Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema

by Rae Beth Gordon

Vividly bringing to light the tradition of physical comedy in the French cabaret, café-concert, and early French film comedy, this book answers the perplexing question, “Why do the French love Jerry Lewis?” The extraordinary emphasis on nervous pathology in the Parisian café-concert, where the genres of the Epileptic Singer and the Idiot Comic took center stage, and where popular comic monologues and songs included “Man with a Tic” and “I’m Neurasthenic,” points to a fascinating intersection between medicine and popular culture. The French tradition of comic performance style between 1870 and 1910 nearly exactly duplicates the movements, gestures, tics, grimaces, and speech anomalies found in nineteenth-century hysteria; the characteristics of hysteria became a new aesthetics. Early French film comedy carried on this tradition of frenetic gesture and gait, as most film performers came from these entertainments and from the circus. Even before Chaplin’s films triumphed in France, film comics were instantly recognizable from their pathological gait, just as Jacques Tati would be a half-century later. Comedy, a genre that dominated French cinema until World War I, has often been linked to a mass public for film; the author elucidates this link by proposing a broadly generalized cultural-medical phenomenon as the explanation for the dominance of the comic genre. Comic performance style drew from a group of nervous disorders characterized by the psychological automatism emanating from the “lower faculties”: nervous reflex, motor impulses, sensation, and instinct. Building on her previous work on hysteria, the cabaret, and pathologies of movement in the films of Georges Méliès, and drawing on over 400 French films made between 1896 and 1915, the author contributes to a new theory of spectatorship at work in the cabaret, in shows of magnetizers, and in early French film comedy. Jerry Lewis touches a nerve in French cultural memory because, more than any other film comic, he incarnates this tradition of performance style.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2001

Reviews

[Helynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

French comic traditions between 1870 and 1910, which combined the tendency toward hysteria with epileptic, slapstick, and other forms of rather unsophisticated and bizarre forms of body movement and humor make the national taste in entertainment a natural for the likes of Jerry Lewis. However, this meticulous historical study of these "hysterical and epileptic" tendencies in French cafe-concert or cabaret scene of the late 19th century and in the first films of the early 20th century does not address the comparison with Jerry Lewis comedy until the epilogue. The six principal chapters provide a detailed description of the philosophical views of literature, art, and music in the 19th century that led to a kind of entertainment that appealed to the "low element in human nature." Gordon's first chapter delves into the reltionship between the diagnosis of hysteria in late 19th-century medical practice and theory and performance art fouund in Parisian cabaret, early film comedy, puppet shows, pantomime, side shows, circus exhibitions,etc., leading up to the Surrealist pronouncement that "hysteria was the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century" (2). The book's cover features a poster of Eugenie Gougere, one of many "epileptic singers," whose success in the Parisian cabaret scene testified to the fascination of the public with convulsive body language, which encouraged audiences to see a correlation between idiocy, hysteria, loss and control . . . and laughter during the years 1870-95. The book also contains numerous blank-and-white photos and publicity posters that show various comedians demonstrating the kinds of facial grimaces and contrortions, and bizarre bodily movements such as animality, automata, and epilepsy that spectators loved. The author explains that such anomalies were popular partly because they evoked laughter and partly because of the sense of superiority that the sight of the afflicted offered them. Also, the "degenerate" tastes of the intellectual and artistic elite tended to pain and other intense sensations meant to "stimulate a lethargic and decadent psyche" (69) It is hardly surprising, says Gordon, to see a parallel in comic taste in early French film not just with Jerry Lewis movies, but also with more contemporary American products such as Beavis and Butthead and Dumb and Dumber, which, frankly, are signs of the lower faculties--the body in its various pathologies dominating reason. A half a century after the advent of film, a new generation of French audiences rediscovered this "vein of humor pushed to a painful and idiotic corporeal extremes in the person of Jerry Lewis" (202). Gordon cites such Lewis films as The Caddy (1959), The Bellboy (1960) The Nutty Professor (1962) as overt homages to early French silent films. Although Lewis, according to French film critic Jean-Pierre Coursodon, "represented the lowest degree of physical, moral, and intellecutal debasement that a comic actor can reach" (205), the French public was delighted with this American comic who was not afraid to take on the outrageous and grotesque traits of the first strain of French film comics--gags based on physical pain, a comic style that is thematically torturous, and the land of the absurd (309). Despite Crousodon's assessment of Lewis's talent, the American comic is "both genuinely popular and critically respected in France" (205). The New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard was particularly impressed with and influenced by Lewis. During a trip to France in 1965, Lewis was greeted with a "rock star's welcome" at Orly Airport. He returned to France in 1982, the same year that his The King of Comedy was called "sublime" in Cannes. On March 24, 1984, Lewis was awarded the Legion d'Honneur by the French government. Although not every reader of Gordon's study may agree that Lewis, whose comic style is often regarded in his own country as embarrassingly over the top, was worthy of such a lofty honor from the French government, this book is a fascinating read. Students of 19th- or 20th-century French literature and history will also find that this book offers an interesting and heretofore little explored dimension to their connaissance of the French character and personality of the turn of the 20th century.

[Trav S.D. · Rating 2 out of 5]

what a preposterous line of inquiry.