As if to prove that fate is the best comedy writer, this weekend we get a final Labor Day with Jerry Lewis.
The comic actor and filmmaker, who made the Labor Day weekend his signature holiday by hosting telethons for decades to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, died on Aug. 20 at age 91.
Turner Classic Movies, which often airs a retrospective for a just-departed star a couple of weeks after his or her death, took advantage of the coincidence of the calendar by scheduling a Lewis marathon on Labor Day. The tribute of five movies begins at 6 p.m. Mountain time — around the time Lewis would have broken out “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at the end of his telethons back in the day.
Lewis’ death has brought out plenty of remembrances and appreciations of the comedian, the artist, the philanthropist and the man — and how those different roles were often contradictory.
By most reports, Lewis was not a pleasant person to be around. His infamous feud with his old stage partner, Dean Martin, lasted 20 years. He was testy with reporters, and his humor — like that of many people from a previous generation — often was cruel to women, minorities and the LGBT community. The Daily Beast reported that Lewis has one daughter who lives homeless in Philadelphia and an adopted son who “disowned the entire family,” according to Lewis’ former manager.
Then there was the matter of his connection with the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Lewis hosted the Labor Day telethon from 1966 to 2010, and other events for a decade before that. He used to brag that he raised $2.6 billion for the cause.
It wasn’t without controversy. Even before the falling-out he and the charity had in 2011, critics had questioned the paternalistic, patronizing way Lewis talked about “my kids.”
Lewis’ death made me think back to 1995, when I met disabled-rights activist Billy Golfus at the Sundance Film Festival. Golfus had co-directed a documentary, “When Billy Broke His Head … and Other Tales of Wonder,” about disabled people, like him, and the way they are depicted in the media.
Lewis was one of Golfus’ targets, and his documentary included clips from the Labor Day telethon that demonstrated how condescending Lewis’ preaching could be. When I asked Golfus what he might say if he ran into Lewis (who was in Park City that year with a movie), Golfus replied, “I’d have nothing to say to him.”
All of those negative aspects of Lewis’ personality are — like his dual role in his best-known film, “The Nutty Professor” — in contrasts to his gifts as an entertainer and filmmaker.
In the mid-’50s, Lewis was the biggest box-office star in America, with the masses flocking to practically any comedy that put his name on the marquee. His humor was lowbrow, to be sure, but it had an audience.
Some compared Lewis to his modern counterpart, Adam Sandler, in that they both made tons of money making stupid comedies. There’s a crucial difference, though: Lewis sweated over every joke and pratfall, while Sandler can barely be counted on to show up in his own movies.
In “Pixels,” the last live-action Sandler title to open in theaters (before his Netflix deal mercifully put his movies outside my jurisdiction), Sandler did a gag where his character did a little moonwalk — and the production hired a body double to perform the dance move. If Lewis were doing it, he would have practiced for weeks to master the moonwalk himself, but only after rewriting the scene until the move would actually be funny.
Lewis’ studio in the 1960s, Paramount, gave him carte blanche to make movies the way he wanted. For “The Ladies Man,” he had a four-story-high set built on two soundstages and put his camera on a 58-foot-tall crane. He was also the first to strap a video camera to the film camera, so he could watch his performance instantly — an innovation, called “video assist,” that’s now common.
Lewis’ craftsmanship partly explains the running joke of his career, that he was so popular in France. The French film legend Jean-Luc Godard, in a 1980 interview with Dick Cavett, said of Lewis, “He’s more a painter, maybe, than a director — and he probably doesn’t even know.” When Cavett asked in return, “Do you find him funny?” Godard replied, “Very. Even when it’s not funny, it’s more funny because it’s not funny.”
Lewis’ death — as happened with Michael Jackson and other entertainers with unsavory personal lives — allows consumers of entertainment to separate the man from the work. We can watch his movies this Labor Day and laugh with them, without being confronted with the messiness of his real life.
Jerry Lewis on TV<br>Turner Classic Movies will show a marathon of Jerry Lewis movies on Monday, Labor Day. Here are the titles (all times MDT):<br>6 p.m. • ”The Nutty Professor” (1963).<br>8 p.m. • ”The King of Comedy” (1983).<br>10 p.m. • ”The Stooge” (1952).<br>Midnight • ”The Bellboy” (1960).<br>1:30 a.m. • ”The Disorderly Orderly” (1964).