I just saw the Jerry Lewis movie "Hardly Working." I must saw, I was completely floored. I was instantly reminded of Chaplin's "Limelight." Some would say this is an outrageous comparison, but I don't think so. They are both films wherein great aging clowns take a bitter and poignant look at themselves, and at their lives spent as clowns in the midst of a changing audience and landscape.
Lewis' film is an abject fantasy about what would happen if he could no longer be a clown. Here is a middle-aged man who has spent his whole life as a clown, and realizes he has no other skills, there is nothing else he can do. So he takes a bunch of odd jobs where he enacts the clown role by default, hilariously causing havoc and chaos everywhere he goes.
But the genius in the film comes from its "serious" parts. The way he cries when he finds out that he lost his job as a clown, his depression when humiliated by his brother-in-law or mean bosses, etc. There is a strange spirit of defiant anger that runs throughout, from the grotesque depictions of people in the world and their banality and small-mindedness, to Lewis' occasional bouts of defiance towards authority figures. It's all about how humiliating and absurd it is to live in the world and have a job, and about all the little moments that make life unbearable.
In this world of unspeakable awkwardness and grotesqueness, women and girls are his allies, and boys and men his enemies. Women and girls laugh at his jokes, seek to help him, find him endearing, and want to grow up to be like him, whereas men and boys find him to be a pathetic loser and try to oust him at every turn. From the young son of the woman he's dating ("You're happy to see HIM??") to his sister's husband, to his many bosses, males are out to get him, threatened by his affinity with women and animals and jealous of his ability to evade the rules.
When he finally quits his job at the post office (it's the only job he can hold; as one of the character states, "no one loses a civil service job unless he wants to"), it's because he has been asked to "take care of" some rabbits that have ended up in the post office, ostensibly by destroying them. The film thus begins with an act in which his partner is a kitten, and ends with him rescuing rabbits.
In one strange scene in the film, he suddenly stops being klutzy and does everything right when he is being watched by a superintendent. Before this he could not touch anything without making it fall over, now he is perfectly in command of himself. There are more "serious" moments, such as when he is gracious and adult when evaluating the performance of his boss. The tables have now turned. Instead of being the lowest scum of the earth, kicked around by everybody, he is now his own boss. And he proves it by delivering the mail dressed as a clown, freeing the rabbits, and quitting his job.
The film ends with him going back to being a clown, and his journey into the abject world of random jobs remains as a dream, a nightmare. It's as if his perfect performance at his job at the post office was a way of suddenly saying, "All right, the farce is over now. I'm really a professional clown, I'm Jerry Lewis, I'm a physical comedian with full control over my faculties, see, I can do this job if I want to." It's like that moment in the dream where you are just about to wake up, or that moment when the actor takes off his makeup and reveals himself to the audience as his true self. But in this case he is taking off one kind of makeup the clown he's playing in the film, which is a "non-clown" who's a regular personand putting on another kind of makeup, his "literal" clown makeup, in which he can finally be himselfJerry Lewis!
So we have to wonder: who is Jerry Lewis? Is it the actor-writer-director Jerry Lewis we are looking at, or are we simply watching a character in a movie? We see both at once, and that's the genius of the movie. It's an actor watching himself, watching his whole career and also watching the end of a career. As in the move "Limelight," the wrenching sadness we feel is in knowing the history of his earlier work, and how the ugliness of the world he is depicting is a world in which he can no longer thrive, as a clown from another era who is losing his audience to newer tastes, younger entertainers.
Some of the sight gags in the movie are brilliant and get quite surreal, as in one where he delivers mail to a Goodyear blimp and ends up taking the blimp for a ride, and another where a housewife offers him a beer and the Clydesdale-drawn Budweiser truck drives by and tosses him a six-pack. But in spite of its rampant silliness, the movie is strangely subversive and sad, and is Jerry Lewis' comic and reflective tribute to his own brilliant career.
Lewis' film is an abject fantasy about what would happen if he could no longer be a clown. Here is a middle-aged man who has spent his whole life as a clown, and realizes he has no other skills, there is nothing else he can do. So he takes a bunch of odd jobs where he enacts the clown role by default, hilariously causing havoc and chaos everywhere he goes.
But the genius in the film comes from its "serious" parts. The way he cries when he finds out that he lost his job as a clown, his depression when humiliated by his brother-in-law or mean bosses, etc. There is a strange spirit of defiant anger that runs throughout, from the grotesque depictions of people in the world and their banality and small-mindedness, to Lewis' occasional bouts of defiance towards authority figures. It's all about how humiliating and absurd it is to live in the world and have a job, and about all the little moments that make life unbearable.
In this world of unspeakable awkwardness and grotesqueness, women and girls are his allies, and boys and men his enemies. Women and girls laugh at his jokes, seek to help him, find him endearing, and want to grow up to be like him, whereas men and boys find him to be a pathetic loser and try to oust him at every turn. From the young son of the woman he's dating ("You're happy to see HIM??") to his sister's husband, to his many bosses, males are out to get him, threatened by his affinity with women and animals and jealous of his ability to evade the rules.
When he finally quits his job at the post office (it's the only job he can hold; as one of the character states, "no one loses a civil service job unless he wants to"), it's because he has been asked to "take care of" some rabbits that have ended up in the post office, ostensibly by destroying them. The film thus begins with an act in which his partner is a kitten, and ends with him rescuing rabbits.
In one strange scene in the film, he suddenly stops being klutzy and does everything right when he is being watched by a superintendent. Before this he could not touch anything without making it fall over, now he is perfectly in command of himself. There are more "serious" moments, such as when he is gracious and adult when evaluating the performance of his boss. The tables have now turned. Instead of being the lowest scum of the earth, kicked around by everybody, he is now his own boss. And he proves it by delivering the mail dressed as a clown, freeing the rabbits, and quitting his job.
The film ends with him going back to being a clown, and his journey into the abject world of random jobs remains as a dream, a nightmare. It's as if his perfect performance at his job at the post office was a way of suddenly saying, "All right, the farce is over now. I'm really a professional clown, I'm Jerry Lewis, I'm a physical comedian with full control over my faculties, see, I can do this job if I want to." It's like that moment in the dream where you are just about to wake up, or that moment when the actor takes off his makeup and reveals himself to the audience as his true self. But in this case he is taking off one kind of makeup the clown he's playing in the film, which is a "non-clown" who's a regular personand putting on another kind of makeup, his "literal" clown makeup, in which he can finally be himselfJerry Lewis!
So we have to wonder: who is Jerry Lewis? Is it the actor-writer-director Jerry Lewis we are looking at, or are we simply watching a character in a movie? We see both at once, and that's the genius of the movie. It's an actor watching himself, watching his whole career and also watching the end of a career. As in the move "Limelight," the wrenching sadness we feel is in knowing the history of his earlier work, and how the ugliness of the world he is depicting is a world in which he can no longer thrive, as a clown from another era who is losing his audience to newer tastes, younger entertainers.
Some of the sight gags in the movie are brilliant and get quite surreal, as in one where he delivers mail to a Goodyear blimp and ends up taking the blimp for a ride, and another where a housewife offers him a beer and the Clydesdale-drawn Budweiser truck drives by and tosses him a six-pack. But in spite of its rampant silliness, the movie is strangely subversive and sad, and is Jerry Lewis' comic and reflective tribute to his own brilliant career.