NBC finally euthanized the show and filled the remaining airtime with a sports documentary on pistol shooting.
Until Nixon’s 18-1/2, Lewis’s 20 were the minutes that lived in pop-culture infamy. Catastrophe would be one way to describe it. Another would be great live television &mdash the spectacle of tuxedoed Hollywood pratfalling into humiliation, and handing the banana peel of blame to the one man who tried to keep the viewers entertained. But Jer must have done something right: it was the second-highest rated show in Oscar history. He surely merits one of those Life Achievement Awards the Academy passes out to distinguished film folk who never won a competitive Oscar and might die soon. (Recent honorary Oscars have gone to Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet and composer Ennio Moricone.) The slur stings any Jerry Lewis fan &mdash especially Jerry Lewis. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lewis explained the hurt: “Because they didn’t think enough of my work. Because what I did didn’t command consideration because it’s slapstick, because it’s lowbrow, because the Academy’s always been cautious about comedy.” It’s a measure of his lingering impact that Hollywood is still embarrassed by the very idea of Jerry Lewis, let alone his presence. To the graybeards at the Academy, Jer is not only the demolisher of Oscar’s gravitas but the unkillable specter of his first eminence, in the late ’40s and ’50s, as the goony kid prancing around the cool crooner. (One producer cruelly called Martin and Lewis “the organ grinder and the monkey”). He is the comic whose genius, or even the robust grosses of his movies, nobody in Hollywood took seriously. And because he was championed as an auteur in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, Lewis’s detractors have made him the derisive punch line to every joke about the French that came after postcards and before Freedom Fries. That’s so small of them. Lewis deserves an armful of awards as a gifted, if problematic, creator of his ’60s movie comedies &mdash and, even more, as the idiot personality and the brilliant creative force behind Martin and Lewis. The Organ Grinder and the Monkey
Comedy duos had been a staple of vaudeville (Buck and Bubbles, Gallagher and Shean, Burns and Allen) and movies in 1942, theater exhibitors voted Bud Abbott and Lou Costello the No. 1 “star” in Hollywood. What Lewis saw in Martin, when they first teamed up in 1946, was something unique: a sexpot straight man, a perfect complement to Jer’s goony girly-boy. Dean was Lewis’s public enabler by acting as the imperturbable wall against which the kid’s maniacal energy kept bouncing, he translated Jer to the mainstream audience.