A jester both silly & stormy

Sometimes the measure of a career isn’t so much in the work that you do as in the influence that you have. A case in point: Jerry Lewis.

Lewis, who died last Sunday at 91, was a towering figure in the entertainment business, but his résumé was almost devoid of the kinds of honours Hollywood bestows on its most respected artistes. Despite being one of the biggest box office stars in the world in the 1950s, he went 0-for-his-career in Oscar nominations, winning only the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2009. He had just one Emmy nomination back in 1952. He won a few lesser awards, but also managed some “worst of” citations from the Razzies and others.

Partly this was a result of his personality — he was, by numerous accounts, not easy to work with, and if you’re an entertainer, the people you clash with on the job are often also the ones voting on awards.

But it was largely because of the nature of his output: lots of low comedy, an abundance of pratfalls and funny faces, but (‘The King of Comedy’ and some others excepted) not much of the kind of substantive or enduring work that brings statuettes.

There aren’t many members of what might be called the 3J ‘Tonight Show’ club — Lewis was on the Jimmy Fallon, Johnny Carson and Jack Parr versions. (In the Jay Leno era, according to the Internet Movie Data Base, he seems to have preferred David Letterman’s show.) That longevity, and his sheer body of work in films and television, are starkly at odds with his small list of laurels.

Yet Lewis did earn plenty of accolades — from comedians in the generations after him. Practically any comic who was young when Lewis was a top star will happily gush about how films like The Bellboy (1960) and The Nutty Professor (1963), as well as Lewis’s earlier movies with Dean Martin, shaped the future performer’s youthful sensibilities.

“They came along at a time, right after World War II, no one was ever that anarchic,” Richard Belzer said of Martin and Lewis in a 2011 documentary on Encore called Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis, one of several re-examinations of Lewis’s career that have turned up in recent years.

The pair seemed, Belzer noted, dangerous — a template that subsequent generations of comics adapted to their own times, using comedy to prod, startle, challenge. And Lewis in particular was a bridge of sorts, reviving the physical comedy of the early film era and passing it along to comic minds still in the formative stages.

“Jerry went back to the silent era, and he brought visual sight gags back to the American movie theatres,” Steven Spielberg said in the same Encore documentary. “They weren’t doing that for a long time.”

Carol Burnett, Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Crystal and others were also in that documentary. So were Chevy Chase and Alec Baldwin. Does a thread connect Chase’s Gerald Ford and Baldwin’s Donald Trump from Saturday Night Live to Jerry Lewis? You bet.