Jerry Lewis, who died Aug. 20 at 91, was a comic actor whose rubber-limbed pratfalls, squeaky voice and pipsqueak buffoonery made him one of the most uncontainable screen clowns of all time.
His partnership with the suave and assured crooner Dean Martin made them a sensation, easily the most popular comedy team of the mid-20th century. After their bitter break up, which devastated their millions of fans, Mr. Lewis embarked on a solo career of dizzying summits and desperate lows, including an addiction to painkillers as years of physical comedy took their toll.
Fascinated by the technical side of film, he became one of the first sound-era comedians to write, direct and star in his own movies. He was credited with laying the groundwork for later comedic writer-director-actors such as Mel Brooks and Woody Allen.
Few comedians have been so beloved and so derided as Mr. Lewis, who amassed devoted fans and stunningly hostile reviews from critics. Few have been so accomplished as humanitarians — his annual muscular dystrophy telethons had raised almost $1.5 billion by the late 2000s — or so polarizing as personalities.
Mr. Lewis could be candid and coy, insightful and insulting in the same sentence. He was tireless, demanding and insecure — in his own words “a neurotic, temperamental imbecile.” He could also play the charming child, telling interviewers he never felt more than 9 years old.
“An audience is nothing more than eight or nine hundred mamas and papas clapping their hands and saying, ‘Good boy, baby,’ ” he said. “You'll find that people who had enough ‘Good boy, baby’ from their actual parents rarely turn to comedy.”
Mr. Lewis was, for better or worse, one of the most unforgettable entertainers of his generation. In his later years, he battled spinal meningitis, pulmonary fibrosis and diabetes, among other ailments. His death at his home in Las Vegas was confirmed by his publicist, Candi Cazau.
A struggling comedian at 19, Mr. Lewis surged to stardom at 20 after partnering with Martin in 1946 at an Atlantic City nightclub. They made 16 films together, including “Jumping Jacks” and “Artists and Models,”and they were major TV stars before breaking up in 1956 at their peak as a duo.
As an actor, Mr. Lewis brought an antic joy to hundreds of millions of people who saw him play a role he called “the Idiot,” a cross-eyed innocent who bested bullies despite his nasally voice and gangly appearance.
The Idiot was the sort of uncontrollable character — falling down laundry chutes, breaking furniture and sputtering at the sight of an alluring woman — that set the loony standard for later generations of comedians, including Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler. “The Nutty Professor,” Mr. Lewis’s 1963 comedy about a shy professor who invents a formula that turns him into wolfish swinger modeled on Martin, was remade with Eddie Murphy in 1996.
As hosts of the NBC’s “The Colgate Comedy Hour” from 1950 to 1955, Mr. Lewis and Martin burst onto the airwaves with an anarchic style unlike most television of that era. Mr. Lewis’s goofball utterings — “I like it, I like it” and “La-a-a-dy!” — became national catchphrases.
“You see Jerry Lewis running up to the cameras and into the audience and breaking the rules right off the bat,” said David Schwartz, chief film curator at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York. “It makes Robin Williams look sedate.”
