1.

SMORGASBORD
Smorgasbord (retitled Cracking Up by the distributor) is Jerry Lewis's last self-directed feature film.
It first opened in France in 1983; it never received a proper American release. (In the US, it was
immediately relegated to cable television -- which is where I saw it for the first time). And
Smorgasbord still isn't very well known today -- even among Lewis aficionados. (It is, for instance,
the only one of Lewis's self-directed films not to appear in the index to Enfant Terrible, an academic
essay collection edited by Murray Pomerance in 2002, which otherwise covers Lewis' film career
quite comprehensively). Yet I think that Smorgasbord is one of Jerry Lewis's greatest films; in what
follows, I will try to explain why.
Let's begin with some general observations. It is often said -- indeed, it is almost a clich -- that
comedy is born of despair. Laughter is an outlet for misery. Turning horrible circumstances into a joke
is a way of detaching oneself from such circumstances, and as a result avoiding madness and despair.
Comedy thus offers us a kind of catharsis. However, this is not a purgation of terror and pity, as
Aristotle maintained in the case of tragedy. Rather, it is a purgation of awkwardness and discomfort;
or, more intensely, of shame, embarrassment, and humiliation.
But how is such a purgation to be accomplished? Fear and terror are sublime; they point to an
overwhelming force, whose advent involves a complete rupture. In the fate of Oedipus or King Lear, a
whole world is destroyed. But awkwardness and embarrassment do not work in such a manner. They
are worldly states of feeling, often manifested in the most petty details of everyday life. Their
purgation, therefore, cannot take place on a grand scale, or all at once. It is rather a slow and
excruciating process.
In Jerry Lewis's films, therefore, cathartic purgation does not take place in an explosive moment of
relief (as is the case with Aristotelian tragedy, or for that matter with that sort of comedy that follows
the model of Freud's theory of jokes). Lewis's films are devoid of grand conflcits. Instead, they
wallow in these harrowing, yet homely and all-too-familiar, negative emotional states. They push
conditions of awkwardness and discomfort and embarrassment all the way to the point of exhaustion.
The jokes in Lewis's films are often extended in time, beyond the breaking point; or else, they are
repeated ad nauseam, until they are no longer funny. At the point of exhaustion, humor no longer
resides in the (by now overly familiar) joke itself, but rather, reflexively, in the very fact that it is
being reiterated without reason.
Take, for instance, the scene in Smorgasbord in which Lewis's character tries to order a meal in a
restaurant from a zealous waitress, played by Zane Busby. The menu seems to contain a multitude of
minute, and nearly meaningless, alternatives. Does Jerry want juice? Busby lists the choices in a
grating monotone: "We have apple, grapefruit, pineapple, apricot, orange, lemon, lemon crush,
banana, asparagus, avocado, nectarine, tangerine, cherry, or pitless watermelon." And so on, for the
salad, the salad dressing, the main course, the rest of the meal, and even beyond. By the end of the
dinner, Lewis is utterly worn down and exhausted.
This sequence never really comes to a climax; it is abandoned rather than concluded. We could easily
imagine it continuing to infinity. (And indeed, Busby twice reappears in the film, as a parking
attendant and then as a movie patron, both times again repeating long lists of alternatives in a
monotone). The joke doesn't have a punchline. For us in the audience, there isn't any sudden outburst
of laughter. Rather, the humor lies in the whole drawn-out process of the scene, and in the very
impossibility of its resolution. We don't get an explosion, but something more like a continual
smoldering. For Lewis, paradoxically, comic relief is a slow and excruciating process.
As humor arises from discomfort, it also tends to mobilize a strong element of aggression. I feel
irritated, and I want to expel the irritant. Humor can therefore easily issue in violence (think of the
Three Stooges), or in insult directed aggressively against others (think of Don Rickles). But Jerry
Lewis's comedy does not work this way. For Lewis -- and this is perhaps more generally true --
comedy is most emotionally riveting, and most therapeutically purging, when the aggression is turned
against oneself, instead of against others. Jewish humor in particular often involves a strong element
of self-deprecation. One sees this in nearly all of Lewis's work -- and also in the early movies of
Woody Allen, and in the shows of Larry David today. When Lewis the comedian skewers and
lacerates himself, he wards off by anticipation the mutiple humiliations that are sure to be imposed
upon him by others.
This is a quintessential strategy that has historically been adopted by Jews, by women, and by
members of other oppressed groups. As Lewis himself puts it, in his book The Total Film-Maker:
Comedy, humor, call it what you may, is often the difference between sanity and insanity,
survival and disaster, even death. It's man's emotional safety valve. If it wasn't for humor,
man could not survive emotionally. Peoples who have the ability to laugh at themselves are
the peoples who eventually make it. Blacks and Jews have the greatest sense of humor
simply because their safety valves have been open so long.
Jewish humor (and African American humor as well) highlights the absurdity of a sort of suffering
that nonetheless cannot be avoided; indeed, a suffering that its victims internalize in spite of
themselves. We might well compare Jewish humor to another great Jewish invention that endeavors to
deal with unavoidable, internalized suffering: psychoanalysis. Like humor, psychoanalysis gives relief
by providing a "safety valve" through which one may give vent to otherwise unmentionable miseries.
The analytic session, like the movie screen, works as a "safety valve" or a space for purgation. The
couch, like the screen, is a place where blockages or "complexes" can be worked through vicariously,
in relative safety. This is possible because of what Freud called the "neutrality" of the psychoanalytic
session. In comedy films, it is similarly possible because of what Kant called the "disinterest" of
aesthetic response. In both cases, sufferers are able to re-enact their traumas vicariously. By
reiterating their suffering in this context, they are able to master it -- or at least to lessen its impact.
This is why psychoanalytic truths, like comedic insights, generally tend to be self-deprecating ones.
The psychoanalytic "cure" consists in recognizing, and giving voice to, the most unpleasant and self-
discrediting things that one can find out about oneself. However, psychoanalysis, like comedy, doesn't
really provide a permanent solution. The sources of misery still persist, and still torment the client of
psychoanalysis, or the spectator of comedy, even after the "treatment" is completed. Freud himself
says that the best that psychoanalysis can do is to relegate the sufferer to "ordinary unhappiness." This
is why psychoanalysis tends to be, as Freud acknowledged, an interminable process, like a shaggy-dog
story that never comes to a proper end -- or like Lewis's gag with Zane Busby in Smorgasbord.
Indeed, Jerry Lewis's quintessentially Jewish comedy tends to be both self-deprecating and
interminable. The humor of Lewis's films often revolves around frustration and incompetence. Lewis's
persona is never able to fulfill the tasks that have been assigned to him; as he struggles interminably
to come to some conclusion, his well-meaning efforts instead spread chaos far and wide. Every one of
Lewis's character's actions seems to have limitless reverberations, both centrifugally and centripetally.
Waves of destruction spread outwards, to infect or contaminate other people, and to overwhelm
Lewis's physical surroundings; at the same time, these waves also redound back upon Lewis himself,
in such a way as to repeat or reaffirm the very irritation that set things off in the first place. Lewis as
filmmaker seeks to track these movements in as much detail as possible, and to articulate them in
formal cinematic terms, through the careful manipulation of space and time, of bodily postures and
facial expressions, and of camera movements and editing rhythms.
In the opening, pre-credit sequence of Smorgasbord, Warren Nefron (Jerry's main character) tries to
kill himself. But he proves to be so incompetent that he cannot even accomplish this. As ominous
music plays on the soundtrack, a man enters a hotel room. We do not see his face, but only his lower
body. He opens a briefcase, and removes a bomb, a gun, a bottle of poison, a bottle of pills, and a hand
grenade. Then he takes out a long rope, already formed into a noose. He stands on a chair, loops the
rope through something on the ceiling, lifts up the noose to put it around his head (presumably; his
head still remains out of frame), and kicks the chair away. But instead of swinging freely through the
air from the rope, his legs float gently down back to the floor. Only then does the camera pull back to
reveal Lewis'sentire figure. Lewis's face registers a look of exasperated, yet unsurprised, frustration
(as if he were saying, fatalistically, "oh no, not again..."). His body seems elongated and rubbery as he
slowly falls to the floor, the noose still around his neck.
Annoyed but undaunted, Warren tries to hang himself again. Once more he loops the rope on the
ceiling, and puts his head in the noose. This time, however, instead of climbing onto a chair, he
remains standing on the floor. He silently mouths the word "goodbye." Then he attempts, quite
bizarrely, to hoist himself up into the air by pulling down on the other end of the rope. I wonder if
there is a subliminal pun here; it's almost as if he were trying to literalize the expression "hoist by his
own petard." But in any case, such a procedure is of course not physically possible. Even if Warren
were somehow able to lever up his own weight, his grip would slacken once he started to suffocate, so
that he would (once again) fall back to the floor. Instead of this, however, something unexpected
happens. As Warren tugs on the rope, he pulls the ceiling down on himself. Cut to a shot of a large
skyscraper imploding.
Warren's next attempt to kill himself is still more elaborate and convoluted. He sits in a chair in a
hotel room, watching a Western on TV. A rifle is poised on a table behind him, aimed right at his
head. Warren has tied one end of a string to the rifle's trigger, and the other to the knob of the door to
his room. He calls room service, asking for some ice. The idea is that, when the bellboy opens the door
to deliver the ice, the string will be pulled, the gun will go off, and Warren will be shot. But of course,
as always happens, Warren's plan goes awry. The bellboy knocks, but he does not enter. It turns out
that the door to the room is locked. Wearily, Warren gets up from his chair and opens the door. The
trigger is pulled, and the rifle shoots. The bullet goes through the television set, and kills one of the
cowboys on the TV screen. Another cowboy turns, faces out of the screen, draws his gun, and fires a
shot that exits the TV screen and kills the bellboy standing in the doorway of the hotel room. Warren's
suicide attempt has been foiled again; instead, he shamefacedly sneaks away.
Of course, I have ruined Lewis's jokes by explaining them at such great length. What's more, I have
taken Lewis's entirely visual setups, and tediously translated them into words. But I have not done this
only in order to underline the grimness that, in the great Jewish comedy tradition, lies at the base of
even Lewis's silliest jokes. I am also trying to call attention to the heavy intricacy of Lewis's sight
gags. Apparently unable to kill himself directly, Warren builds cumbersome and elaborate machines
in order to do the job. His own body is just one component of these machines. I am reminded of Buster
Keaton's magical rapport with machines, of Rube Goldberg's complicated devices for performing
simple tasks, and even of Deleuze and Guattari's "desiring machines." Lewis's machines, like all of
these, cross boundaries and flatten hierarchies. They ignore distinctions between things and their
representations: the bodies in the hotel room and the images on the TV screen are equally affected.
But in one crucial way, Lewis's machines are the inverse of those constructed by Keaton, Goldberg,
and Deleuze and Guattari. The difference is that Lewis's machines are neurotic rather than schizo, and
reiterative rather than transformative. They only seem able to produce unintended consequences. For
all their ramifying, disproportionate, and transformative effects upon their surroundings, they leave
Lewis's own persona weirdly unaffected, or stuck in the same place. At the end of Smorgasbord's pre-
credit sequence -- and indeed throughout most of the film, until the very end -- Warren Nefron is still
a "misfit" (as he later calls himself): out of whack with his surroundings, and uneasily trapped within
himself. Comedy may be purgative and transformative for others, but it seems to have no efficacy for
the comedian himself.
Consider yet another example from Smorgasbord. Warren hires a trainer to help him give up smoking.
(The trainer is played by the great Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus). Every time that Warren so
much as starts to light a cigarette, Butkus arrives, seemingly from nowhere, and punches him out. It
doesn't even seem to matter where Warren is: Butkus shows up in a closed elevator, and comes to life
from being a statue in the museum. Giving up smoking is thus an interminable process, just like
psychoanalysis itself. Warren's pain and insecurity drives him to try to relieve himself (or self-
medicate) through the comfort of smoking: indeed, Butkus begins the "treatment" by evoking for
Warren all the pleasures of lighting up, only to scream at him when he nods and agrees. Subsequently,
each time that Warren tries to light up, the brutal interruption of this comfort means that he becomes
still more pained and insecure, which means that he will inevitably reach for another cigarette, sooner
or later...
In nearly all of Lewis's self-directed films, his characters have no way to address their dilemmas.
They are unable to assert themselves through speech; which means that they are forced to act out (or
obsessively repeat) these dilemmas instead. The comedy actively orchestrated by Lewis the director
can only be suffered passively by Lewis the performer. In The Bellboy, Stanley never gets to speak,
because nobody ever gives him the chance to say anything. They are too busy giving him orders, or
reproaching him for his errors on the job. In The Nutty Professor, Julius Kelp cannot express his desire
for Stella, except through the voice of his narcissistic alter ego, Buddy Love. In The Big Mouth,
Gerald similarly struggles in vain to get anyone to listen to his lengthy explanations of his "problem"
(which is not falling in love, as his girlfriend Suzie hopes, but rather his unwanted entanglement with
gangsters, as a result of his uncanny resemblance to somebody who is supposed to be dead).
In Smorgasbord, this incapacity is both epitomized and inverted; this is one of many ways in which
the film works as a culmination of Lewis's entire oeuvre. Speech becomes possible for Warren, only
because he goes to the psychoanalyst: somebody who is paid to listen to him. The film insists upon --
even as it ridicules -- the necessity of paying the analyst; you can only get someone to listen to you at
the price of what Jacques Lacan called a "symbolic debt." As Doctor Pletchick (the fatuous
psychoanalyst played by Herb Edelman) reminds Warren at one point, "money is no object. We accept
furniture, television sets, stereos..." Through this sort of payment, the "talking cure" becomes a kind of
relay, much in the same way that media like television (in the pre-credit sequence) and musical
recording, and also film itself, work as relays. The analytic sessions do not really relieve Warren of
his anxieties and incapacities; instead, these analytic sessions (or cinematic scenes) reframe these
anxieties, and offer a space for their endless elaboration.
The confluence of psychoanalysis and Jewish humor is usually taken in a more "serious" (if I may use
that word) manner than Jerry Lewis is ever willing to provide. One may think of Woody Allen's films,
which I have already mentioned; in the course of Allen's career, he moves from scattershot absurdist
comedy to a more broodingly existential way of reflecting upon the absurdity of life. One may also
think of Philip Roth's early novel Portnoy's Complaint, in which several hundred pages of manic self-
loathing and self-justification culminate in the punchline of the psychoanalyst saying: "So [said the
doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?" Both Allen and Roth underscore the interminability of
psychoanalysis to great comedic effect. But they also both treat psychoanalysis itself with a kind of
"seriousness" and "sophistication" (once again I am unsure if these are the proper words) that Lewis
refuses, and that he may well be incapable of.
In other words, Lewis -- unlike Allen or Roth, and in sharp contrast to Freud's own recommendations -
- refuses to sublimate. He rejects the notion that psychonalysis could treat a neurotic blockage by
transferring it to a higher plane, just as he rejects the notion that comedy could be redeemed by being
sublimated into a "higher" cinematic genre. Lewis notes, in The Total Film-Maker, that comedies
never win Oscars, and that indeed "there is no comedy category" at all in the Academy Awards: "the
whole smell of 'Comedy, Jesus, that's low-brow' has infiltrated motion-picture-industry awards," he
writes. In his treatment of psychoanalysis no less than his treatment of film as entertainment, Lewis
remains resolutely "low-brow." Although his comedies seem to offer -- as I am trying to argue -- a
sort of purgation, they are never edifying or "elevating." Even the sentimentality of which Lewis is
often accused is the result of his stubborn refusal of sublimation (even when it comes in the anodyne
form of "sophistication").
Although Lewis also engages psychoanalysis directly in Three on a Couch, it is only in Smorgasbord
that he pushes the link between comedy and psychoanalysis to its furthest consequences. For here, the
film itself directly coincides with the process of the supposed psychoanalytic cure. Smorgasbord has
almost no linear plot; it consists in a series of independent gags -- including the ones that I have
already discussed -- bound together, at best, by the excuse that they are all episodes that Warren
recounts to the analyst. The incidents could therefore be regarded as a series of flashbacks. But even
this conceit is stretched, first by Warren's recounting of incidents in the lives of his ancestors (played
of course by Lewis as well), and then by sequences that allow Lewis to impersonate yet other
characters with whom Warren only comes into momentary contact (like a Southern sheriff, and a New
Age guru).
Many of Lewis's movies -- stretching back to the very first film he directed, The Bellboy, have an
episodic or picaresque structure, rather than a strict linear narrative. But in Smorgasbord, Lewis
pushes this tendency further than ever before. Warren Nefron needs psychoanalysis because he is
basically an empty shell of a man, devoid of any unity of "character." He is nothing more than a
disaggregated collection of nervous tics, irresistible compulsions, and flailing, self-defeating attempts
at what might loosely be conceived as "normality." But psychoanalytic treatment itself rejects the goal
of a unified self or stable ego (the latter was conceived by the "ego psychology" that, as far back as the
1950s, both Jacques Lacan and Norman O. Brown already denounced as a betrayal of Freudian ideas).
And the psychoanalytic method of "free association" -- even if, as Freud claimed, it is ultimately
governed by the "strict determinism of mental events" -- appears on the surface as a picaresque,
seemingly random, series of digressions and non sequiturs. Precisely because it is a sequence of
seemingly disconnected scenes, Smorgasbord is closer to the underlying logic of Lewis's comedy -- as
well as to both the psychoanalytic conception of neurosis and to the psychoanalytic treatment of
neurosis -- than any more unified narrative possibly could be. (This is evidently also one reason for
the original title of the film: Lewis offers us, as it were, a buffet of culinary alternatives, rather than a
narrative that starts with soup and ends with dessert).
What all the multiple, proliferating sequences scattered throughout Smorgasbord have in common is
only (but crucially) that they all turn upon the fundamental lability, and yet seemingly unchangeable
klutziness or incapacity, of Lewis's comedic persona. For instance, one sequence recounts the fate of
Warren's distant ancestor Jacques, a French prisoner on Devil's Island. Lewis uses a mock French
accent. (This would seem to be referring obliquely to his popularity in France, and to the way that
many Americans have come to dismiss him as a figure whom only the French love). The accent is an
odd construction: it mixes French words with English ones, mangling the pronunciation of both by
speaking the words of each language with vowel sounds more typical of the other. It also strays into
additional linguistic territory, introducing Japanese intonations at one point, and German words at
another. The effect is to produce an alarming instability, through a process of continual modulation.
Yet at the same time, the point of this whole episode is Jacques' inability to escape from his prison. He
carefully crafts "ze dummy zat looks like moi," so that he can leave it in his cell, in order to fool the
guards, as he runs away. But when the guards toss out the old mattress in which the dummy has been
concealed, the dummy leaves the prison and "escapes" to Paris on horseback, while Jacques is left
behind in his cell. Once again, Lewis's persona is unable to achieve freedom, even as his machinations
have cascading effects beyond the limits of his own confinement.
The actual credit sequence of Smorgasbord, immediately following the failed suicide attempts, shows
Warren entering the psychoanalyst's office for the first time. Lewis's brilliance as a physical comedian
-- I am almost tempted to say, as a contortionist -- is on full display, as Warren attempts to walk
across the office floor and to sit in its sofas and chairs. The floor is immaculate, waxed to a bright,
gleaming finish; the furniture is plastic and smooth. As a result, Warren simply cannot get a grip: he
keeps doing pratfalls on the floor, and sliding off the chairs. Presumably Warren's inability to so much
as get across the room is a physical (or perhaps physiological?) expression of his terror at exposing
himself to the analyst's inquiries. The analyst's office is a "smooth space" (as Deleuze and Guattari
might put it) within which Warren fears that he may simply dissolve or slip away.
Despite this terror, Warren nonetheless tries to deal with the situation with his usual earnestness and
concern for details. He places cigarettes in a trail across the floor, in order to anchor his footsteps.
Typically, he crawls forward to lay down the cigarettes, and then -- despite having already reached the
chair which is his immediate objective -- lets himself slide back to his starting place, in order to walk
the same distance he has already traversed. As always for Lewis's comedic personae, the procedure
that he settles upon to solve his problems becomes more important in its own right, than actually
achieving the very goal for which the procedure was originally devised. This is yet another formula
for the interminability, both of comedy and of psychoanalysis.
In the credit sequence, Warren similarly solves the problem of sliding off the smooth plastic sofa and
chairs by dousing a pocked handkerchief in alcohol, and then sitting upon it, thereby creating enough
friction to stay in place. Once again, Lewis's persona tries to resolve an intractable problem by
scrupulously ignoring its major causes, and instead focusing on its most minute details. This is what
allows Lewis's gags to continue at such length: each of them involves a series of ingenious partial
solutions that actually do work to a certain extent, but also result in prolonging the basic situation that
they are meant to address. Yet again, this is the very mechanism by which both comedic invention and
psychoanalytic experimentation are subject to interminable extension.
I am sorely tempted to go on and analyze every single sequence of Smorgasbord in detail. In
particular, I would like to say more about the psychoanalyst, Dr. Pletchick, who in Herb Edelman's
performance becomes the last in a long line of overbearing, yet ultimately vain, ridiculous, and empty,
male authority figures appearing in nearly all of Lewis's movies. The deflation of patriarchal authority
is a crucial element of Lewis's comedy, and one that dovetails with its psychoanalytic affiliations. But
for reasons of length I will drop these considerations, and instead skip ahead to the film's conclusion.
I have been arguing that comedy and psychoanalysis are both properly interminable, so that the
purgation they promise is only delivered piecemeal, and can never be achieved once and for all. Yet of
course, any film, like any treatment, empirically needs to conclude at some point (even if this, most
grimly, only happens with the death of the protagonist or analysand). There is no linear progression in
Smorgasbord; Warren Nefron is no closer to being "cured" after all his extensive sessions with Dr.
Pletchick than he was at the very beginning. The only way out is by some sort of deus ex machina --
and Dr. Pletchick accomplishes this by reverting from psychoanalysis to the very technique that Freud
had earlier tried and then rejected: hypnosis.
At the end of the film, then, Dr. Pletchick hypnotizes Warren. For his part, Warren, of course, is only
too willing to be hypnotized, since his labile character is such that he is already overly influenced by
anything and everything that he encounters. Under hypnosis, Warren is told that his symptoms will all
disappear by post-hypnotic suggestion, once Dr. Pletchick repeats to him the magic word:
smorgasbord. Dr. Pletchick awakens Warren, and drags him out of the building and onto the street. He
repeats the magic word to Warren, and the result is instantaneous. Warren is now, for all practical
intents and purposes, "normal." A well-functioning male heterosexual subject, he crosses the street
and starts chatting up some women whom he meets.
Of course, such a magical "cure" cannot come without a price. This cost is a kind of transference
(though, in strict psychoanalytic vocabulary, it is probably best described as counter-transference).
All the symptoms that have been excised from Warren's body and mind reappear instead in Dr.
Petchick. All of a sudden the psychiatrist has adopted all of Warren's mannerisms and incompetencies.
He lights a cigarette and gets punched out by Dick Butkus; he flails about, running this way and that,
causing cars to crash and structures to topple, spreading chaos all around him. The film cuts from this
to one final sequence: Warren and his girlfriend are coming out of a movie theater, where they have
just been watching "Jerry Lewis in SMORGASBORD (The Movie)." (The transition is actually a slow
dissolve, rather than a clean cut; by stopping the DVD at just the right moment, I was able to see Dr
Pletchick, in his confused state, superimposed upon the image of the movie marquee).
At the end of Smorgasbord, therefore, Lewis once again demonstrates his penchant for self-
referentiality, which has been noted by many critics. In particular, Chris Fujiwara has shown how
Lewis's self-referential moments are often autobiographical ones as well. But here, self-referentialiy
is linked to another one of Lewis's most important thematic and structural devices: that of comedic
disorder as a sort of infection and contagion. The dysfunctional traits of Lewis's characters --
stammering, moving about clumsily, manifesting various nervous tics and speech disorders -- are
always being transferred among numerous personas (in films -- such as The Family Jewels -- where
Lewis plays multiple roles), or else transmitted from Lewis-the-actor to characters played by other
actors (this occurs most notably in The Big Mouth).
In Smorgasbord, these two operations -- self-referential doubling, and the contagious transmission of
dysfunctional affects -- seem to be two sides of the same operation. Comedy is supposed to be
purgative and cathartic. But it cannot really get rid of the awkwardness, discomfort, embarrassment,
and humiliation that are its representational content and its purgative targets. Instead, it can only
eliminate these symptoms, or structures of feeling, from one place by implanting them elsewhere
instead. It's as if the world operated according to some weird metaphysical law of the conservation of
affects. In particular, the negative emotions with which comedy has to deal are never abolished.
Instead, the "safety valve" of comedic relief causes them to be transferred from one persona or
character to another, and ultimately (through the self-referential leap of aesthetics) from the movie as
a whole to its audience. In real life, Jerry Lewis has been a tireless apostle for the healing power of
comedy; indeed, he has conducted numerous "Laughter & Healing Seminars." But even as Lewis's
movies perform the healing miracle of comedic catharsis, they also continually remind us of just how
tenuous, and how interminable, the "healing" process which they dramatize can be.
2. THE JERRY LEWIS ASSEMBLAGE
Consider a scene from The Patsy (1964). Hans Conreids stuffy, Germanic music teacher is giving
Jerry Lewis a singing lesson. Conreids performance here is reminiscent of his role, a decade before,
as the sadistic piano teacher in the Doctor Seuss film The 5000 Fingers of Dr T (Roy Rowland, 1953).
He is one of the pompous male authority figures who are always ridiculed and reduced to impotence in
Lewis movies. Jerrys own character is a hotel bellboy named Stanley: evidently the same figure who
appeared in Lewis earlier film The Bellboy (1960). Lewis persona is, as always, earnest and eager to
please, but utterly incapable of doing anything right. Theres an extended routine involving Conreids
collection of priceless antiques, including vases and statues that Lewis bumblingly knocks off their
pedestals, only to catch them just before they would have hit the ground and shattered. Lewis also tries
to sit in a number of Conreids antique sofas and chairs, all of which seem exceedingly uncomfortable.
Despite contorting his body into various grotesque postures, Lewis always ends up either by wrecking
the furniture, or by sliding down off it and onto the floor. As Lewis continues his nearly-silent
shenanigans, we get frequent reaction shots of Conreid, whose face shifts alarmingly from an unctuous
smile of obviously false warmth (as he recounts the wonders of music) to various frowns, grimaces,
and nervous tics (expressing his displeasure at Lewis unwitting assault upon his museum pieces).
After all this, the music lesson itself begins. In order to show how one must sing with diaphramatic
breathing from the chest, Conreid screams so closely into Lewis face that the sonic reverberations
cause Jerrys eyebrows to stretch out and grotesquely cover his eyes. This creates a monster effect,
with a look that would not be out of place in the transformation scene of The Nutty Professor (1963).
But Lewis barely reacts, pausing for a second and then carefully combing his eyebrows back into
place. Conreid, sitting at the piano, then sings a series of notes for Lewis to emulate which he does,
braying off-key, and exaggerating (amplifying and caricaturing) Conreids facial expressions and arm
gestures. Conreid accompanies one note with a grandiose sweep of his arm. Imitating this gesture,
Lewis knocks down the pianos lid prop, so that the lid closes over Conreids hand. Conreid grimaces,
and issues a series of screams. But Lewis continues to imitate Conreids facial expressions and vocal
tones, as if he were just being given additional notes to sing. The caricatures become more and more
demented, but Lewis barely acknowledges that anything is wrong. (At one point, Lewis steps out of
character, and says in a normal voice, in response to a scream, thats a good note; but almost
immediately he returns to his hysterical vocalizations and contortions). Finally, the intense
reverberations from Conreids screaming destroy the room. We get a close-up of a decorative drinking
glass shattering, followed by a deep-focus long shot of the entire room, with antiques toppling,
lighting fixtures swinging as in an earthquake, furniture being shattered or overturned, and portions of
the ceiling collapsing onto Conreid and Lewis.
Even so detailed a description fails to capture the full complexity of what might well be called the
Jerry Lewis assemblage (using this last word, as is customary, to translate Deleuze and Guattaris
agencement). How does this assemblage produce comedic effects? According to Bergsons famous
formulation, comedy results from a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to
find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being. But in a certain way,
Lewis inverts Bergsons formula. For Lewis persona pushes elasticity, adaptability, and living
pliableness to an alarming extreme. Jerry seems to have no fixed inner essence; he is open to any and
every suggestion that reaches him. Lewis body is something like an electronic transformer: only it
amplifies affects, gestures, and expressions, instead of electric currents. Lewis registers inflections
and influences from the people around him and from the nonhuman objects in his environment as
well and pumps them up into a bizarre hypervisibility.
Bergson writes that to imitate any one is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to
creep into his person. And Lewis does indeed seem to respond helplessly and automatically to all the
suggestions that reach him; this is why his hapless repetitions of Conreids tones and gestures make
the latters pomposity seem ridiculous. However, Lewis mimetic automatisms themselves take on the
liveliness and flexibility, and indeed the duration, that for Bergson rather characterize the full
unfolding and expressiveness of lan vital. Bergson tells us that in contrast to the mechanistic
reductions that provoke laughter life in its full vigor presents itself to us as evolution in time and
complexity in space; living beings are characterized by a continual change of aspect, the
irreversibility of the order of phenomena. But such are precisely the characteristics of Lewis
comedy. Everything in the sequence I have described depends upon irreversible temporal processes
unfolding under conditions of spatial complexity.
One important aspect of the Jerry Lewis assemblage is therefore its articulation of space and time.
Lewis usually sets his destructive routines in large, carefully designed three-dimensional spaces, often
shown to us in deep focus. The most famous example of this is the cut-away three-story house that
serves as the main set for The Ladies Man (1961). But The Patsys music room works in a similar
way. The room is packed with kitschy clutter, including the priceless antiques I have already
mentioned, and a large piano, as well as things like a bust of Beethoven under a sign that reads (with
fake-German-accent-spelling) Zing For Your Zupper. Yet the room is so large that, despite this
clutter, there is also a great deal of emptiness. The space is well-defined, but it cannot be closed upon
itself or separated from its outside. This is made evident in a gag where Lewis tries to close a pair of
sliding doors, only to have them slide past each other, opening up the room again. Objects are
scattered throughout this large, open volume. These objects at first seem to be entirely independent of
one another; but over the course of the scene, the violence released by Lewis body will cause them to
interact, and even to interpenetrate.
The Jerry Lewis assemblage is not given to us all at once; rather, it involves a certain experience of
duration. The timing has to be precisely right; as Lewis says in his book The Total Film-Maker, two
extra frames spoil a joke. Bergson identifies repetition, inversion, and reciprocal interference of
series as the three crucial methods of light comedy; these stand in opposition to the way that life
never goes backwards and never repeats anything. But Lewis, once more, works to have things both
ways. His repetitions, inversions, and interfering series are themselves only produced in the course of
a complex, evolving, and irreversible process. When a vase shatters, its pieces will never
spontaneously come together again. But in The Patsy, the vases do not shatter right away; Lewis
catches them before they hit the ground. We need to wait until they all smash up at once, thanks to
sound waves that need time to reverberate invisibly through the space, before they have built up
enough to wreak their havoc. Throughout his movies, as here, Lewis makes us endure a long build-up,
before he will give us the explosive moment of comedic release. In this way, the empty time of our
waiting for something to happen itself becomes part of the gag. We watch some four minutes of Lewis
catching vases and sliding off chairs, before the room-annihilating vocalizations are unleashed. The
anticipated punch line is withheld for an excruciating length of time. (In some of Lewis movies,
this punch line can even be omitted altogether).
This brings me to three final points about the Jerry Lewis assemblage. In the first place, Jerrys own
bodily gestures and actions are jerky and discontinuous: these are qualities that Bergson associates
with nonliving, mechanistic repetition. And yet the result of Lewis painful and idiotic corporeal
extremes (as Rae Beth Gordon calls them) is to produce a thoroughly animistic universe. Everything
seems more or less alive; the most inert objects, and the most mechanistic processes, seem to be
driven by a strange vitality. But I call this situation animism, rather than vitalism, because the
liveliness of the inorganic in Lewis films and indeed the liveliness of Jerry himself seems more
like a form of alien possession, than an intrinsic principle of expression. There is no autopoietic self-
reproduction here, but something more like a process of contagion or contamination, or the uncanny
vitality of the living dead. Part of Lewis genius is to make nervous comedy out of what in other hands
would otherwise register as horror.
In the second place, the animism of the Jerry Lewis assemblage can be understood as an implicit
revision and extension of Bergsons theory of comedy. Bergson structures his account of laughter
around an opposition between the entropy (or degredation of energy) found in mechanistic processes,
and the negentropy (or complex organization) of life processes. But recent biological speculation by
Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan suggests that this is not a true opposition. The negentropic,
creative organizing force of living processes (and of certain nonliving ones, like weather patterns and
chemical catalytic reactions) is not opposed to entropy. Rather, the complex organization of
phenomena like hurricanes, living organisms, and ecosystems works to reduce energy gradients (like
that of solar radiation streaming towards the earth) more powerfully, radically, and efficiently than
would otherwise be possible. The limited negentropy of Bergsonian creative evolution thus in fact
works to dissipate energy (or to generate entropy) on a larger level. And the radical difference (or
indeed incompatibility) of scale between these two levels is itself (following the arguments of Gilbert
Simondon and, following him, Deleuze) a necessary condition for this process. But the Jerry Lewis
assemblage already works according to these principles of organization-dissipation and of
incompatibilities of scale. Lewis comedy necessarily involves durational movements of both creative
organization and explosive dissipation; and it mobilizes minute causes which lead to disproportionate
effects. Such processes are readily apparent in the voice lesson sequence of The Patsy.
In the third place, and finally, the animism of the Jerry Lewis assemblage has a double root. On the
one hand, it is grounded in the tradition of cartooning and cinematic animation. This is something that
Lewis learned (and inherited) from Frank Tashlin, the director of the best Lewis films not directed by
Lewis himself. Cartoon animation gives exaggerated life to imaginary, and initially inanimate,
figures; Tashlin and Lewis apply such exaggeration to living bodies themselves, creating an
unnatural more-than-liveliness. On the other hand, this animism equally derives from the uncanny
vitality that is produced by commodity fetishism. Every person in Lewis films is reduced (as Bergson
would say) to an inert and repetitive mechanism. But at the same time, every object and mechanism in
Lewis films is like Karl Marxs table, which not only stands with its feet on the ground, but stands
on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to
begin dancing of its own free will. In this way, Bergsons theorization of the duality of life and
mechanism in comedy is superposed with Marxs understanding of how the duality between life and
mechanism stands at the heart of everyone and everything, in a society organized by the capitalist
mode of production. A Marxist Bergsonism, or a Bergsonian Marxism: such is the magic formula of
the Jerry Lewis assemblage.