Word: jers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...