Jerry Lewis: a wild poet of liberation

Film historian Leonard Maltin notes in his book The Great Movie Comedians that Jerry Lewis almost single-handedly carried the banner of film comedy throughout the ’60s, as most of his colleagues migrated to television. As writer, producer, and director, Lewis wanted to make a statement about the plight of the “little guy.” Both caustically irreverent and keenly sentimental, Lewis was also a radical democrat whose conception of the audience was as total as his identification with the art of filmmaking: he understood the lifelong reproached child, the inner free person cowering in fear and cringing with embarrassment. The terrors that he unleashed upon the haughty and the famous and the pure exuberance that he unleashed in moments of secret abandon, were acts of collective liberation. The French were right: Lewis was a wild poet of liberation, one of the most original, inventive, and, yes, profound directors of the time. In his films of the nineteen-sixties, he put himself through a wide range of sentimental triumphs, using technical devices onscreen and off with a gleeful audacity; he was also sentimental enough about childhood that he hoped to spare actual children the coarseness of life that he had experienced. Source: www.newyorker.com

CBS' biopic Martin & Lewis (2002) narrates the story of how Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis came to be a professional act in 1946 when Lewis decided to act as an incompetent waiter during one of Martin's songs at Atlantic City's 500 Club and how the audience loved their shtick. Lewis is also the one who cries in the arms of wife Patti (Sarah Manninen) and who dies inside every time his vaudevillian father Danny (Steve Brinder) refuses to acknowledge his comedic gifts. Over the years Lewis and Martin become close as brothers, with Jerry seeking the approval from Dean he never got from his father, but over time issues start to occur as Dean, being pressured by his second wife Jeanne, becomes tired of being Jerry's stooge. 

We see the destruction of the partnership which pretty much puts the blame on Dean's wife Jeanne who comes across as poisoning Dean with her moaning about Jerry getting all the praise and that Dean could be a bigger star going solo. Lewis’ zany act isn’t all that different from Andy Kaufman’s play-along-to-records shtick 30 years later, while Martin was a Crosby-esque crooner several notches below Sinatra. The more ensconced the two become in Hollywood — this is told by having movie posters flash quickly across the screen — the more they come to despise each other. Final curtain is on the set of “Three Ring Circus” in Phoenix in 1954 as Lewis has come to dominate their movies together; a year later, they do their final performance at New York’s Copacabana. Source: variety.com

Cognitive and emotional demands of black humour processing: the role of intelligence, aggressiveness and mood. The most surprising result is that subjects who show the highest values with respect to black humour preference and comprehension show high values with respect to intelligence, have higher education levels and show lowest values regarding mood disturbance and aggression. On the other hand, subjects who show average verbal and nonverbal intelligence scores as well as high mood disturbance and high aggressiveness show the lowest values with respect to comprehension and preference of black humour. Previous studies suggested that aggressive mood leads to the preference of aggressive humour. Therefore, it would not have been a surprise for this study to show that subjects who enjoy reading cartoons dealing with nasty or morbid contents also show high levels of aggression. Quite surprisingly, it could be shown that subjects who present high levels of aggressiveness directed against others are most likely to dislike black humour and show lower values with respect to black humour comprehension than subjects with low aggression values. Furthermore, it could be shown that subjects who are in a bad mood are most likely to dislike black humour and show lower values with respect to black humour comprehension than subjects who show low mood disturbance. These results support studies which show that subjective humour response is influenced by pre-existing mood as well as the notion that bad mood impairs the involvement in humour rather than facilitating the appreciation of aggressive humour. Also, preference for sick humour is related to the ability to treat nasty contents as playful fiction. 

The role of intelligence in humour processing was recently investigated by Vrticka and colleagues (2013) in the light of the incongruity-resolution model. They could show that in childhood and adolescence higher intelligence supports the detection of incongruities in a verbal utterance as well as the successful reinterpretation of these incongruities so as to get the joke. Furthermore, they could show that higher intelligence in this age-span is associated with stronger activity in brain areas involved in humour processing. Given the results of the current study, it can be hypothesized that in adulthood intelligence still strongly influences this two-stage problem-solving process with respect to humour processing. Whilst a positive association between black humour processing and intelligence can be shown, aggressiveness and bad mood apparently lead to decreased levels of pleasure when dealing with black humour. Black humour processing is seemingly a complex information-processing task that depends on cognitive and emotional aspects. It can be hypothesized that these cognitive and emotional demands directly influence the mental operations underlying humour processing as they lead to an increased or decreased information-processing capacity but also facilitate the adapting of humour processing strategies in a quick and flexible way as humour processing is dependent on the content and structure of a joke. Source: link.springer.com