It’s one of the great gags in film theory. Writing in 1969, Cahiers du cinéma editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni devise a seven-part critical...
March 16, 1926, Newark, New Jersey, USA
August 20, 2017, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
To note that the films of Jerry Lewis are a rich, pleasurable and en...
“O dear god please give me the serenity to understand the things I can not change; to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”
The...
“At the same time, there is a contradiction because you don’t really think in terms of directing yourself. You refer and must refer to that ‘other bei...
In 1946, when the hot new comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis burst onto the New York nightclub scene, their outrageous irreverence was just th...
On what Jerry Lewis “has been”, the literature is abundant. And it is excellent at that: see, above all, Chris Fujiwara’s unsurpassable monography. Li...
Paralysis in Motion: The Nutty Professor (1963)
The Nutty Professor is entirely devoted to Professor Julius Kelp’s attempts to surmount his deficienc...
The Patsy and The Struggle of Jerry Lewis
In 1995, the novelist and critic Gilbert Adair published his Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Ye...
As Gilles Deleuze put it: “If you are a prisoner of the dream of the other, you are damned,” or, closer to Deleuze’s words, “you are screwed.” And it ...
Lewis often structures his films around a therapeutic theme: a character needs to be cured of some affliction or has a problem – at least partly inter...
Hitchcockian Comedy and Jewish Kabuki: Jerry Lewis’ The Big Mouth (1967)
One way to think about The Big Mouth (1967) is to see it as Jerry Lewis’ par...
