The Jerry Lewis Show

Jerry Lewis is revered in the film industry as the inventor of the 'video follow', a device which is now standard equipment on big-budget movies: it gives film directors an instant video playback of each film take, without the time-consuming and expensive process of printing daily rushes. While I give Lewis credit for this innovation, I find his talents as a performer and director quite minor. The only Lewis performance which impressed me was his dramatic turn in 'The King of Comedy' (which, to Lewis's credit, apparently he largely improvised). In the rest of his filmography, there are occasional flashes of extreme originality, such as the typewriter sequence in 'Who's Minding the Store?'. Apart from such sporadic delights, Lewis remains for me someone who walks on the sides of his feet while screeching "Hey, lady!".

Jerry Lewis starred in two self-named TV series. The first one (1963) combined a chat-show interview format with comedy sketches. Advance word predicted that this series was incredibly bad. A few hours before the premiere episode was aired live, a protester was seen outside the ABC-TV studio with a sign reading 'Ban the bomb before it goes off!' This same wisecrack applies just as well to Jerry Lewis's 1967 TV show.

'The Jerry Lewis Show' ('67 edition) used a variety format ... but was slow, dull and self-indulgent with it, featuring some very bad artistic decisions. The main visual motif was a fingerpost: an elaborate depiction of a hand with one pointing finger, and a sign or label to tell us what the finger is pointing towards. On 'The Jerry Lewis Show', each sketch or musical number began with a rostrum camera panning slowly across a brightly-coloured drawing of a long and elaborately designed arm, ending in a fingerpost with the name of the guest star who was about to perform, or the title of the sketch we were about to witness. There was an attempt to vary the designs of the fingerposts to match the acts which they introduced: for instance, the Osmonds (a quartet at this point) were introduced with a shot of four intertwining fingerposts, each a different colour, converging towards a caption reading 'THE OSMONDS'. All that effort to such little effect.

Tone-deaf Jerry Lewis saw fit to afflict us with his musical 'talents' in some weird production numbers. One episode featured a dreadful song called 'An Epicurean Delight', in which Lewis and two guest stars, all dressed as chefs, cavorted round a banquet table and sang(?) about how to create the perfect meal whilst getting drunk on cooking wine.

This short-lived series featured Jerry Lewis in awful comedy sketches which were so generic that any performer could have done them just as well ... or just as badly. Examples: a fingerpost points to a caption reading 'A TOMB WITH A VIEW', which leads into a sketch featuring Jerry and a woman guest-star as archaeologists opening an Egyptian tomb. (She precedes him with an aerosol spray which we're meant to think is an air freshener, but she's really killing a fly.) Another sketch: Jerry is sent to a lumber camp to sack a brawny hot-tempered foreman named Brannigan, and then Jerry must take Brannigan's place in charge of a crew of hostile lumberjacks. Have another: Jerry and a male guest star (doing a bad imitation of Dean Martin) play jobless vaudevillains. The other guy decides to do a ventriloquist act, and he bullies Jerry into pretending to be his dummy. He draws vertical lines on Jerry's chin to make his mouth look like a vent-figure's jaw.

Just occasionally in this brief series, Jerry aspired to something greater. In one long sketch with no dialogue, Jerry played a schlub who's locked in a penny arcade after closing time. He spots a Ray Bradbury-ish waxwork fortune-teller with a sign reading 'The Power of Positive Thinking'. This inspires Jerry to make various things happen just by pulling faces and making wishes. Of course, all the things he wishes for are stupid. This sort of silent character-study reminds me of Ernie Kovacs and the brilliant sketches he performed as his silent Everyman character named Eugene. But Kovacs's 'Eugene' sketches were very funny and featured some clever technical innovations, whereas Jerry Lewis (here, at least) isn't funny at all.

I suppose that the real culprits on 'The Jerry Lewis Show' are the inept scriptwriters. But, as one-man-band Jerry Lewis was the producer who hired them, he must ultimately take the blame for their presence.

'The Jerry Lewis Show' is totally unworthy of revival. Its badness doesn't even attain the level of so-bad-it's-good campiness. It's just bad, full stop.

I liked the show very much, even maybe some sketches weren't not that good! But Jerry was always brilliant and he has got an excellent comedy and music talent!!!

I can't understand why some people are talking so bad about Jerry Lewis, because I don't think that comedy were that much successful if Jerry wasn't there. To me he is still the King of Comedy. And Comedy is a really hard business. I think it is easier to make them people cry as to make them laugh and Jerry Lewis had and still has got the talent to make the people laugh and that's why I admirer him very much! "The Jerry Lewis Show" was in my eyes a very good show. And it was not Jerrys fault, if some people don't like some of the sketches. Because you can't make sketches who everybody does like.

So, I think he did a great job! Thank you, Mr. Jerry Lewis!!! :)

When you watch this series, you'll notice that it doesn't seem like the Jerry you remember from the Colgate comedy hour or from his movies. The issue was that in 1965 Jerry Lewis fell off a stage while he was performing and cracked a vertebrae in his back. After that incident, he was in excruciating pain for decades. He had to take pain killers for years. His performances from that point on on were affected. Jerry Lewis was one of the hardest working and best physical comedians of all time, and it's a shame that this happened to him. A lot of his genius was stifled due to the medications he had to endure to relieve his pain. So when you watch these episodes, keep in mind that Jerry is actually in pain while making them so please cut him some slack.

"The Jerry Lewis Show" was a variety show which ran on NBC for two seasons between 1967 and 1969. It is not the well known ABC disaster of the early 1960s. This was a color show featuring Jerry and top notch guest stars in musical specialties and comedy sketches. The writers of the sketches were some of the most successful TV comedy writers. In December of 2009, Infinity Video released a package of 12 shows. However, "disappointing" is understating the situation. We were promised 13 hour long variety shows. What was released was a syndicated comedy sketch package, probably prepared in the 1980s, similar to "Carol Burnett and Friends" from the "Carol Burnett Show" and "Carson's Comedy Classics" from the "Tonight Show".

Jerry's theme music, "Smile", has been replaced by some synth 80s theme music and the hour long variety shows have been cut down to 24 minutes. All that remains are edited comedy sketches. Most of these sketches are flat and unfunny. Some are re-workings of sketches Jerry performed with Dean Martin on the "Colgate Comedy Hour". The sketches usually feature Jerry either as "Sidney Portnoy" or the "Nutty Professor". The best sketches are those which feature Nanette Fabray as Jerry's co-star.

Almost all of the musical numbers have been removed. (For some reason, a short dance number for Joey Heatherton and the song "Step to the Rear" from the "classic" musical "How Now Dow Jones" and sung by Laurence Harvey !!! are left alone.) I guess Infinity either did not want to pay musical royalties or felt that the musical numbers were "gay" (corny, non-rock musical presentations that could only be of interest to the fruitiest, theater-loving homosexuals).

On their own, the comedy sketches are extremely weak. Maybe within the context of the variety show, they were acceptable. Jerry tries hard, and the guest stars are first rate, but nothing seems to work. One of the sketches, "Sidney Rents an Apartment" is available on Youtube in its entirety. Of course, Infinity, or the original syndicators, removed the musical number which makes this sketch charming.

Even for the staunchest Jerry fans, this show and this collection are a big let down.