Jerry Lewis Dead 91

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Undaunted
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Jerry Lewis Dead 91

Post by Undaunted »

"In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king"
windwalker

Re: Jerry Lewis Dead 91

Post by windwalker »

Completely obnoxious as a person as he grew older.
fountainhall

Re: Jerry Lewis Dead 91

Post by fountainhall »

I never knew much about him apart from the fact that i mostly found him distinctly unfunny! I did admire his commitment to raising massive amounts of money for muscular dystrophy, though.
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Gaybutton
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Re: Jerry Lewis Dead 91

Post by Gaybutton »

fountainhall wrote:I did admire his commitment to raising massive amounts of money for muscular dystrophy, though.
I remember one night when he was guest-hosting The Tonight Show he was taking audience questions. One man asked him why muscular dystrophy as opposed to other maladies. He said, "That's the one question I won't answer." That answer made me think he must have had someone very close to him suffer from muscular dystrophy.

As for his comedy, the one movie he ever made that had me laughing was 'The Nutty Professor.' His other movies, I thought, were mildly amusing, but every so often there were parts I enjoyed, such as the following:




I thought the best film work he ever did was playing a dramatic part, rather then a comedic part, as the late night TV host in 'The King of Comedy.'




fountainhall

Re: Jerry Lewis Dead 91

Post by fountainhall »

Today's Guardian has a quite fascinating anecdote few seem to know about.
In May 1992, Spy magazine, under the editorship of Graydon Carter, had the idea of trying to piece together what happened to a film which Jerry Lewis had half-made and then abandoned: a forgotten mess entitled The Day the Clown Cried, from 1972 — reportedly a horrendous mish-mash of pathos and bad taste, in which Lewis stars as a clown who is sent to a Nazi concentration camp and who, in a final desperate act of redemption and self-validation, attempts to cheer up the poor children there with his silly pratfalls and gurning as they are led to the gas chambers. When the truth of what he had done dawned on Lewis, he shut down the film, put existing prints and video copies in a vault and refused to let anyone see the footage, apart from a very few friends. (Some fragments have since surfaced online.)

Spy magazine mischievously interviewed the surviving cast members and single-handedly made The Day the Clown Cried the biggest film maudit in cinema history — and inflated Lewis’s cult status even further. But then, five years later, Roberto Benigni had a massive hit with his Oscar-winning movie Life Is Beautiful, which had a similarly sucrose approach to the concentration camps. Peter Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar in 1999, starring Robin Williams, struck a comparable note. And once again, onlookers asked themselves: could Lewis have been ahead of his time? Was there something daring, even magnificent, in his utter unawareness of good taste? A kind of primitivist genius, an art brut of the movie screen?
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmbl ... inner-life
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Re: Jerry Lewis Dead 91

Post by Smiles »

Jerry Lewis was not particularly esteemed in the USA ... more like pockets of fans rather than full-on country-wide gushings.
In an interview somewhere he mentioned that "at least I'm beloved in France". Sound familiar? Trump's rather like that, but for him it's Russia.
Lewis's comedy was, for me, very hit and miss. Oddly enough, his best role (IMO & Gaybutton's by the looks of it) was a Martin Scorsese film named 'The King of Comedy' ... the humour much blacker than his normal Laughing-Out-Loud screechy stuff.
Lewis's great ego was strapped to his arm for all to see, another Trumpian characteristic.

Jerry Lewis and Robert DeNiro screeching out loud in 'The King of Comedy'. Both dressed in horrendous suits. :roll:

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Cheers ... ( and just one more reason why I love living in Thailand )

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fountainhall

Re: Jerry Lewis Dead 91

Post by fountainhall »

Interesting why France embraces so many American comedians. On the face of it I'd have thought the French would be perhaps slightly more sophisticated as far as comedy is concerned. Not so, according to this article in the New York Times.
The French saw in Mr. Lewis a revolutionary, a man who dared, an experimentalist and a pioneer, and an artist with an absolute creative freedom. He knew no bounds, no limits. His early champion here was the influential French film critic Robert Benayoun, who wrote a seminal book on Mr. Lewis, as well as others on the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and Woody Allen. A friend of the Surrealists and André Breton, Mr. Benayoun saw in Mr. Lewis’s humor a continuation of Surrealism and the Theater of the Absurd. In his book “Bonjour Monsieur Lewis,” Mr. Benayoun wrote, “Since Buster Keaton died, Lewis has been the world’s biggest comic artist.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/arts ... r-did.html
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