King of Comedy, Jerry Lewis, 91, Passed Away Aug. 20th

In 1946, a young comedian, Jerry Lewis, met a struggling singer, Dean Martin. They decided to form a team, Martin and Lewis, and the rest, as they say, is history. Their act, with its elaborate pattern of sparring and interruption, turned them into a success on the nightclub circuit – and on television, then establishing its hegemony over American popular entertainment.

Before long they were in Hollywood, under the sharp entrepreneurial aegis of the Paramount producer Hal Wallis. Between 1949 and 1956, they starred in more than a dozen movies, with Martin as the worldly philanderer and Lewis the gormless hanger-on. The humour may have been unsophisticated, but Wallis knew better than to skimp on the production values, and the duo became a box-office success.

Lewis, who has died aged 91, was steeped in show business. His parents, Daniel and Rae Levitch, were entertainers (using the surname Lewis on stage) and from an early age Jerry (born in Newark, New Jersey) would join them at resort hotels during the summer. By the age of 18, he was established in a small way as a standup comic – his act, significantly enough, featured mimicry of better known performers – and not long afterwards he met Martin.

Several of Martin and Lewis’s films were loose remakes of earlier Paramount comedies (Scared Stiff, 1953, for instance, derived from The Ghost Breakers, 1940), with Lewis in roles equivalent to those of the leading ladies in the originals: the fact that this could be accomplished so readily is a measure of the films’ essential innocence.

When Martin and Lewis parted professional company, reputedly in a spirit of mutual resentment, both went on to successful solo careers. Lewis’s first few films on his own were routine mixtures of slapstick and somewhat mawkish sentiment, but in 1960 he opted to write and direct, as well as star in, The Bellboy, a startlingly surreal, and all but plotless, account of the travails of a dysfunctional individual at the mercy of modern living.

Established on a new footing, Lewis proceeded over the next several years to alternate performing in vehicles made by other directors with directing and producing, and often writing, his own. In the former category, the most rewarding pictures stemmed from Lewis’s collaboration with Frank Tashlin, an ex-cartoonist and gagman.

Such films as Who’s Minding the Store (1963) and The Disorderly Orderly (1964) draw on the cartoon precepts of Tashlin’s past to create a fantasticated modern age in the grip of faddishness and technology. The most personal of the films Lewis directed himself, The Nutty Professor (1963) and The Patsy (1964), reflected similar concerns, but internalised them in the figure of the star-protagonist.

The Nutty Professor, a conspicuously well crafted picture, was a reworking of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in which the Jekyll is a nerdish chemistry teacher and the Hyde is Buddy Love, a womanising singer whom many at the time assumed was meant as a malign parody of Martin, though in later years Lewis was at pains to deny this and to maintain that his feelings for Martin were warm. The Patsy, a slapstick satire on Hollywood star-making, is overtly Pirandellian in form, and ends on the set of its own production, with Lewis emerging from behind the camera to offer advice to a fellow performer.

By the late 1960s, however, Lewis seemed to be losing his way. Whatever critical following he might have had from a small coterie, the mass audience which had hitherto underwritten his efforts showed signs of fading away as family movie-going disappeared. Lewis broke his longtime link with Paramount, and, as a freelance, recognising that he was getting older, sought to distance himself from the post-adolescent “nerd” figure who had been his mainstay.

Thus, in Three on a Couch (1966), he moved some distance towards traditional romantic comedy, while Which Way to the Front? (1970) cast him as an eccentric millionaire who during the second world war seeks to raise his own private army. In 1972, Lewis tried to go considerably further beyond his past range with a comedy set in Nazi Germany and confronting the Holocaust. The Day the Clown Cried was never released, and the only surviving print was acquired in 2015 by the US Library of Congress.