"Putting on the Whole World" Jerry Lewis and America’s Descent into Jewish Comic Madness

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“Over my desk I did not have a photograph of a sailboat or a dream house or a diapered child or a travel poster from a distant land, but words from Flaubert, advice to a young writer that I had copied out of one of his letters: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’”

  – Phillip Roth1

“As long as it gets a laugh, who gives a shit.”

– Jerry Lewis, on humor’s dark underpinnings 2

More than a decade before the 1960s cultural revolution Jerry Lewis (Joseph Levitch) epitomized the Jewish revolutionary spirit in entertainment that paved the way for the forthrightly profane comedy of Lenny Bruce, Phillip Roth and their successors, collectively signaling the Jewish takeover of American humor. Yet Lewis’ chronological station necessitated the deliberate projection of a more assimilationist facade. While those controlling U.S. mass media and culture over the past century were inclined toward being highly critical of Western culture before the 1960s, such notions “were not often expressed in media because of the influence of non-Jewish cultural conservatives.”3

Jerry Lewis ensured his elevated place in popular memory and reinforced himself as a pillar of Americana through his apparently selfless efforts for physically disabled children. The comic’s Wikipedia page declares that since “his contributions to comedy and charity made him a global figure in pop culture, he was nicknamed ‘The King of Comedy.’”4 Over the years this altruistic veneer has served as a bulwark against serious critiques – particularly those daring to insinuate how Lewis’ comic oeuvre was among the prime subversive maneuvers in the twentieth century culture wars.

As one comprehensive biography proclaims, having “single-handedly created a style of humor that was half anarchy, half excruciation,” Lewis remains “among the most influential and imitated figures in the history of comedy.” Many of the most well-known comic writers and performers of the late twentieth century, from Woody Allen and Richard Pryor, to Bill Murray and Jim Carrey, can directly track their comic pedigrees to the Jerry Lewis who reigned from the late 1940s through the 1960s. Lewis’ Jewish character and bearings “paved the way for a comic persona like Allen’s to be presented to a larger audience as a frankly Jewish character.” Moreover, during this era Lewis “prepared America for the uncloseting [sic] of a wholly Jewish sensibility in Hollywood film comedy.”5

“All comedians watch other comedians,” television producer Carl Reiner concludes,

and every generation of comedians going back to those who grew up watching Jerry on The Colgate Comedy Hour were influenced by Jerry, who owned the zany, crazy approach. They say that mankind goes back to the first guy rubbing sticks together and making fire, which everyone else tried their best to copy. In the world of comedy, that guy was Jerry Lewis.6

Yet there is more here than meets the habitually adoring eye. Decades before the notion of “transgenderism” or same sex marriage emerged, Lewis’ unpredictable, crass, and effeminate character, dubbed “the Kid” or “the Idiot,” pushed the boundaries of acceptance by promoting a marked irreverence for established authority and mores; his unconventional schtick involved parodying curbed intellectual development, dressing in drag, and femininely catering on stage (or camera) to longtime comedy teammate Dean Martin.

Jerry Lewis in Drag

All the while Lewis’ enterprise carefully presented the iconic Jewish “funny man” as an affable figure committed to producing wholesome entertainment. Indeed, Lewis built himself into one of the most significant children’s entertainment franchises in media history, becoming “a family act, and then finally a kiddie act.”7 He submitted himself as the ideal figure for the normal American family to welcome into their living rooms or entrust their children to for an afternoon matinee. After the breakup of the Martin-Lewis team in 1956 Lewis produced two movies annually, timing their releases for Christmas, Easter, or summer seasons, in anticipation of children’s school breaks.8 “‘The kids, they’re smilin’ ‘cause The Idiot’s on his can,” the comic superstar reflected at the peak of his career. “‘They built me a house in Bel Air, I ain’t gonna forget that. When they come up to the box office and their little hands reach up to the window with their little money and they say, ‘One child please,’ they can’t go inside and be disappointed.’”9



Against the Divine Order

In reality Jerry Lewis recognized himself and served as a purveyor of socio-cultural rebellion10 consistent with the centuries-old Jewish assault on the rule of reason governing Christian principles.11 Sigmund Freud pointed to how the theatrical arts offer audience members “the pleasure of identifying themselves with the hero” who may be in endless “rebellion against the divine order or against society.”12

Freud stressed “the socially subversive tendency of joking – the significance of wit as a rebellion against authority, and of jokes as an unmasking of public morality.” The joke teller, in Freud’s view, conveys the ideas society prohibited and possesses a powerful Trojan Horse-style weapon by which select messaging may be injected into the body politic; “humor may be pictured as a certain disguised expression of deep feeling, dodging past the sentries posted to guard against more serious expressions of the same feeling.” Combined with dreams, sexuality and art, wit is a basis “of fantasy from which a refuge from society is created. At the same time, these activities defy society and triumph over it; they are a mode of blasphemy.”13

Freud’s blueprint for cultural battle by way of comedy was enacted on a mass scale by “sex-preoccupied funny Jews” who emerged in the 1950s, of which Lewis was a surreptitious participant. “These newcomers to Anglophone culture insisted on attending to” intensely carnal concerns, James Bloom observes, “even self-pleasuring, to masturbation not only as a morbid sexual substitute, but also as a form of gratification in its own right.”14

Sigmund Freud and Jerry Lewis not only shared a distinctly Jewish view toward comedy’s subversive potential; they also sprang from bloodlines of Jewish rabbis, yet suppressed this aspect of their personal histories. Freud was the product of “a deeply religious Chasidic background, with generations of distinguished rabbis on both maternal, paternal and marital sides.” He thus “was very knowledgeable about Jewish ideas and practices,” and “very familiar with both Hebrew and Yiddish.”15 According to Lewis’ first wife, the comedian’s paternal grandfather “was one of a long line of rabbis until his son, Jerry’s father, broke tradition and went into show business.” Rabbi Levitch “lived his life in a strict kosher home, with rules for every phase of living. He spent Saturdays in the synagogue and read the Talmud by the hour.”16

From those early years the rabbi’s favorite grandson was keenly aware that young audiences were drawn to his media personas because they provoked defiance of established norms. “‘I appeal to children who know I get paid for doing what they get slapped for,’ he said. ‘I flout dignity and authority, and there’s nobody alive who doesn’t want to do the same thing.’”17 Modeling disobedience of traditional norms aided in setting the stage for the immense degree of social engineering the American Baby Boomer generation underwent in ensuing decades…

Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Marilyn Monroe

Though often tacitly excused as part of his madcap persona, Lewis’ cultural hostility was likewise rooted in a deep resentment toward prevailing Christian culture – an antagonism resounding in the observations, behavior and creative work of many of his Jewish contemporaries in show business. “‘My comedy,’” comic Mel Brooks (James Kaminsky) declares, “‘comes from the feeling that, as a Jew, and as a person, you don’t fit into the mainstream of American society. It comes from the realization that even though you’re better and smarter, you’ll never belong.’”18

In the 1950s Jewish television writers including Brooks, Sid Ceasar, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Woody Allen (Allan Konigsberg), and others were alongside Lewis “subliminally Jewish in many ways, but they couldn’t be explicitly Jewish in that era.”19 Their furious destructive energy was on display in Ceasar’s “writers’ room” for the variety program Ceasar’s Hour, where “desks were burned, people’s shoes were ripped off their feet and thrown out the window on Fifty-seventh Street,” and writers who became ostracized were forced to work in “the ‘Jock Room,’ a downstairs rehearsal hall dressing room, where male dancers changed their clothes and hung their jockstraps.” The program’s lead writer Mel Tolkin “liked what he called ‘good creative anger.’” This mutual Jewish angst would typically find its way into the group’s output. “‘Nearly all of us were in therapy,’” Tolkin recalls,

and we often took out our anger in our script ideas. I realized later that we got a lot of laughs out of murders. In one Italian-movie satire, for example, Sid stabs his wife to death, and then, while he’s mourning and carrying on, a shoeshine boy comes in to polish his shoes. Almost absentmindedly, Sid plunges the knife into the kid’s back. Then, after he’s arrested, Sid walks past the morgue attendants carrying off the bodies, and he also matter-of-factly knifes one of them. It was all done so preposterously that it wasn’t offensive, but it gives you some idea of how we were venting our aggressions against each other – in our writing.20

Unlike his Jewish contemporaries Lewis was less reflective, consulting only one psychiatrist throughout his life. “‘I think it would be a mistake if you were to undergo analysis,’” the doctor advised. “‘Your pain might leave, but it’s also quite possible that you won’t have a reason to be funny anymore.’”21

All the Known Signs of Degeneracy

The notoriety surrounding Jerry Lewis’ early live performances with Dean Martin grew in part from the idea that it was hip to laugh at their disordered and vulgar antics. On a summer afternoon in 1946 the brazen Jewish comedienne and jazz singer Sophie Tucker was walking along Atlantic City’s boardwalk in front of the Club 500 when she observed a fetching young Italian man “rescuing a skinny and bedraggled Jewish-looking youth from the surf.” According to Lewis biographer Arthur Marx, “When the Last of the Red-Hot Mamas finally realized that the drowning she had just witnessed was only a crass publicity stunt, she burst into laughter – laughter that caused the flesh on her gargantuan frame to shake like a bowl of soft Jell-o.” Tucker was impressed enough by the prank to attend Martin and Lewis’ show that night.

“For ten minutes, Sophie Tucker didn’t crack a smile. Neither did anyone else – to Dino and Jerry’s dismay and bewilderment.” Midway through the show the nightclub’s manager snarled, “‘If you guys don’t get funny soon, you’re through.’ Lewis then began nervously interrupting Martin’s crooning “with all kinds of crazy ad libs that were absolutely apropos of nothing – cracks like ‘You know what, Dean? If I go out with girls, I get pimples’; and ‘You’re not for real – you have talent – I just have nerve.” At one point Lewis mounted the drum set. “‘May I play the drums for you, dear thir?’” He then

pulled out a set of novelty-store comic teeth from his pocket, shoved them into his mouth, and started pounding on the drums until he had completely drowned out Dino’s ballad. As the customers began to chuckle, Jerry continued his assault on his straight man. Grabbing the orchestra leader’s baton from him, Jerry started to lead the orchestra. Then, as Dino made another attempt to sing, Jerry turned out all the lights in the room, causing dining employees to drop whole trays of dishes … When it became obvious from the yaks they were getting the audience liked that sort of thing, Jerry strode to a ringside table, paused in front of a man partly preoccupied with eating a steak dinner, grabbed the plate, and smashed it to the floor, steak and all. Taking a cue from Jerry, Dino grabbed a highball from a passing tray, took a sip of it, sputtered and coughed as if the drink were poisonous, then emptied the rest of the glass’s contents into a customer’s face. The audience gasped, and for a split second there was total silence in the cavernous room … Suddenly Sophie Tucker, prominent at her ringside table, threw back her huge head and roared. This broke the tension, and the rest of the customers followed her example. Gales of laughter filled the Club 500, and some of the customers urged them on to further madness by shouting, “More, more.”22

Offstage the duo took delight at how the anarchic onslaught left audiences and critics confounded. “‘People couldn’t tell you when they left the Copa what the fuck Martin and Lewis did,’” Jerry howled in retrospect. “‘They know one was a singer and one was a monkey. That’s it. People used to sit at Lindy’s [restaurant in Manhattan] and say, ‘They tore the fuckin’ joint apart.’ ‘What did they do?’ ‘Uh … uh … you gotta see it.’ … They could try it, and good writers on The New York Times attempted it, and Dean and I used to sit and get hysterical … ‘They don’t fucking get it. They just don’t get it.’ … We were putting on the whole fucking world.’”23

In a few years Jerry Lewis introduced to American film what “rock and roll” was conveying through American popular music – a form of infectious rebellion challenging already strained traditional norms. Yet more perceptive cultural observers got what others missed. “‘Jerry Lewis, a new comedian, puts on the face of an American avant-gardiste,’” wrote French film director and critic Francois Truffaut in 1952, “very effeminate, with a short hairdo and bangs. It goes without saying that he is also overpowered by all the known signs of degeneracy: a fat chin, thick lips, and the hint of a goiter.”24 Along these lines Jean-Luc Godard summarized Lewis as “the only American director who has made progressive films.”25

Between 1949 and 1956 Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis starred in seventeen films together, in addition to a broadcast program, The Martin and Lewis Show, airing on NBC from 1949 to 1953. In 1951 and 1952 movie exhibitors declared them the top box office draw. Yet they required substantial cultivation and preparation following their arrival from the nightclub circuit since Lewis “wasn’t used to sticking to the written line – mainly because he and Dino had never before used material expressly prepared for them by writers.” The material they didn’t improvise was stolen and sometimes amended.26 However, once the two were instructed to perform on the movie set “exactly as they had done it on stage, they were fantastic. They burned up the screen. Everybody in the projection room was in stitches.”27

It was no secret the real comedy attraction was Lewis; neither he nor Martin-Lewis film producer Hal Wallis (who later supervised Elvis Presley’s series of lamentable film projects) would have it any other way. “‘Dean could be insanely funny with a line,’” staff writer Norman Lear recalls. Whenever this happened “‘strange physical things happened to Jerry. Sometimes he would go to the extreme of calling Martin Levy, who was his doctor at the time, to fly in from California to treat him.’”28 The trio averaged three movies-per-year for Paramount. “‘A Martin and Lewis picture costs a half-million, and it’s guaranteed to make three million with a simple formula,’” Wallis explains. “‘Jerry’s an idiot. Dean is a straight leading man who sings a couple of songs and gets the girl.”29 Indeed, any number of traditional crooners could have served as the backdrop to Jerry’s provocative burlesque….

 

[…] This is just an excerpt from the May 2023 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

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Endnotes

1  Philip Roth, My Life as a Man (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 174-175.
2  James Kaplan, "The Laughing Game," The New Yorker, February 7, 2000, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/02/07/the-laughing-game-2. Cited in James D. Bloom, Gravity Fails: The Comic Jewish Shaping of Modern America (Westport CT: Praeger, 2003), p, xvi. 
3  Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth Century Intellectual and Political Movements (New York: Praeger, 1998) Amazon Kindle Edition, 2013.
4  Jerry Lewis, Wikipedia, n.d., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Lewis
5  Shawn Levy, King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. x-xi, 340. 
6  Carl Reiner, “Carl Reiner on 7 Decades of Laughter with Friend Jerry Lewis: ‘He Was a True Genius,’” Hollywood Reporter, August 23, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/carl-reiner-tribute-jerry-lewis-he-was-a-true-genius-1031722/
7  Levy, P. 326.
8  “Jerry Lewis on His Childhood and Career (1965 interview with David Susskind),” YouTube, givethechanceakid, August 25, 2013. 
9  Levy, p. 326.
10  Lewis’ Jewish identity was very important to him throughout his life. For example, in a 2014 interview he complained that Joan Rivers “set the Jews back one thousand years,” and “went to Israel and uprooted two trees in my name.” for publicly suggesting that Lewis’ professional career had been reduced to organizing Muscular Dystrophy Association telethons. “Jerry Lewis: Joan Rivers Set Jews Back 1,000 Years,” YouTube, Sirius XM, June 6, 2014.
11  “Now the rule of reason, as Aquinas tells us, is like the rule of a king – sweet, gentle, and enlightened. But the rule of passion is like the rule of a despot – harsh, crude, and blind. Man acts as man when he follows the rule of reason; but he acts as an animal when he follows the rule of passion.” Robert Edward Brennan, Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophic Analysis of the Nature of Man (New York: MacMillan Company, 1941), p. 162.
12  Phillip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Third Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 349.
13  Rieff, p. 350.
14  Bloom, pp. 70, 71.
15  “The Hidden Chasidic Roots of Sigmund Freud,” The Jewish Chronicle, July 16, 2015, https://www.thejc.com/judaism/all/the-hidden-chasidic-roots-of-sigmund-freud-1.67616
16  Patti Lewis, I Laffed Till I Cried: Thirty-Six Years of Marriage to Jerry Lewis (Waco TX: WRS Publishing, 1993), pp. 2-3. Patti Lewis repeatedly refers to Jerry’s grandfather as a rabbi. Lewis’ own biographical recollection falls short of giving “Grandpa Levitch” this title, yet describes him as a strict Talmudist. “Grandpa and his little white beard” was “a man of faith – spending his last years among the old dreamers of Brownsville, where the collective wisdom of Jewish law passed from mouth to mouth on street corners and park benches day after day; old men at home with the precepts of talmudic [sic] reasoning, debating like ancient prophets and philosophers what was proper and improper, what was allowed or forbidden in daily Jewish life …” Jerry Lewis with Herb Gluck, Jerry Lewis in Person (New York: Atheneum, 1982), p. 125.
17  Levy, p. 73.
18  John Robert Parish, It’s Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007), p. 3.   
19  Patrick McGilligan, Funny Man: Mel Brooks (New York: HarperCollins, 2019), p. 131-132.
20  Sid Ceasar, Where Have I Been? An Autobiography (New York: Crown Publishers, 1982), p. 145.
21  Levy, p. 212.
22  Arthur Marx, Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime (Especially Himself) (New York: Hawthorn Books Inc., 1974), pp. 51-52.
23  Levy, p. 75.
24  Levy, p. 329. 
25  Levy, p. 332.
26  Marx, p. 88.
27  Nick Tosches, Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (New York: Dell Publishing, 1992), p. 170.
28  Tosches, p. 237.
29  Levy, p. 102.
30  Levy, p. 341. To leave no room for doubt, in 1959 Lewis even played the lead role of “a singing rabbi” in a television adaptation of The Jazz Singer which according to viewer and critical reception “was enough to convert the most dedicated Jew to another religion.” Marx, p. 237.
31  Andrew R. Heinze, Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the 20th Century (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 303. Early Church fathers recognized the Judaization of Christians as the chief threat to their congregants, and identified such veiled confused sexuality with the synagogue, which “is no more than a theatre into which the Jews drag effeminates, harlots and actors.”  Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 244. Cited in E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend IN: Fidelity Press, 2012), p. 80.
32  Erica Scharrer, “Why Are Sitcom Dads Still So Inept,” The Conversation, June 16, 2020, https://theconversation.com/why-are-sitcom-dads-still-so-inept-139737
33  At War with the Army, Hal Walker, dir., 1950, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042209/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
34  Scared Stiff, George Marshall, dir., 1953, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046280/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
35  The Stooge, Norman Taurog, dir., 1951, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045192/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_2
36  Levy, p. 175.
37  That’s My Boy, Hal Walker, dir., 1951. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044119/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
38  Marx, p. 173.
39  The 1972 film has been tentatively scheduled for release in 2024. “The picture must be seen, and if by no one else, at least by every kid in the world who’s only heard there was such a thing as the Holocaust.” Lewis, In Person, pp. 279-283. Jerry Lewis, The Day the Clown Cried, IMBD, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068451/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
40  Levy, p. 104.
41  Tosches, p. 217.
42  Lewis, I Laffed, p. 113. Patti Lewis’ autobiography is her only published account of the marriage. “Jerry never said a word about the book in public,” Lewis’ biographer notes. “And Patti determinedly tried to maintain an air of dignity” upon its release. “‘She’s too much of a lady to let the whole story come out,’ her coauthor said.” Ever loyal even after their divorce, when “approached with requests for interviews about her marriage, Patti would let Jerry know that someone had been asking questions about him.” Levy, p. 468.
43  Levy, p. 152.
44  Marx, pp. 156-157.
45  Levy, p. 152. “Arnold Rothman” appears to have been one of Lewis’ alter egos.
46  Marx, pp. 155-156.
47  Levy, p. 153.
48  Levy, p. 361. While Lewis regularly counseled promising comedians, when he advised Lenny Bruce “he was extremely frustrated with Bruce’s stubborn insistence on political material and blue language.” Levy, p. 340.
49  Jones, p. 950.
50  Lewis, I Laffed, p. 40.
51  Neil Simon, Neil Simon’s Memoirs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 20. In the early 1990s while Lewis biographer Shawn Levy managed to approach Lewis to arrange some in-person interviews, Lewis anticipated Levy would write a complementary portrait and thus promised the author unlimited access. When it became apparent during an interview that Levy intended to write an honest book, Lewis flew into several abusive tirades. “Before I realized what was happening, he grabbed my tape recorder,” Levy recounts. “‘I’ve never talked to anyone like that before,’” said Lewis, “‘and I have to have this.’” The encounter left Levy traumatized. “For the next few weeks, I absolutely could not work; indeed, I could barely sleep. The thought of spending another year or so researching and writing about Jerry Lewis shook me with nausea.” Levy, pp. 486-488.
52  “Remembering Jerry Lewis with Roy Arroyo,” World Over, EWTN, YouTube, August 25, 2017.
53  John Walsh, “Nutty … King of Comedy (aged 9),” The Independent (London), June 7, 1997, p. 1.
54  Phillip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 209. Quoted in Jones, p. 945.
55  Lewis, I Laffed, p. 114.
56  Marx, p. 217.
57  Levy, p. 258.
58  Levy, pp. 274-275.
59  Martha Ross, “Jerry Lewis’ Female Co-Stars Accuse Him of Sexual Abuse,” San Jose Mercury News, February 23, 2022, https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/02/23/jerry-lewis-female-co-stars-accuse-him-of-sexual-abuse-cruelty-in-new-report/
60  Adelman went on to become a prominent television writer. Dorri Olds, “Trailblazing Women in the Mad Men Era,” NYCityWoman, n.d., https://www.nycitywoman.com/trailblazing-women-in-the-mad-men-era/
61  Sybil Adelman Sage, “I was Jerry Lewis’ Secretary: I Believe What People are Saying About Him,” The Forward, February 25, 2022. 
62  In the early 1950s writer Norman Lear recalls Lewis inviting him and a cohort into his hotel room. “‘Come on in!’” Lewis intoned. 
We opened the door. The room was pitch-black. As our eyes grew accustomed to the dark, we heard the scratch of a match, and suddenly we were greeted with this hilarious sight. The irrepressible man-boy, Jerry Lewis, alone on the sofa, with an erection. As the lit match in his hand came down toward his penis – of which, let me tell you, he was very proud – we could make out one of those tiny birthday candles sprouting from it. And as the fire met the wick, Jerry began to sing, “Happy birthday to you, / Happy birthday to you, / Happy birthday, dear closest friend I have in the world, / Happy birthday to you
Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), pp. 132-133. Several years after declining to adopt Portnoy’s Complaint Lewis was comfortable demonstrating his kinship with infamous Jewish pornographer Al Goldstein on a regionally-televised talk show. “Jerry Lewis and Al Goldstein on AM New York (2/13/1976),” YouTube, shockcinemamagazine, January 16, 2011.
63  Mia Farrow, What Falls Away: A Memoir (New York: Doubleday, 1997).
64  Allen, who classifies Lewis’ filmmaking skills with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Bob Hope, unsuccessfully approached Lewis to direct Take the Money and Run. Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking (New York: Knopf, 2007) pp. 71, 224, 335.
65  Farrow claims to have “disengaged from” Catholicism because Pope John Paul II did not emerge “like Archbishop Desmond Tutu” in his response to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. “Martin Sheen and Mia Farrow on Faith,” CNN, YouTube, March 14, 2013.
66  Claire Bloom, Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1996), p. 183.
67  Jones, p. 950.
68  Lewis, I Laffed, p. 19. “I can get 5,000 letters patting me on the back and wishing me all the wonderful things in life,” Jerry reflected. “In that batch of 5,000 letters I need to just read one [from someone] who disbelieves me, who doesn’t particularly care about what I care about, and thinks that I’m a jerk. I’m shattered by that letter.” “A Current Affair – Behind the Scenes @ The 1989 Jerry Lewis Telethon,” YouTube, nuttyrican, September 12, 2011.
69  Lewis, I Laffed, p 123. 
70  “Foolishly, I had signed whatever he gave me through the years,” Patti recalls during their divorce proceedings. Such requests were “usually preceded by some song and dance about his just needing my signature and asking if I trusted him. Once in court a judge asked me if I knew I was being stonewalled. I was so naïve, I did not even know what ‘stonewalled’ meant. (At that time Jerry was taking out a loan on our house for drugs.)” Lewis, I Laffed, p. 124.
71  “Jerry Lewis Snubs His Six Sons in Will, Leaving Entire Fortune to Wife, Adopted Daughter,” Inside Edition, September 20, 2017, https://www.insideedition.com/25623-jerry-lewis-snubs-his-6-sons-in-will-leaving-entire-fortune-to-wife-adopted-daughter; Suzanne Adelson, “After 35 Years of Marriage Patti Lewis Sues Jerry for Separation and $450,000 a Year,” People Magazine, October 6, 1980, https://people.com/archive/after-35-years-of-marriage-patti-lewis-sues-jerry-for-separation-and-450000-a-year-vol-14-no-14/
72  Marx, pp. 39, 40. Fio Rito’s admonition is in fact in direct alignment with the Church, which “warns her children against such alliances, just as a loving father might warn his son against undertaking some journey which he knows will expose himself to great peril. In early times parents who gave their daughter in marriage to a heretic were subjected to a five years’ penance.” Rev. Fr. Francis Spirago, The Catechism Explained (Caritas Publishing/Amazon Kindle Edition, 2020 [1899/1921]). Lewis’ otherwise meticulous Jewish biographer Shawn Levy omits Fio Rito’s apt advice, alleging the bandleader’s venality and prejudice. “He’d pinned his hopes on a new singer with a good voice, and he wasn’t about to let some skinny kid with a dummy act derail his gravy train,” Levy writes. “He confronted Patti about her budding romance: ‘I suppose you were out with that Jew again?’ (It’s not hard to see how Fio Rito’s career fizzled away in a business dominated by Jews.)” Levy, p. 49. 
73  Lewis, I Laffed, p. 2.
74  William Fanning, “Mixed Marriage,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910). Retrieved November 29, 2022 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09698a.htm
75  Spirago.
76  “If a Jew enters into marriage with an Akum (Christian), or with his servant, the marriage is null.” This is because, according to the Talmud, “‘the sexual intercourse … and seed of a Goi’” are equal to “‘that of a beast.’ Hence it is to be inferred that Christian marriage is not true marriage.”  Rev. I. B. Pranaitis, The Talmud Unmasked: The Secret Rabbinical Teachings Concerning Christians (New York: E. N. Sanctuary, 1939 [1892]), p. 51.
77  Levy, p. 49. One encounters a set of similar marital relations in Roth’s novel, My Life as a Man, where the author profiles one of his shikse’s families having “‘the aviator Lindbergh, the Senator Bilbo, the cleric Coughlin, and the patriot Gerald L. K. Smith,’” as its idols. “‘It had been a life of little but punishment, humiliation, betrayal, and defeat, and it was to this that I was drawn, against all misgivings.’” Jones, p. 949. As Roth’s account suggests, the Jew’s sexual violation of a goy’s daughter can be honorable “as a way of getting back at ‘the puritan austerity, the prudery, the blandness, the xenophobia of the women of her clan [and] the criminality of the men.’” “I was a CARE package child,” Jerry declared, recounting “his nomadic existence as the child of scrambling entertainers. ‘I’m sure there were other people who had rougher beginnings, But as I look back I can’t imagine that that’s true. I’m talking about violent deaths, poverty, hunger, and inability to equate where I believe now to why I’m going to live with an aunt Tuesday, now with my grandmother, traveling back and forth. It was devastating.’” Levy, p. 9. Lewis was often locked in dressing rooms while his parents were performing, his schooling was regularly interrupted, and he couldn’t make relationships with other children. “It’s little wonder that, as an adult, he wound up with a series of nervous disorders – frequent colds, sinus attacks, hay fever, mastoiditis, hives, extreme depression, loss of appetite due to tension, and even a mild heart attack.” Marx, p. 29.
78  Marx, pp. 40, 41.
79  Levy, p. 51.
80  Lewis, I Laffed, pp. 3, 4.
81  Lewis, In Person, p. 126.
82  “Jerry Lewis on Religion and Family (1965 interview with David Susskind),” YouTube, givethechanceakid, August 6, 2013. 
83  Lewis, I Laffed, p. 53.
84  Levy, p. 308.
85  “Jerry Lewis on Religion and Family.”
86  Levy, p. 158.
87  Lewis, I Laffed, p 45.
88  Lewis, I Laffed, p. 44.
89  Mike Miller, “Jerry Lewis on His Secret Love Affair with Marilyn Monroe: ‘I Was Crippled for a Week,’” People, August 20, 2017, https://people.com/movies/jerry-lewis-on-his-secret-love-affair-with-marilyn-monroe-i-was-crippled-for-a-week/
90  Levy, p. 81.
91  “‘Shit, yeah, we started knockin’ ‘em off,’” Jerry proclaimed. “‘Not something to be proud of, but true. The most beautiful broads went crazy for Dean. In truth, I fucked more than he did; but it was always like they wanted to burp me.’” Tosches, p. 172.
92  On several occasions Jerry secretly consulted the family’s physician in apparent concern over the toll a divorce would take on his personal health. Lewis, I Laffed, p. 41.
93  Lewis, I Laffed, p. 41. During the early 1950s Jerry reportedly had a three-year affair with fashion model Lynn Dixon that produced one daughter, Suzan Lewis (née Minoret). A DNA test with Lewis’ oldest son Gary revealed an 88.7 percent chance the two had the same father. “‘He wanted a daughter but he could never tell anyone he already had one,’” Suzan said. Even later in life he “never confirmed or denied that Suzan is his biological daughter, despite Suzan’s repeated pleas.” Dana Kennedy, “Jerry Lewis and the Homeless Daughter He Cruelly Ignored,” Daily Beast, August 27, 2017.
94  Jerry Lewis, Dean and Me (A Love Story) (New York: Doubleday, 2005).
95  Levy, p. 159.
96  Marx, p. 177.
97  “Dad seldom mentioned [the Martin-Lewis] relationship as I grew up, but not once did I ever hear him speak ill of Jerry. The characters they played in their movies and in their nightclub act seem like a fair reflection of their true selves, opposites to the core.” Ricci Martin, That’s Amore: A Son Remembers Dean Martin (New York: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2002), pp. 30, 31.
98  Marx, p. 198.
99  Martin, p. 32.
100  The first pages of his autobiography, Jerry Lewis: In Person, fondly describe the duo’s last live performance and breakup. 
101  Lewis, Dean and Me, p. 294. 
102  Levy, p. 310.
103  Lewis, I Laffed, pp. 18-19.
104  Lewis,I Laffed, p. 90.
105  Levy, p. 322.
106  Levy, p. 324.
107  “Son of Jerry Lewis Left Out of Comedian’s Will Says He Was Not Surprised,” Inside Edition, YouTube, October 24, 2017.
108  Lewis, I Laffed, pp. 74, 75.
109  Lewis, I Laffed, p. 75.
110  Steve Berry, “Jerry Lewis: Funnyman with an Unfunny Life,” Columbus Dispatch, August 21, 1997. 
111  “Son of Jerry Lewis Dies From Drug Overdose,” Inside Edition, February 7, 2010, https://www.insideedition.com/167-son-of-jerry-lewis-dies-from-drug-overdose
112  “Lewis’ Son: I Blame My Mean, Evil Dad For Brother’s Death,” World Entertainment News (England), January 7, 2010,