Jerry Lewis: The Deformation of the Comic

Abstract

This comment, made during the publicity junket undertaken by Burroughs and Cronenberg to publicise the film of Naked Lunch, says much about the peculiar reputation of Lewis. Burroughs deems it appropriate that the French Order of Arts and Letters should include a wife-murdering ex-addict novelist and a maker of visceral horrorfests, but Lewis-comedian, film-maker, and Telethon-host-cannot be tolerated within such exalted company. Rarely has a public media figure been so deeply loved, and so intensively and so easily vilified. If art is in the eye of the beholder, what is that art that can frame the fearful dissymmetries of Lewis-his spastic physical contortions, his pretensions to godhead? The extremism that marks Lewis's public reputation-as man or myth, genius or embarrassment-began in the 1960s, when, following hot on the heels of the heretical politique des auteurs, French film critics launched their most devastating broadside yet against the fortress of traditional evaluative criteria. In 1967, for example, Jean-Luc Godard had the nerve to proclaim that Jerry Lewis ... [is] the only one in Hollywood doing something different, the only one who isn't falling in with the established categories, the norms, the principles. .... Lewis is the only one today who's making courageous films. And I think he's perfectly well aware of it. He's been able to do it because of his genius.2 Like many other French film critics of the 1960s, Godard was perfectly well aware of the scandal of celebrating Lewis's personal genius. Faced with such heady European validation of the comediandirector, even Andrew Sarris, the most ardent American auteurist, felt obliged to restore some sanity to the proceedings. In his 1968 book The American Cinema, Sarris fired off a 12-pronged salvo against Lewis's value-as-an-artist, and against the French critics' fundamental error of taste and judgement.3 But Lewis had himself fanned the flames of the contro-