Jerry Lewis, the unreliable narrator: Notes on ‘From Darkness to Light’

Jerry Lewis was a lot of things to a lot of people in his day. One of those things was the least reliable narrator of his own life story. In the time that I’ve spent absorbing writings about and by Jerry (and many interviews with the man) during the 31 years I’ve been paying tribute to him on the Funhouse TV show, I’ve discovered that Jerry often changed stories to make them more dramatic, fabricated greater and greater lies as he grew older (one small example: him suddenly saying he slept with Marilyn and trying to pass it off as a real story), and was often woefully deluded about the parameters of his talents.

Thus, the documentary From Darkness to Light, which was shown on TCM a few nights ago, presents a “different side” of Jerry, as he tells us that the long-sought-after, unfinished, unedited film “The Day The Clown Cried” was “bad work,” which he realized after shooting much of the film — a rare admission of defeat from a world-class egomaniac. The documentary, directed by Eric Friedler and Michael Lurie, offers scenes from the unfinished film, following the plot as best it can when it’s pretty evident that Jerry was altering the script (or scripts, as various revisions existed) as he went along and was doting on certain things (his character being a sad but noble clown) while leaving other things out (namely any additional dimensions to all the other characters).

In order to complete this piece after freshly watching the documentary, I’ll introduce some points as they are, just so this doesn’t become a treatise on a documentary that itself covers a lot of ground — some of it excellently, some of it not as well. 

Names/words that are missing. There are certain invaluable voices heard in the doc, including those of the Swedish cast and crew, the late filmmaker/clown Pierre Etaix (who acted in the film), and the late filmmaker Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva, Betty Blue), who assisted Jerry on the production’s shoot in France. [UPDATE: These interviews came from an earlier doc made by Friedler; see note below.] 

Certain words and names, though, are never uttered in the 113 minutes of the doc. There is no narration for the film, so all statements are attributed to the talking head saying them, the most notable of whom is Jerry himself, who sat for a full interview about “Clown” explicitly for this documentary. 

The biggest missing word is “ego,” as “Clown” was clearly a major act of ego; Jerry and others skirt around this, but no one wants to lay it on the line and note that Jerry was always his own biggest fan and could’ve possibly delivered a misguided but still watchable film if he hadn’t chosen himself for the lead role. 

Jerry and Pierre Etaix.

“Drugs” is another missing word. Jerry did admit in his later years that he was addicted to painkillers for decades (and it really shows in his work of the Seventies; check out his bleary eyes in Hardly Working). Besides the fact that he had an immense regard for his own talents, he also was “enhanced” by chemicals; his son Joseph (in a famous National Enquirer essay) blew the whistle on the amount of cocaine that was found in Jerry’s personal bathroom. 

The names of the original scripters of “Clown” are also surprisingly absent in the doc. Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton wrote the first drafts of the script and Jerry made all kinds of alterations to transform his character from an unlikable sort who undergoes a transformation in the concentration camp into a suffering “hysterical” clown who is always sympathetic.

O’Brien is obliquely mentioned as the unnamed original “author” who didn’t want to sell Jerry the rights to her story once she saw his film. (This was contradicted by TCM host Ben Mankiewicz telling us that Jerry’s son Chris said O’Brien *was* willing to sell the rights; Chris was an employee of his father, working on his website among other things — he seems like a lovely guy but is always there with a diplomatic contradiction to differ with something stated about his father, who of course disinherited him and his brothers.)

The final name that isn’t uttered is that of Frank Tashlin. There is a section of the documentary that explores Jerry’s filmmaking. It includes quotes from admirers including Martin Scorsese (who is interviewed by Wim Wenders!). There are claims made about the vibrant color palette that Jerry used, his facility with gags, and the visual style of his work. 

Frank Tashlin and Jerry.

Jerry’s first six films do indeed have deliriously wonderful images and stylization, but the more one sees of the films of Frank Tashlin (one of Jerry’s mentors and the one he most borrowed from — lock, stock, and barrel), the more one sees how Jerry’s own talent was overlaid on top of lessons he learned from Tashlin. The documentary is so intent on erasing Tashlin’s importance, in fact, that they credit the film Cinderfella to Jerry, when it was directed by Tashlin. (Although unreliable narrator Jerry claimed on the DVD commentary track for the film that he directed the best scenes in the picture and ascribes the worst scene, which he acknowledges is the worst, to “Frank.”)

Contextualization that shows other comic filmmakers getting it right. An early segment of the film shows comedies that mocked the Nazis beautifully: Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, and Mel Brooks’s The Producers. The last-mentioned is incredibly important in terms of discussing “Clown” since only briefly is it mentioned (by Harry Shearer) that Jerry’s films from the late Sixties and early Seventies were bad movies that made very little money. 

By 1970 when Jerry was making a film as truly dreadful as Which Way to the Front? (which has a whole Nazi humor section and looks like a bad sitcom episode), Mel Brooks was already on the scene making much more accomplished comic films (as was Woody Allen, who has uttered only a few lines about the Nazis, but his films from Take the Money and Run to Love and Death were absolutely sublime and examples of where comedy filmmaking went in the Seventies, which was straight past Jerry). 

The producer as villain. The documentary basically places the lion’s share of the blame for the film’s production ending suddenly on its producer, Nat Wachsberger. He apparently stopped paying the crew, ceased communication with Jerry, and let the rights lapse to the original script by O’Brien and Denton, thus making the entire production “illegal.” 

Jerry “walked away.” The talking heads seen in the film are very reverent on the topic of Jerry Lewis. Thus the phrase “walked away” is used to describe his departing the set in Sweden. If one reads between the lines, it sounds more like Jerry abandoned the cast and crew. (Although it is noted here and is verified in some sources that he did put a few million into the production itself, he clearly did not want to pay the salaries of the cast and crew.) 

Was Harry Shearer lying? The documentary focuses on the production of the film and its plot; the cult that has developed around the notion of the film is only briefly referred to. That cult began with an article in Spy magazine in which Harry Shearer talked about having seen a tape of the full movie.

All the stories we’ve subsequently heard about the film have mentioned that it was never assembled by Jerry into a coherent feature. Although — and this is nowhere mentioned in the doc — it was indeed also seen in a supposed 75-minute compilation that French filmmaker Xavier Giannoli showed to various people, including a former editor of the Cahiers du Cinema, Jean-Michel Frodon. 

Frodon has noted that what he saw was a “rough, preliminary edit,” and that is what we see scenes from in the documentary (as the doc-makers add film leader in between some shots to show some images are not present [or were never filmed?]). What is notable about what is included in the doc is that it seems to cover the much-discussed-but-never-seen ending of the film, in which Jerry’s clown character ushers children into a gas chamber. 

Clown looks badly paced, poorly acted, and has a low-budget look and tone. In the years since the Spy article, countless speculation has appeared about what “Clown” would be like. What the documentary ends up showing is a film that looks cheaply produced, has questionable casting decisions (the most important of which is Jerry himself), and it looks to have deadly dull pacing — hardly the camp masterpiece that people have been waiting for for years now. And more like the episode of “Ben Casey” in which Jerry played a doctor who acted clownish to entertain his patients; his performance in these clips most closely resembles the “Casey” episode and his super-“sincere” turn in a TV version of “The Jazz Singer.” 

The major revelation of Darkness is viewing the scenes with the children, which should be stunningly offensive or unintentionally hysterical. Instead, it’s just more of Jerry thinking whatever he did was instantly funny. He conceived of himself as a classic clown in the mode of his silent-movie heroes (which did not include Keaton, whom he was always rather rude about) and circus clowns, whom he felt a kinship to (and in fact stole his clown makeup from the design worn by Emmett Kelly for decades).

The moments with the children are revelatory, though, since talking-head Jerry says that he didn’t care for them — “Where’s the comedy?” he bellows to Friedler, convinced four decades on (his interview was conducted seemingly in the early 2010s) that he could have, and should have, made the film funnier. This is a killer example of Deluded Jer, showing that he didn’t understand the lesson that Benigni obeyed in Life Is Beautiful: Don’t get too carried away with big gags once the characters are inside the concentration camp!

The makers of the documentary clearly admired Jerry and wanted to honor his memory, so they don’t pursue the cult that has evolved around “Clown,” including the staged readings that were run by Patton Oswalt and David Cross. I saw one of these in Manhattan, where Jay Johnston did a terrific turn as the Clown by *not* at all impersonating Jerry and just playing the character in a totally straightforward way. For their part, Cross and Oswalt kept overselling the jokes that they recited from Jerry’s handwritten notes in the script. 

Friedler and Lurie clearly didn’t want to pursue at any length the strong notion that one gets from the testimony presented in the film — that, despite the alleged crookedness of the producer, Jerry also sank the project from the beginning by casting himself in the lead role and rewriting what O’Brien and Denton had written. His final hasty departure from the set is presumably the reason Harriet Andersson (who has been quoted as saying that she was never paid for her work on the film) is not interviewed.

But the documentary does succeed in conveying the essence of “Clown.” That essence is that the film’s non-existence as a finished work is most likely a just finale for the project (despite the financial screwing of the cast and crew), since the one time here that Jerry most decidedly is not an unreliable narrator is when he declares the damned thing “bad work!”

UPDATE (12/20/24): I discovered after posting this piece that Darkness was essentially a reworking and an update of Friedler's preceding 2016 German TV documentary on "Clown" called Der Clown. It was for that doc that Friedler shot the interviews with Jerry, Etaix, and Beineix, and it was there that the clips from "Clown" were first seen by the public. (Via a fan who bought a mail-order copy of the German doc and posted the scenes from "Clown" to Vimeo.)

The 2016 doc also contained some of the surviving actors (none of them being Jerry) recreating lost scenes. In Darkness those scenes were replaced by (credited) footage from a doc called The Last Laugh, about humor concerning the Holocaust, and some newer reflections by the Swedish cast members. I'm not certain if the interview about the discovery of the "Clown" footage in the Swedish studio was present in the original 2016 doc.

Note: For those who would like to see the entirety of the interview Jeanne Moreau conducted with Jerry about "Clown," click here. (Subtitles in English by yrs truly) Thanks to Jon Whitehead of Rarefilmm for helping me see this doc.

‘Obsolete’? Not at all. Necessary TV rarities, now on a great YouTube channel

The "Husbands" host a 
telethon: Gazzara and 
Cassavetes standing,
Falk in wheelchair (left).

At this point it is truly impossible to keep up with what is posted on the various streaming video sites. Fans, historians, obsessives, collectors, and tech-experts are flooding the Net with terrific posts of obscure movies and old TV series and specials, to the extent that one can’t possibly watch it all, nor would one want to. (’Cause most of it ain’t all that great… shhhh…)

In the case of YouTube, there are thousands and thousands of channels devoted to “TV nostalgia.” Some of them are very hard to sift through — in many cases, because the poster isn’t making use of the Playlist function on YT, in which you can separate your postings by title, theme, or topic.

One of the most intense collections of rare TV is the “Obsolete Video” channel on YT, which goes beyond the mere posting of vintage commercials – which I do like, but c’mon, how many hours of that can really be watched? – with a series of episodes and specials that haven’t been seen since they first aired. The Obsolete channel doesn’t have Playlists of its material, but it's definitely worth hitting the “Page Down” several dozen times to move through its offerings.

The gent who runs it, Rick Thomas, has an introductory video for the channel, in which he explains that his main business is the conversion (and digitization) of video footage from any format, past or present; he also repairs old video machines of any type and is looking for additional rare programming. He notes that the Obsolete channel has thus far been made up of tapes recorded for private use off TV in the Chicago and Los Angeles areas – Rick himself lives and works in Arizona.

Rick’s postings have been gobbling up my time in the last few weeks, and I wanted to present a “Ten Best” list for this post, but as I started putting the list together I realized I was going to go beyond 10 (but hopefully not to 20). Thus, let’s review some highlights of the Obsolete Video channel on YT.
*****

Since it’s nearly Labor Day, it’s fitting to start off with segments from the first and last hours of the 1974 MDA Telethon. A lot of the hour-long talk show and variety special vids that Rick has put up are actually two half-hour recordings, so around the :30 mark we often move from one episode of a given show to another. Here we move from beginning to end; click here to watch.

Since this clip can’t be embedded, it should be noted that it includes the “solo Jer” aspect of the Telethon — Jerry being sincere about the cause, introducing that year’s poster child, fawning over his guests, and accepting a big check by a corporate sponsor.

As for what can be embedded with Jerry at the helm, here is an off-kilter episode of The Tonight Show with him guest-hosting when Carson was on vacation. Many people guest-hosted Tonight, but the episodes that exist of Jerry hosting are unusual — he seemed calm in the early to mid-Sixties episodes, but was the living embodiment of flop sweat by the late Sixties.

Here is an example of that. And yes, the tape that is posted is “hot” and a mess to look at – but when this stuff initially aired, it was seen through the miasma of rabbit-eared antenna “ghosts” and other imperfections. In the part of Queens, N.Y., that I grew up in, cable TV didn’t exist until 1990, so I spent years of my life watching shows that looked like this (or worse!)

Jer’s opening song is a poor one — a standard that few folks revive — his opening joke falls flat, and the little we see of an interview with a psychiatrist-turned-politician is desperate. It is, therefore, absolutely fascinating to watch.

 

Another flop sweat host, but playing it that way for laughs, was Don Rickles. This video, which starts with Flip Wilson guest-hosting and Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows guesting, has segments from two Rickles-hosted shows. The first has Lee Marvin joining a panel of Don Adams and Muhammad Ali (!); Marvin did give good interviews, but here Rickles pounces on him, to the extent that you have Don doing humor about Lee not talking — until Lee finally talks and what he says is quite considered and intelligent.

The next Rickles-hosted segment comes as James Caan joins a panel with Bob Newhart and Karen Black (who is seen seducing Rickles on another Obsolete posting!). Black proceeds to kiss on the mouth both Caan and then Rickles, and Caan ends up telling Rickles “atrocity” stories, since he apparently used to regularly hang out with the two Dons (Adams and Rickles) before he was a star.

An even worse-looking but riveting-to-watch sample of a guest-hosted Tonight Show can be found in the middle of this video, which begins with segments from two other shows. The first has Carson hosting Tiny Tim (in his Vegas lounge-lizard phase) and Burt Reynolds hosting, with guests Kaye Ballard (who does her Vegas act) and redneck emeritus character actor Dub Taylor – who plays the xylophone!

At 20:15, a terrific example of a guest-hosted episode appears, this one a killer hosted by Sammy Davis Jr in August of 1974. Even though whoever recorded this left out Sammy’s two songs, we see: His opening banter with Ed; him interviewing the aforementioned Burt Reynolds (fresh from the set of At Long Last Love); him talking to Helen Reddy (whose first song is cut but her second song is included); him interviewing Richard Pryor at full steam (truly amazing); and then a final chat with Evel Knievel, who was at that time about to jump the Snake River Canyon.

Firstly of fascination, the network edits: While Reddy singing the word “screw” and Pryor saying the word “faggot” are both bleeped, Pryor’s album title That Nigger’s Crazy could indeed be said on the air on late-night NBC, circa ’74. Even in its edited-down version (with visuals so hazy they’re b&w), this is a great example of The Tonight Show at its best, but with a guest who was actually part of the superstar culture of the time. Johnny was the master of the laid-back chat with these people, but he was not a master performer in any format other than Tonight. (And the episodes with guest hosts have all been buried for the syndication package of the Carson Tonight — perhaps because one can see that other hosts were equally adept at running the show!) 

Yes indeed, Sammy does over-laugh at everything his guests say — but when Pryor is on fire, clearly trying to make Sammy laugh, it is sheer bliss. Richard is so busy ad-libbing he changes the end of his old routine about a preacher talking about eating a tuna-fish sandwich when God spoke to him, saying, “Hey... can I have a bite of that sandwich?” Changed here on what seems like a whim, since Richard is just gauging how much he can make Sammy lose it.

 

Still in a Tonight Show groove, here is the sketch comedy group The Ace Trucking Company doing a Halloween skit in costume. (Obsolete has a very good collection of horror-host material as well, by the way.) It’s not all that funny, but it’s a good set-piece that shows a younger group of comic actors taking over Tonight for a while. The ATC line-up included Fred Willard, George Memmoli, and Billy Saluga (of “Ooooh, you doesn’t has ta call me Johnson!” fame).

Like a bunch of posts on the Obsolete channel, this sketch has been posted more than once. Rick is so painstaking in his work that he has often posted “upgrades” of better transfers of the original tapes he’s restored. This is the best-looking version. (Still, for those of a certain age, remember what rabbit-ears TV used to look like!)

 

Before the Dean Martin Roasts took off (more on Dino below), there were several attempts to present roasts on network TV in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The Obsolete channel has two of these entries (which, of course, could pretend to be “racy” but were just super-clean in verbal content), which both seem to have aired on the ABC Wide World of Entertainment — the concept that ABC used to replace Dick Cavett. Cavett remained on board, but he switched off with Jack Paar (returning for his last shot at late night), various documentaries, comedy specials, and a concert slot for Friday nights (to compete with “The Midnight Special” on NBC).

The first roast of note here is “A Salute to Humble Howard” (1973) — Cosell, that is. The best presenters in this roast are Redd Foxx, Don Rickles (of course), and none other than Cosell’s “nemesis” Muhammad Ali. Slappy White comes off better than usual because he was put toward the end (after Rickles and Ali), so he gives up on the jokes written for him and starts throwing in ad-libs. Watch it here.

As a massive fan of Steve Allen, I was interested to see “A Comedy Salute to Steve Allen.” Here, all the jokes are indeed scripted, and it’s rather odd to see Steve on ABC (when all his successes were on NBC and CBS). Still, though, there are bits by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme (singing Steve’s “theme song”) and the great Louis Nye (as Gordon Hathaway and himself). Steve himself has particularly brutal jokes at the end (a bit more brutal than he was in earlier eras and later on, when he became prudish). His mention of the stars of Fifties TVs having “survived” is fascinating.

 

Two of the rarest, most surprising videos on the Obsolete channel show are uncut tapings of The Dean Martin Show. Dean Martin fans, at least some of us, have a love-hate relationship with the show’s producer, Greg Garrison. On the one hand, Garrison made the show possible by striking a deal with Dean where he had to do as little preparation as possible and would only have to be in-studio one day a week.

On the other hand, Garrison was a notoriously schlocky producer who made extensive use of terrible laugh tracks and godawful editing, including many, many freeze frames. The Dean Martin Show had some of the slickness of other variety shows, but it also had a really tacky “packaging” that made its comedy sketches really sink (even as they began). The tacky editing was one of the central features of the later DM roasts, where guests who weren’t present were edited in, laughs were “sweetened” with exceptionally phony tracks, and reaction shots of celebs laughing were used repeatedly, even in the same segment.

Dino and Greg Garrison.

The two examples of the uncut record of the Dino show explains why this was — in essence, Garrison wanted to honor the commitment to Dean to get him quickly on and off the set on his one day in the studio, and thus was constantly directing sketches “in frame.” Meaning he would constantly be stepping into the frame to restart or clumsily finish off sketches by appearing in front of the performers right after the final line was spoken. (I mean, RIGHT after — Garrison nearly jumped into frame as the sketches ended.)

And while some of the show was done with a live studio audience, a good amount of it was done without, including standup monologues. In the first video below you’ll see Steve Landesberg doing his standup to an empty studio, where only the crew are laughing. (Thus, it’s even more remarkable that some of the standup worked on the show — the comics were so good they could deal with Garrison’s moronic cost-cutting measures.)

What comes through as one watches these weird little shards of entertainment into which Garrison bounds, looking like a stevedore rather than a producer, is that he did NOT intrude when Dean was singing solo. Those moments truly were the best moments in the show (and the reason Dino fans do have to be grateful to Garrison, for at least keeping the DM show on the air for so long), and were clearly the moments that Dean rehearsed — Garrison’s mythology was that Dean “listened to tapes in his car” of the material, but it’s been made clear (even from other interviews with Garrison himself) that Dean did rehearse and block the musical numbers. Thus, seeing Garrison keeping a respectful distance as the solo songs fade out is very welcome.

The best part about seeing Dean’s blasé response to the show being built around him is hearing him refer to himself in the third person as “the Italian.” As in, “Where does the Italian go now?”

 

A second “raw” tape of the Dino show being assembled. Notable here? Frank Sinatra Jr. doing a cover of America’s “Horse with No Name” and one of those full-ensemble musical medleys of songs from old musicals, this time based around Pal Joey with Sinatra.

 

Another wild artifact of the Sixties-into-Seventies: the pilot for The Kopykats, a variety show featuring a group of impressionists, on The Kraft Music Hall in Nov. 1970. This show varies from the later Kopykats series, in that it features Edie Adams as the one female impressionist (Marilyn Michaels played that role in the later series) and one of the first standup impressionists (Will Jordan) and a then-very successful nightclub act (David Frye) are in the ensemble. (They were replaced in the series by Joe Baker and Fred Travalena; Frank Gorshin, Rich Little, and George Kirby were in both pilot and series.) 

The comedy (supervised by Danny Simon) is quite lame, but the fascination here are the impressions themselves, ranging from the perfected ones done by their innovators to ones that seem quite labored. The wonderful Edie gets her own solo spot, and Frye seems to get the most to do in the special — most likely because he was doing very topical political comedy at the time the special aired.

 

The joy of watching old talk show segments on YouTube comes mostly from realizing that, while late-night talk shows are absolute garbage these days, there were indeed some genuinely smart, fascinating, adult talk programs on the air besides the obvious ones (Cavett, Allen and Paar on Tonight, David Susskind). Tom Snyder may have often seemed like a rambling, discursive interviewer (best parodied by Dan Aykroyd on SNL), but when he was in peak form (as with Sterling Hayden), the Tomorrow show hosted some terrific talk.

The Obsolete channel has a number of Tomorrow segments, but the hour that immediately grabs attention is a two-parter (not sure if it’s even the same program): one half with Marlon Brando and Russell Means of the American Indian Movement; one half with Arthur Marx to discuss his dual biography of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime (Especially Himself). 

The Brando/Means segment is a very serious discussion of Native American rights, with Snyder asking a great question of Marlon – if the Indian movement asked him to “go away” since they didn’t want him distracting from their cause anymore, would he do it? (Snyder also gets to hear what Brando has actually donated to the Indians in the way of land – 40 acres in Azusa, Calif., and an apartment building in another California town he can’t remember!)

The Marx segment is fascinating because it takes place at the time that Jerry Lewis was thought to be entirely washed up, purely a presence on the show biz scene because of the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. Marx was a truly unreliable narrator (he doesn’t get key dates right — like when the duo broke up!), but his book does have some wonderfully gossipy stories in it, and it is amazing to hear he and Snyder discussing “what happened” to Jerry. (Without mentioning the personality issues that killed off his career in the late Sixties.)

 

Obsolete has put up segments from a certain New Year's show that Snyder did (on Jan. 1, 1974), but one segment (from a 1973 show) is best seen on its own. A Louisville, Kentucky Satanist conducts a “hexing” ritual with a silent lady lying on an altar (her presence is mentioned but never explained). Might’ve been the only time “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law!” was uttered on late-night TV in, well… at least that part of the Seventies.

 

For comedy LP fans, one of the great treats unearthed by Obsolete is Murray Roman’s TV Show, a pilot hosted by Murray Roman, a comedian who is best known for having written for, and been an ensemble cast member on, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Roman was actually a very special figure in comedy history – clearly “converted” by Lenny Bruce, he spoke like Lenny when doing standup but also pioneered on his albums the kind of headphone comedy that was done to a fine turn by the Firesign Theater.

Roman let his eclectic and turned-on taste rule his TV pilot. The comedy is oddball and more off-kilter than Laugh-In or the Smothers show (it has the off-beat tone of Kovacs, but without his visual innovation); the music is supplied by Donovan, folkie/actor Hamilton Camp, and Linda Ronstadt. Nancy Sinatra does a poetry reading of the lyrics to the Beatles' "Revolution" (!), Frank Zappa sits for an interview by Murray, and the show closes out with Donovan’s recording of “Atlantis” being played, with Donovan, Roman, and a group of hippie-ish young people singing along (although you can only really hear the recording). Tommy Smothers also makes a brief appearance.

This program has no IMDB listing, but according to Obsolete’s notes, it was broadcast on KTTV in Feb. 1970. An educational documentary appears after the Roman show on the tape that Rick and his crew transferred. 

 

Still in the realm of comedy, and another jam-packed show with great names from that Sixties/Seventies era, is “Comedy News,” another pilot that aired during the ABC Wide World of Entertainment late-night slot in Sept. 1973.

The cast is pretty damned impressive: as fake “anchors,” Kenny Mars, Andrew Duncan, Fannie Flagg, Anthony Holland, and Marian Mercer; as “correspondents” doing their own material, there are Bob and Ray, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, and Peter Schickele. Appearing in a final “women’s panel show” sketch (which would seem to have begun as a bit done at an improv club) are comedy writer emeritus Gail Parent and Joan Rivers.

Some of the material is dated; some is timeless. The best stuff comes from the correspondents and on the women’s panel, but Kenny Mars deserves special mention for incarnating a pompous, self-satisfied and conservative anchorman, decades before Will Ferrell.

 

There are many mind-blowers in the coffers of Obsolete. Two major ones come from a non-Jerry Lewis program, the Easter Seals Telethon. The first one is from 1975, cohosted in early scenes by Peter Falk, Wayne Rogers, Billy Davis (of Marilyn McCoo and…), and actor James Cromwell. Tony Bennett (in excellent voice, with one of his wackier wigs on) performs several numbers in-studio as the clip begins.

Diana Trask does a song and then the show kicks into higher gear for cinephiles: John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara, Falk’s Husbands pals, appear as cohosts. Falk then participates as the referee of a rather bizarre wheelchair basketball game (!). It’s a mind-boggler to hear Cassavetes’ cigarette-smokey laugh and Gazzara’s DEEP tones while they serve as spontaneous sportscasters. (With Micky Dolenz and Donny Most on the phone bank.)

The oldies group the Penguins then perform “Saturday Night at the Movies” (after an intro by new hosts Lucie Arnaz and Desi Jr; Lucie does a slow dance to the song with Henry Winkler). A call-in of $20.00 from Garry Marshall — wow, Garry, couldja spare it? — closes out the segment, which then goes to many ads.

 

Perhaps the most mind-roasting segment yet unleashed by Obsolete (and this is a hard call) is another one from the same ’75 Easter Seals Telethon. It begins in media res, with Adrianne Barbeau dancing wildly (yes, the teen boys who loved her at the time were no doubt thrilled) with Marty Allen, who was quite the crazy dancer himself. Ben Gazzara’s dance partner at this point? Well, Charo, of course.

Falk is still the serious host, doing a pitch to call in with a pledge as the music plays. Adrianne continues to feverishly dance, as Marty Allen breaks off and cuts a rug with a person in a giant Easter Bunny suit. The bunny person grabs Barbeau and cops a feel, but she is nonplussed, as she goes from dancing into a pitch for Easter Seals. Cassavetes gives the pledge-tally for the hour.

 

***** 

As I wrote this piece, there was a basic problem: Rick kept uploading things to the Obsolete channel that I really had to include. The first of these was a full special by Bobbie Gentry, shot in Canada and recorded off an L.A. airing.

The show is terrific, as Bobbie (like Johnny Cash) wisely avoids the standard terrible variety-show sketches that blighted shows hosted by singers. Her guests are all musicians, and so we get songs from them alone and with Bobbie.

They are: John Hartford, Richie Havens, Ian and Sylvia, Biff Rose, and the Staples Singers. Hard to pick a favorite performance but Bobbie, Hartford, and Richie, singing Bobbie’s own “Morning Glory” has to qualify. She also does a spirited and well-acted version of her latest story-song, the iconic “a girl has to do what she has to do” song, “Fancy.” The end, what we have of it, is amazing – Bobbie leads a little dance party onstage while singing “The Rainmaker” as all her guests dance around as well, as they are “rained on.”

 

And you’d think that an important TV special like Free to Be… You and Me from March 1974 would’ve made it to YouTube intact, but Obsolete has posted a nearly full broadcast of it with commercials intact. Marlo Thomas and her producers assembled a great collection of talent for the 1972 LP and the ‘74 TV special, which focused on letting children know that gender differences (and those of race) don’t matter — yes, it’s corny as hell at points but charming throughout and quite important in its time.

The most enjoyable scenes include: Marlo and Mel Brooks providing the voices of boy and girl babies in a hospital discovering their genders (sketches cowritten by Carl Reiner; the puppets of the babies were made and operated by Wayland Flowers, of “Madame” fame!); a cartoon about a girl who uses her being a “lady” to get everything she wants, until she receives her comeuppance (written by the great Shel Silverstein); and a number of very touching songs, most prominently “When We Grow Up” sung by Roberta Flack and teenage Michael Jackson — the last line, convincing children that you “don’t have to change at all” is indeed quite poignant given that it is sung by MJ (who changed everything about his physical appearance systematically through the last decades of his life).

I note at least one thing missing: Rosey Grier singing “It’s All Right to Cry” (and the beginning of the “William’s Doll” song sung by Alan Alda). However, this initially aired version of the show includes a segment with Dustin Hoffman that was cut from the special when it was first released on home-entertainment formats. (It has since reappeared as a DVD supplement.) Hoffman, at the height of his powers (in the year of Lenny), reads a Brooklyn Jewish boy’s story about wanting to stop crying so much. It would seem that this is the great Herb Gardner’s contribution to the program, as Gardner’s name appears among the writers — he and Marlo were a couple at the time — and this piece has the “sound” of Gardner’s NYC realist-poetry dialogue.

 

Note: Rick has posted info on how to reach him on the videos he hosts on the Obsolete Video channel. He is looking for donations and sponsoring orgs to help him acquire more collections and restore those videos. He's doing invaluable work and we are very lucky that he's making this stuff available for free on YT.

Thanks to Jon Whitehead and Rich Brown for referring me to Rick’s YT channel.

“Mean Jerry”: the underside of Deceased Artiste Jerry Lewis

“I live in a selfish, selfless kind of a cocoon. You cannot get by in this world, apparently, if you are a courageous, honest crusader and/or stand-up, straight-ahead man who will not take shit. I’ll sit in the corner and let you pound me if I’ve got it coming. If I don’t have it coming, you’d better know what you’re doing, because you are tangling with a goddamn son of a bitch.” — Jerry Lewis [Levy, p. 433]

I really did think Jerry Lewis would make it to 100 and appear on stage telling everyone to go fuck themselves. That would've been just like Jerry, who spent a good deal of his time being creative but also celebrated that creativity at great length and got easily angry at the people who worshipped him.

First, a word about my own feelings about the man and his comedy. I loved his stuff as a kid (as we all did) and then rediscovered him in the early Eighties, when he was making the talk-show rounds and doing desperate jokes (I mean really desperate — blacking out his teeth, making odd mouth noises, putting the drinking glass in his mouth, the “big lighter” bit, that sort of thing). 

My friends in college and I began our own little “cult” for Jerry that celebrated both his very funny years (the Fifties and early Sixties) and the desperately unfunny comic performer he had become.

So, I will declare it for the record, since even people who've seen some of the 23 episodes I've done about Jerry on the Funhouse TV show (the 24th aired this weekend) and read any of the 30 blog entries I've done about him here, think I dislike him entirely. Here it is… wait for it: I find Jerry Lewis funny! Yes, I said he was funny, actually funny and very imaginative.

The caveat to that? I am speaking of Jerry between the years of '48-'66, when he had structures for his completely anarchic, pretty much ridiculously non-narrative comedy. The films he made as part of the Martin and Lewis team are mostly awful — with the two Tashlins and a few others (The Caddy, Living It Up) being very enjoyable (if you're uncertain as to where to start with Jerry, you can't go wrong with Artists and Models). 

But their TV appearances, when not acting out a goofy sketch, are absolutely wonderful — there was something about that team that still can delight. Jerry called it “the union of a handsome man and a monkey.”

Tashlin and Jerry

From '56 to '66 the solo Jerry still has amazing moments. His work with Frank Tashlin, six solo films in all, are all wonderful, with Tashlin achieving something Jerry could never achieve himself: making the Jerry “kid” character charming. That is not to say that the films directed by Jerry aren't worth seeing — the first half-dozen (well, really, the first five) are a lot of rambunctious fun. 

The Nutty Professor is the only one that works at all in a straightforward narrative sense, but the initial films Jerry made are both very funny and wonderfully imaginative. Yes, his directorial style had many, many elements taken from Tashlin, but when he was working at the top of his form, Director Jerry made some very funny, wonderfully shot and edited, movies.

Now you know it: I am a fan of Jerry Lewis's work. That said, I should note that I coined (in the late '80s) the phrase “happy pain” (TM) to describe watching the worst of Jerry's films: the ones where he stretches jokes for endless amounts of time, didn't bother with a linear script, and basically seems like he's just either making it up on the spot or didn't properly rehearse or storyboard whatever the fuck is happening onscreen.

I also greatly enjoy Jerry's dual public persona: the perpetually nine-year-old “kid” who took great joy in making noises, dancing around, making goofy faces, and basically disrupting things in a very deliberate way; and his alter-ego, the greasy-haired sharpster who insulted anyone he encountered (even if they loved him and expressed that love — those people, especially!). A curt, rude, boorish, nasty bastard whose act had breaks where he could harass the band (meant to be funny and “ironic” but seemingly coming from a very real place) and doing humor that was unapologetically prehistoric.

There was a “man you loved to hate” vibe that emanated from Jerry. I've met many people who were diehard Jerry fans who excused all of his bad personal behavior, but I've also met many who either took that as part of the bargain (“he's a crazy comedian who is just a nasty guy offstage”) or who, like myself, took some delight in just how mean Jerry could be.

In recent years I've met a third category, people who met him and whom he was nice to — I can only assume that this is the Lou Reed Situation: if you met him at the right minute and/or he thought you were worthy of his attention, he could be a sweetheart. Otherwise, you bothered him by merely existing in his airspace. It's a fascinating archetype: the performer who *must* have an audience, who will die without an audience, but who does not want to interact with that audience (paging Bobby Zim) — if he must interact with them, he will tell them how little they mean to him, how they're wasting his time.

I saw this in person three of the four times I saw Jerry onstage. When he appeared on Broadway in Damn Yankees, there was no interaction possible — it was a set Broadway show that offered no Q&As or shtick with the audience. That said, it also included a small chunk of Jerry's nightclub act that was awkwardly shoehorned into the production.

The other three times, though — I will never forget them. In the first instance, he was doing his full act, during the “Jerry Lewis Unlimited Tour” in 1994. I saw him at Queens College and was flabbergasted at what his act really was. (I shouldn't have been, having watched him on the Telethon for so many years, but I thought surely someone had written him something new!)

Jerry showed film clips, told anecdotes, did some tap-dancing, did the “cane bit,” conducted the band, did shtick with the audience, sang (off-key, as always), and told jokes. Lots of them. Very bad, very old jokes. And often racist jokes – racist jokes of the type that little kids tell in the playground or sandbox. To wit, “How do Chinese people pick their names? They hold a silver platter and throw spoons up in the air. When they land — “'ching chong ding dong!!!' ”

Here are bits of that stage act, including a pathetic Mexican joke:

Jerry made no jokes about African-Americans or Italian-Americans (although the latter group was dying to made fun of). His Jewish jokes were always kind-hearted, Yiddish-accented, tales of the sort that Myron Cohen used to tell. But there were plenty of “Polack” jokes that afternoon. “Polack walks into a 7-11. He asks the clerk, ‘How many cups of coffee can you fit in this thermos?’ The clerk says, ‘Six.’ And so the Polack says, ‘Great. Give me two black, two with milk, and two decaf.’ ”

(Jerry would then lean over to an old lady in the front row and do a mock-explanation of the joke. “You see – they would all be mixed together in the thermos...”)

It was stunning, hearing him do this material — not because I found it offensive. (I'm the least-offended person there can be; I think that everything can be made fun of — just be funny while doing it!) It was because the jokes just plainly sucked and were eons old. 

Jerry got one up on all of us, though: he did his full Jolson medley, something he did to reflect his roots in old show-biz and to honor his only-nominally talented dad Danny Lewis, a Z-grade Jolson-inspired singer and showman. (Danny treated Jerry like crap over the years, which definitely set up Jerry's Freudian “I'll conquer the world!” view of things.)

I saw some lovely things at Queens College, but nothing as memorable as this lovely moment at Brooklyn College on the same tour. Since I put this clip up (shot by a friend's assistant), the battle has raged — is the kid doing the impression being an asshole, or is Jerry? Suffice it to say both parties are responsible for some assholery, but it’s stunning how fast Jerry whips the mic out of the kid's hand and realizes that he's going to make fun of “Telethon Jerry.” Always a no-no, unless you were Joe Piscopo or Martin Short, with whom Jerry later appeared to show his magnanimity.

The next two times I saw Jerry live he was doing his “motivational speaker” thing. This mostly consisted of him doing a very long Q&A session, punctuated by many of his adages that were either super-simplistic (“Why not be nice? Being nice is good — it's good to be nice!”) or so convoluted and oddly phrased they would make James Joyce's head spin. (Jerry's grasp of the English language was bizarre — the longer his sentences were, the less sense they made, and the more earnest he got.)

What was most surprising about these engagements was how many dick jokes Jerry made — the first of the two events was held at a temple, so that was a little odd (but everyone laughed) — and how the audience came there to be insulted by Jerry. They were waiting on line to ask him questions, knowing that he'd most likely insult them and that, for them, was like a benediction. (Friend John Mariano described the atmosphere at the temple gig as being “a combination of an Aimee Semple McPherson tent rally and Todd Browning's Freaks.”)

So many people were insulted, in such lackluster ways. For Jerry was not Rickles — he wasn't a good insult comedian, he mostly just verbally abused the person, and entire crowd cheered his abuse as if it was his whole act (which, at these events, it was). For instance, one French woman asked a question, assuming Jerry would make fun of her accent. He didn't – which seemed to disappoint her. But when she turned her back to sit down, Jerry made a gesture with his hands to indicate she had very large breasts — thus making the audience bust a gut. She seemed curious as to what he did, but she couldn't turn around in enough time to catch her much-hoped-for moment of humiliation.

So, was Jerry a forerunner of punk-rock frontmen? Yes and no. The punk guys were definitely inspired by the pro-wrestling “heel” character — they wanted to be hated and set about addressing the audience as one person, a moronic person. They praised themselves and made the crowd hate them. Don Rickles was the master of this situation, and had a bunch of lines to combat any show of dissension from the audience.

Jerry was always on the offense, but there was nothing “strategic” about his insults — unlike the wrestlers or punk rockers, Jerry just arbitrarily insulted people, and because of the audience's love of his “kid” character, they laughed at him doing it, instead of booing and hissing him (while still loving him, as crowds always do heel wrestlers – and aged punk rockers).

Jerry was aware of the interest he held for punk rockers. He talks about it here at 26:12 in an interview with David Letterman. Punk rockers learned a lot not only from Jerry Lewis the nightclub comic, but also from his character Buddy Love. A punk-turned-power-pop band named themselves after the character, and Buddy's heelish charms certainly were a model of creepy ugliness for a generation of frontmen who enjoyed insulting their audience.

Jerry was a punk performer when he started out with Dean Martin. His job was to screw up Dean's songs — something that was initially welcomed by Dean but became a major annoyance for him as their partnership continued. The duo did anarchic, crazy-ass humor that was fast and energetic. The jokes were already prehistoric (Jerry loved to cite the classic “Did you take a bath today?” “Why, is one missing?” groaner), but the pair were so charismatic that they sold them to an appreciative audience.

Dean was the straight man, an ego in a tux, while Jerry was an id springing around the stage (a Harpo without the surreal gags and musical talent). As such, he liked to freak out older performers — he reportedly told Milton Berle from the stage of a Miami nightclub, “You're an old man, Berle — you're all washed up!” [Arthur Marx, Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime (Especially Himself), Hawthorn Books, 1974, p. 276]

He also put Bing Crosby on edge, as Der Bingle was sure that crazy Jer was going to grab his toupee:

Interestingly enough, Jer never outgrew this adolescent silliness. At 1:25 here, he mocks Tony Bennett, while Bennett is unaware anything is going on (the satellite was broadcasting him to Jerry's studio, but he was not hearing or seeing Jer). This little performance by Jerry ensured that Bennett — who at this time (1992) was undergoing a renaissance and cultivating an MTV audience — never returned to the Telethon.

Jerry had his rockin' moments, in films like Tashlin's Rock-a-bye Baby and his own The Patsy. Here he is doing his thing on the Telethon, at 4:30:

At other points, Jerry's familiarity with the drug scene (thanks to his own addictions to Percodan and cocaine) led him to rockin' rants about how he wanted money for his kids so much he'd take money contributed by drug dealers.

But the story that makes Jerry sound the most like a rock/drug casualty (a Borscht Belt Keith Moon) is this beauty from the biography King of Comedy by Shawn Levy (St. Martin’s Press, 1997):

In March 1973 Jerry did a two-week engagement with another King of Mean, Milton Berle, at the Deauville Hotel in Miami. The Jewish seniors who came to see the show disliked Jerry’s “energy,” according to the Levy book. He finally flipped out in a Keith Moon/Jim Morrison-like hotel-room-smashing manner:

“Some days later, in his hotel room with this assistant, Bob Harvey, he launched into a drunken tirade. ‘Miami sucks!’ he shouted. ‘The people here know from nothing. Nothing do they know. They know ‘shit’ and they know ‘fuck,’ and anything else is out of their league. If you don’t open with ‘fuck,’ you bomb. ‘Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock: Fuck him, let him stay there.’ Then you’re a hit.’

“He slammed a wine bottle against a wall: I christen this hotel ‘Motherfucker’! Pull out the pilings, you sons of bitches!’ And then he bruised himself setting an ashtray, a toilet bowl, and a tiled bathroom floor on fire with lighter fluid. ‘Burn! Burn, you motherfucker! Burn down the fucking hotel! Burn down the whole fucking town!’ ” [p. 383]
*****

Was the “Mean Jerry” persona just an act, Jerry taking his angst out onstage? Sadly, no. A bunch of things have been written about his supposedly “idyllic” life with his first wife Patti and six sons, but the real story came out for good when his son Joe wrote a tell-all article for the National Enquirer in 1989.

The article isn’t retrievable online, but the gist of it was included in a piece written by Scott Marks that can be found on an evangelist's site on the Wayback Machine site. The article was written in 2010 when Joe was found dead of an overdose at age 45. His older brother Gary went public with his opinion: “Joe had problems his entire life and I blame our father. Jerry Lewis is a mean and evil person. He was never loving and caring toward me or my brothers… (My father) doesn’t really care. He’s more worried about his career and his image than his own family.”

Here is the part of Marks' article (from Jan. 10, 2010) that outlines what was in the Enquirer article:

“— The Lewis family occupied a 32-room Bel Air mansion. Joe told the Enquirer, “The house was huge and posh, but there was no love in it.”

— The Nutty Bathroom: It was Jerry’s fortress of solitude. A ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign warned passersby to steer clear. According to Joe, this was no ordinary comfort station. It came stocked with a color TV, two telephones, two revolvers, a wet bar, refrigerator, bookcase, marijuana, Quaaludes, Nembutal, coke paraphernalia and an intercom system hooked up to each bedroom so Jerry could eavesdrop.

— The Strap: A thick leather belt Jerry used to administer punishment.

— The Rubber Snake: Joe and brother Christopher were roughhousing with a toy snake. The noise bothered Jerry so much that he took the toy and proceeded to whip Christopher with it. He took the snake into his dressing room and proceeded to chop it to shreds with his pocketknife. Once finished, he threw the pieces on their bed and said, 'That will teach you stupid kids.' ”

Other quotes from the article can be found in the Levy book:
"All my life I’ve been asked what it’s like being Jerry Lewis’s kid. And all my life I told the same lie: ‘it’s great, he’s great.’ It wasn’t great. It was pure hell. There were whippings, and he was always yelling. My older brothers got chased around the house and slapped and punched. Even today we’re all afraid of him…. My dad is a mean-spirited, self-centered jerk. Thank God for my mother. She was a saint….

“… There are two sets of Jerry’s kids. Those physically crippled by a dreadful disease and those emotionally crippled by a dreadful father.” [p. 451]

Just in case this all sounds like “recovered memories” from a vengeful son, here is Jerry in the late Sixties on Joan Rivers’ daytime chat show That Show discussing how he believes in corporal punishment for children. He believes in it so much that he describes the special belt he uses to whip his boys:

One of the sources for the most “Mean Jerry” stories is the Arthur Marx biography of Martin and Lewis Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime…. However, as Nick Tosches warned in his immaculately researched Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992), when reading Marx’s book, “Caveat lector.”

However, since the stories in the book are so mouth-wateringly nasty, I have to repeat at least a few, while admitting they are of dubious provenance. Firstly, in the aftermath of a failed lawsuit that found Dean and Jerry trying to retrieve millions of dollars stolen from them by their manager Abby Greshler, Jerry decided he needed to get revenge in another manner, one that didn’t involve a courtroom:

“...Jerry, lest anyone be unaware of his hatred for [manager Abby Greshler], had toilet paper printed with Abby Greshler's picture on every tissue, handed the rolls out to his friends as gifts, and decreed to his wife and children that thereafter no other kind of toilet paper would be used in the Lewis household.” [p. 126]

Marx also offers a few stories about Jerry’s fun in the office. The second story below tallies with the story that appeared years ago, I believe in Spy. That tale involved Jerry attending business meetings with a small valise. He would then “forget” the valise in the meeting room and later reclaim it. After he did this several times, it became obvious to his colleagues that he had an audio recorder in the valise and was recording what was said about him after he left the room.

“One of his tricks was to creep up behind Janie Thompson when she was talking on the phone or working at the typewriter and bind her to her desk with Scotch tape. If he were feeling particularly puckish, he might even tape her lips shut.

“… He liked to bug his office or living room at home and record intimate conversations unbeknownst to the participants. Then he'd play the tapes back to them in front of others, usually to everybody's mutual discomfort.

“Sometimes the items Jerry picked up with a tape recorder were a good deal more than just a private conversation. He went through one phase where he used to bug the Ladies' Room the women in his office used. This was good for a lot of laughs.

“Say a woman excused herself to 'powder her nose,'” as his personal secretary did one afternoon during a story conference that was attended by a number of important people at the studio. When she returned to the conference room, Jerry played back the tape on which he had recorded all her toilet sounds. When the poor woman realized what they were all listening to and laughing at, her face flushed a crimson color, and she nearly fainted from humiliation. She quit the job on the spot.” [pp. 218-19]

The Levy book includes the Jerry-as-Keith-Moon anecdote quoted above, but it also contains a fascinating chronicle of the ways in which Jerry sabotaged Alexander Cohen’s production of Hellzapoppin, which was to have been Jerry’s first appearance in a Broadway show (two decades later he redeemed himself by starring in the revival of Damn Yankees and causing no overt trouble).

I recommend you seek out Levy’s book to read the whole account, but the most eye-opening passages involve the duet that was written into the show, to be performed by Jerry and Lynn Redgrave. Redgrave never had a reputation as a diva or troublemaker, but for whatever reason Jerry loathed her and refused to work with her. The duet, for him, was out of the question, so he made it as difficult as possible to even do a rehearsal of the number:

When forced to rehearse a duet with Redgrave, “… he finally acceded, [with] amazingly ill grace, demanding that the rehearsal be held on Christmas morning and lying flat on the floor of the rehearsal space throughout the number. When he was through upstaging his costar, he stood up, announced of the number, ‘It’s cute, like the second stanza of the national anthem,’ and walked out, refusing to perform it ever again.” [p. 401]

The show never made it to Broadway because of Jerry’s sabotage, but it did play in out-of-town tryouts. One in Boston produced extremely nasty reviews, referring to “his long-since questionable talents” and “black patent leather hair.” One reviewer put it this way: “Shall we say Hellzapoppin needs work? We shall. We must.”

Jerry finally proclaimed that he would do the duet with anyone other than Redgrave. “… according to one published account, he said that all he was willing to do with his costar was ‘take out his cock and piss on her.’ ” [p. 403]

At one matinee, learning that his protégée Jill Choder — whom he had shoehorned into the production (she was an actress he had used on the Telethon in filmed sketches) — was having more of her part removed from the show, he refused to come out during the intermission. “Jerry declared he had a loaded gun in his dressing room.” [p. 403]

Courtesy of the Temple of Schlock blog.

Alexander Cohen lost 1.3 million dollars, sued Jerry for breach of contract, and finally received $39,000 in damages. It wasn’t the amount that mattered — Cohen wanted to humiliate Jerry and he did. It was the first time in Broadway history that a performer had to pay out to a producer for having killed a show.
*****

Jerry became so renowned for his temper that he worked a temper tantrum into his nightclub act. When I saw him in 1994, he got “mad” at the band, threw a mock-tantrum, and then they all walked offstage. So Jerry had conceived of a way where he could play-act what had really been happening up to that point: He could now berate his musicians for screwing up, and they could respond, giving the audience a “bit” to laugh at, while still letting both parties (Jerry and the band) indulge in the same thing that had been going on for some time. (This got particularly strange when he did this shtick on the Telethon, where he was indeed berating the musicians, but also acting out “the bit.”)

Here he is getting cranky with his bandleader:

And telling him off once again. One YT poster has put together a montage of all the times Jerry complained to the band, in each case saying he’d worked with Lou Brown “for 35 years” (over the course of several different Telethons, held in several different years).

The compilation below contains what the poster calls “bloopers” but which could more accurately be called “outbursts.” For the highlights, go to: 6:40 to see Jerry fuck with the pianist; 13:20 to see him making a “green card” joke with a Latino crew member; 14:48 to see him do his famous pidgin Japanese (Sid Caesar he was not); 15:53 to see him telling audience members who are leaving to “Get back in your seats!!!”

In this clip he refers to his crew as “Polish dentists”:

At 2:35 in this clip, he registers a complaint with several crew members about how bad the lighting and video effects are on the show. Here he refers (joshingly, but still…) to one of his “poster children” (an adult, middle-aged woman — even senior citizens were called “my kids” by Jerry) as a “drunken broad”:

*****

Much has been written about Jerry’s interactions with his “kids.” When they were small kids afflicted by the disease, Jerry treated them like precious relics. When they got older he would joke amiably with them. When they questioned the fact that he called them his “kids,” though? THAT really set him off. Here is an interview with Chris Wallace in which Jerry is asked about the group of former “poster children” who called themselves “Jerry Orphans.”

Jerry was able to eloquently defend his use of sympathy to solicit funds to fight MD. What was most injurious, however, was that he had a temper with small children if around them for too long a time (in one Vanity Fair he joked that one child needed a shot of Ritalin as he continued to get on his nerves) and he indeed did feel (as indicated in the interview above) that he should be a “hero” to the people afflicted with MD.
*****

Jerry was of a generation that played loose and easy with epithets. He was never, ever to be found using the n-word, but “fag”? Well, that was another matter entirely. Here he is doing random raucous comedy (if it can be called that) with a barbershop choir. At 2:10 he’s desperate for a quick laugh, so he mouths that one singer is a “fag” and that he “does it” with another singer. Then the inevitable tongue roll Jerry really enjoyed doing:

This particular phrase came up again on the Telethon when Jerry was being chummy with a cameraman. Offhandedly he referred to the guy’s son as a fag, and — well, you can even see him briefly hesitate, as if he knows “there will have to be an apology made for that…” (He did issue an apology, shortly after.)

*****

His feelings about women he never apologized for. One of his more notorious quotes was calling JFK “one of the great cunt men of all time... Except for me."

Jerry thought of himself as a serious playboy (his answer as to how he fell in love with his second wife while married to his first wife was something to the effect that he “didn’t feel” married…). When given a bad review by a woman writer in Montreal, he said, “You can’t accept one individual’s [opinion], particularly if it’s a female, and you know, God willing — I hope for her sake, it’s not the case — but when they get a period it’s really difficult for them to function as normal human beings.” [Levy, p. 444]

Asked by another women reporter about this remark, he answered, “Not with the type of sex drive I have, honey. I have nothing against women. As a matter of fact, there’s something about them that I love, but I just can’t put my finger on it.” [ibid]

Several years later he returned to this particular thought by saying that he didn't like women as comedians. When asked if there were no funny women comedians, he eventually came up with Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett as those he liked (both were/are comic actresses, not comedians). He offered in exchange that women have one blessing that men will never have: they can make babies!

A reporter did a follow-up question on these statements at a press conference:

Jerry in fact had a deep loathing for one woman comic: Joan Rivers. The interesting thing about this exchange of insults is that he claimed they never ever met in person (not true), and she claimed they only met on Jerry's Telethon. Evidently both forgot that he had been a guest on That Show, Joan's daytime talk show, in the late Sixties (see above).

Joan responded to Jerry's remarks in an interview with the great Ron Bennington.

Jerry didn't ever want to retire. He also didn't want to fall out of the news. So he made nasty statements during interviews that he knew would gain some traction as headlines (the Net needs news all the time….):

ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos

When Jerry did that interview in which he sideways-advocated for Trump, he also was asked about the then-current Syrian refugee crisis. His answers were classic Mean Jerry, but then again the wonder here is that an interviewer is asking Jerry his opinions about a refugee crisis in the first place!

The “Mean Jerry” legacy was kept intact by the fact that his final on-camera interview was with The Hollywood Reporter on the subject of working after 90. The chat was intended as a simple, straightforward talk, intended to get a sound bite for a “package” about celebs who would never retire.

The story goes that Jerry didn't realize there was a video component to the interview and was surprised to see a video crew enter his office. So he did his best to give the interviewer nothing he can use. Of particular interest is that he bolts up out of his chair in the end (by this time he was traveling via wheelchair – certainly needed given his many different medical conditions, but was it also an “SCTV”/Guy Caballero-like symbol to garner respect?).

Anyway, here's Jerry cringeworthy last talk on the record:

And because you do have to leave 'em laughing (or at least scratching their heads), here's the joke Jerry chose to tell the most in his final years. It's a very old joke – I've heard it on an old comedy album directed at hippies, but it became a joke about “punks” soon enough, and Jerry did his best to keep it alive by telling it several dozen (hundred?) times on nearly every talk show he appeared on in the last decade or so.

Notice that Jerry took on the Myron Cohen intro shtick, in which a particularly silly joke is prefaced by a very sober intro with some “real life” details that are totally made up. Herewith, Jerry greatest wheeze:

Thanks to Steve Korn and Rich Brown for suggestions of videos used in this piece. Also, Anthony Vitamia for an amazing array of Jerry pics to adorn the piece.