clown Cried, a sort of Bozo at Auschwitz drama that was never released and remains a very tantalizing lost film. Comedian Harry Shearer — whose report on the 1976 Telethon is one of the finest pieces written on Lewis, and who may have seen the movie — described it as “the Holocaust on black velvet.” In what must be another painful twist for Lewis, Roberto Benigni did the same shtick in 1998, starring in and directing Life Is Beautiful and won a Best Actor Oscar for it.

Jer, we sympathize; we admire; we’re grateful. Your career has been a magnificent, traumatic ride, for you and the people who worked with you. And tonight, even if it’s not the one you deserve, you finally got an Oscar. Hold that statuette with pride. But don’t lick it.

See Richard Corliss’s Guide to the Oscars.

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