Word: comical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shout "Mel-vin!"? Would he, bearing in mind how he's been scorned by mainstream U.S. critics but revered in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, give his acceptance speech entirely in French? Would he lecture the Academy because it cited him for his humanitarian efforts and not his comic genius...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...