Le Roi du Crazy: Was Jerry Lewis a nincompoop or a comic genius?

With Lewis’s ‘The Nutty Professor’ set for an unlikely screening at this month’s Berlin Film Festival, Geoffrey Macnab looks back on the life and career of a comedian revered by the French but sneered at elsewhere

Goofball: Lewis in 1963’s ‘The Nutty Professor’ (Rex)

Alongside all its premieres of new work from the most revered European art-house directors and symposiums on the future of cinema, this month’s Berlin Film Festival is to hold a special screening of an unlikely film. The original Jerry Lewis version of The Nutty Professor (1963) will be shown in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, one of the city’s most prestigious venues. The star’s son, Chris Lewis, is expected to be in town for the event that is being held to mark the donation of new documents from the comedian’s estate to the Deutsche Kinemathek.

Scoffers will react with the usual cynicism to seeing Lewis (1926-2017) celebrated in this way. To many, he is still the nincompoop who goofed around opposite the urbane and understandably exasperated Dean Martin in all those film comedies (Sailor Beware, The Caddy etc) that used to be shown on a permanent loop on British television in the school holidays. He was American cinema’s answer to Norman Wisdom.

Contemporary critics tended to be very sneering about Lewis. “Sticky and unfunny,” The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther wrote of The Stooge (1953), although Crowther had been more generous than many other reviewers when Lewis first appeared on-screen alongside Martin, in My Friend Irma (1949). “This freakishly built and acting young man … has a genuine comic quality. The swift eccentricity of his movements, the harrowing features of his face and the squeak of his vocal protestations, which are many and frequent, have flair,” Crowther wrote, calling him the “funniest thing” in a film otherwise hardly worth seeing. He noted the comedian’s “genuine talent for first-class satiric mimicry”.