Month: September 2013

New Ebook — TWO ESSAYS ON JERRY LEWIS

I’ve decided to release a free ebook (a pamphlet, really): TWO ESSAYS ON JERRY LEWIS. The book contains, unsurprisingly, two essays I have recently written on Jerry Lewis. The first essay is about his final self-directed feature film, Smorgasbord (retitled Cracking Up by the distributor). It appeared in the online film journal La furia umana, but it is currently unavailable due to website restructuring. The second essay, “The Jerry Lewis Assemblage,” takes off from a scene in Lewis’ film The Patsy in order to give a more general discussion of the mechanisms of his comedy (and how Lewis provides us with a synthesis of Henri Bergson and Karl Marx). This essay will be appearing in a book on Lewis edited by Toni D’Angela (the editor in chief of La furia umana). I am putting the two essays together here, in the hope that they will be read more widely. Consider it as part of my ongoing effort to help Jerry Lewis — a comedian and filmmaker more recognized in Europe than at home in America — fully gain the recognition he deserves as one of the great artists of world cinema.

The ebook is available for free download: