Word: martin
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...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 in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, Lewis's detractors have made him the derisive...
...That's so small of them. Lewis deserves an armful of awards as a gifted, if problematic, creator of his '60s movie comedies - and, even more, as the idiot personality and the brilliant creative force behind Martin and Lewis...
...Comedy duos had been a staple of vaudeville (Buck and 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...
...clicked immediately. In less than a year, they were earning $30,000 a week at Manhattan's Copacabana night club. In live appearances at movie theaters they stoked ardor of Beatles intensity. But it was on the infant medium of TV that Martin and Lewis were awesome. Their appearances on NBC's Colgate Comedy Hour made the viewer a co-conspirator in their anarchy; they broke the "fourth wall" as blithely as if it were a cardboard prop, and incorporated their famous arguments into gag lyrics for their duets. Their jokes became instant catchphrases, like the running gag where Jerry...
...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...