1. SMORGASBORD

Smorgasbord (retitled Cracking Up by the distributor) is Jerry Lewis's last self-directed feature film.It first opened in France in 1983; it never received a proper American release. (In the US, it wasimmediately relegated to cable television -- which is where I saw it for the first time). AndSmorgasbord still isn't very well known today -- even among Lewis aficionados. (It is, for instance,the only one of Lewis's self-directed films not to appear in the index to Enfant Terrible , an academicessay collection edited by Murray Pomerance in 2002, which otherwise covers Lewis' film careerquite comprehensively). Yet I think that Smorgasbord is one of Jerry Lewis's greatest films; in whatfollows, I will try to explain why.

Let's begin with some general observations. It is often said -- indeed, it is almost a cliché -- thatcomedy is born of despair. Laughter is an outlet for misery. Turning horrible circumstances into a jokeis a way of detaching oneself from such circumstances, and as a result avoiding madness and despair.Comedy thus offers us a kind of catharsis. However, this is not a purgation of terror and pity, asAristotle maintained in the case of tragedy. Rather, it is a purgation of awkwardness and discomfort;or, more intensely, of shame, embarrassment, and humiliation.

But how is such a purgation to be accomplished? Fear and terror are sublime; they point to anoverwhelming force, whose advent involves a complete rupture. In the fate of Oedipus or King Lear, awhole world is destroyed. But awkwardness and embarrassment do not work in such a manner. Theyare worldly states of feeling, often manifested in the most petty details of everyday life. Theirpurgation, therefore, cannot take place on a grand scale, or all at once. It is rather a slow andexcruciating process.

In Jerry Lewis's films, therefore, cathartic purgation does not take place in an explosive moment ofrelief (as is the case with Aristotelian tragedy, or for that matter with that sort of comedy that followsthe model of Freud's theory of jokes). Lewis's films are devoid of grand conflcits. Instead, theywallow in these harrowing, yet homely and all-too-familiar, negative emotional states. They pushconditions of awkwardness and discomfort and embarrassment all the way to the point of exhaustion.The jokes in Lewis's films are often extended in time, beyond the breaking point; or else, they arerepeated ad nauseam, until they are no longer funny. At the point of exhaustion, humor no longerresides in the (by now overly familiar) joke itself, but rather, reflexively, in the very fact that it isbeing reiterated without reason.

Take, for instance, the scene in Smorgasbord in which Lewis's character tries to order a meal in arestaurant from a zealous waitress, played by Zane Busby. The menu seems to contain a multitude ofminute, and nearly meaningless, alternatives. Does Jerry want juice? Busby lists the choices in agrating monotone: "We have apple, grapefruit, pineapple, apricot, orange, lemon, lemon crush,banana, asparagus, avocado, nectarine, tangerine, cherry, or pitless watermelon." And so on, for thesalad, the salad dressing, the main course, the rest of the meal, and even beyond. By the end of thedinner, Lewis is utterly worn down and exhausted.

This sequence never really comes to a climax; it is abandoned rather than concluded. We could easilyimagine it continuing to infinity. (And indeed, Busby twice reappears in the film, as a parkingattendant and then as a movie patron, both times again repeating long lists of alternatives in amonotone). The joke doesn't have a punchline. For us in the audience, there isn't any sudden outburstof laughter. Rather, the humor lies in the whole drawn-out process of the scene, and in the veryimpossibility of its resolution. We don't get an explosion, but something more like a continualsmoldering. For Lewis, paradoxically, comic relief is a slow and excruciating process.

As humor arises from discomfort, it also tends to mobilize a strong element of aggression. I feelirritated, and I want to expel the irritant. Humor can therefore easily issue in violence (think of theThree Stooges), or in insult directed aggressively against others (think of Don Rickles). But JerryLewis's comedy does not work this way. For Lewis -- and this is perhaps more generally true --comedy is most emotionally riveting, and most therapeutically purging, when the aggression is turnedagainst oneself, instead of against others. Jewish humor in particular often involves a strong elementof self-deprecation. One sees this in nearly all of Lewis's work -- and also in the early movies ofWoody Allen, and in the shows of Larry David today. When Lewis the comedian skewers andlacerates himself, he wards off by anticipation the mutiple humiliations that are sure to be imposedupon him by others.

This is a quintessential strategy that has historically been adopted by Jews, by women, and bymembers of other oppressed groups. As Lewis himself puts it, in his book The Total Film-Maker:

Comedy, humor, call it what you may, is often the difference between sanity and insanity,survival and disaster, even death. It's man's emotional safety valve. If it wasn't for humor,man could not survive emotionally. Peoples who have the ability to laugh at themselves arethe peoples who eventually make it. Blacks and Jews have the greatest sense of humorsimply because their safety valves have been open so long.

Jewish humor (and African American humor as well) highlights the absurdity of a sort of sufferingthat nonetheless cannot be avoided; indeed, a suffering that its victims internalize in spite ofthemselves. We might well compare Jewish humor to another great Jewish invention that endeavors todeal with unavoidable, internalized suffering: psychoanalysis. Like humor, psychoanalysis gives reliefby providing a "safety valve" through which one may give vent to otherwise unmentionable miseries.The analytic session, like the movie screen, works as a "safety valve" or a space for purgation. Thecouch, like the screen, is a place where blockages or "complexes" can be worked through vicariously,in relative safety. This is possible because of what Freud called the "neutrality" of the psychoanalyticsession. In comedy films, it is similarly possible because of what Kant called the "disinterest" ofaesthetic response. In both cases, sufferers are able to re-enact their traumas vicariously. Byreiterating their suffering in this context, they are able to master it -- or at least to lessen its impact.

This is why psychoanalytic truths, like comedic insights, generally tend to be self-deprecating ones.The psychoanalytic "cure" consists in recognizing, and giving voice to, the most unpleasant and self-

discrediting things that one can find out about oneself. However, psychoanalysis, like comedy, doesn'treally provide a permanent solution. The sources of misery still persist, and still torment the client ofpsychoanalysis, or the spectator of comedy, even after the "treatment" is completed. Freud himselfsays that the best that psychoanalysis can do is to relegate the sufferer to "ordinary unhappiness." Thisis why psychoanalysis tends to be, as Freud acknowledged, an interminable process, like a shaggy-dogstory that never comes to a proper end -- or like Lewis's gag with Zane Busby in Smorgasbord.

Indeed, Jerry Lewis's quintessentially Jewish comedy tends to be both self-deprecating andinterminable. The humor of Lewis's films often revolves around frustration and incompetence. Lewis'spersona is never able to fulfill the tasks that have been assigned to him; as he struggles interminablyto come to some conclusion, his well-meaning efforts instead spread chaos far and wide. Every one ofLewis's character's actions seems to have limitless reverberations, both centrifugally and centripetally.Waves of destruction spread outwards, to infect or contaminate other people, and to overwhelmLewis's physical surroundings; at the same time, these waves also redound back upon Lewis himself,in such a way as to repeat or reaffirm the very irritation that set things off in the first place. Lewis asfilmmaker seeks to track these movements in as much detail as possible, and to articulate them informal cinematic terms, through the careful manipulation of space and time, of bodily postures andfacial expressions, and of camera movements and editing rhythms.

In the opening, pre-credit sequence of Smorgasbord, Warren Nefron (Jerry's main character) tries tokill himself. But he proves to be so incompetent that he cannot even accomplish this. As ominousmusic plays on the soundtrack, a man enters a hotel room. We do not see his face, but only his lowerbody. He opens a briefcase, and removes a bomb, a gun, a bottle of poison, a bottle of pills, and a handgrenade. Then he takes out a long rope, already formed into a noose. He stands on a chair, loops therope through something on the ceiling, lifts up the noose to put it around his head (presumably; hishead still remains out of frame), and kicks the chair away. But instead of swinging freely through theair from the rope, his legs float gently down back to the floor. Only then does the camera pull back toreveal Lewis'sentire figure. Lewis's face registers a look of exasperated, yet unsurprised, frustration(as if he were saying, fatalistically, "oh no, not again..."). His body seems elongated and rubbery as heslowly falls to the floor, the noose still around his neck.

Annoyed but undaunted, Warren tries to hang himself again. Once more he loops the rope on theceiling, and puts his head in the noose. This time, however, instead of climbing onto a chair, heremains standing on the floor. He silently mouths the word "goodbye." Then he attempts, quitebizarrely, to hoist himself up into the air by pulling down on the other end of the rope. I wonder ifthere is a subliminal pun here; it's almost as if he were trying to literalize the expression "hoist by hisown petard." But in any case, such a procedure is of course not physically possible. Even if Warrenwere somehow able to lever up his own weight, his grip would slacken once he started to suffocate, sothat he would (once again) fall back to the floor. Instead of this, however, something unexpectedhappens. As Warren tugs on the rope, he pulls the ceiling down on himself. Cut to a shot of a largeskyscraper imploding.

Warren's next attempt to kill himself is still more elaborate and convoluted. He sits in a chair in ahotel room, watching a Western on TV. A rifle is poised on a table behind him, aimed right at hishead. Warren has tied one end of a string to the rifle's trigger, and the other to the knob of the door tohis room. He calls room service, asking for some ice. The idea is that, when the bellboy opens the doorto deliver the ice, the string will be pulled, the gun will go off, and Warren will be shot. But of course,as always happens, Warren's plan goes awry. The bellboy knocks, but he does not enter. It turns outthat the door to the room is locked. Wearily, Warren gets up from his chair and opens the door. Thetrigger is pulled, and the rifle shoots. The bullet goes through the television set, and kills one of thecowboys on the TV screen. Another cowboy turns, faces out of the screen, draws his gun, and fires ashot that exits the TV screen and kills the bellboy standing in the doorway of the hotel room. Warren'ssuicide attempt has been foiled again; instead, he shamefacedly sneaks away.

Of course, I have ruined Lewis's jokes by explaining them at such great length. What's more, I havetaken Lewis's entirely visual setups, and tediously translated them into words. But I have not done thisonly in order to underline the grimness that, in the great Jewish comedy tradition, lies at the base ofeven Lewis's silliest jokes. I am also trying to call attention to the heavy intricacy of Lewis's sightgags. Apparently unable to kill himself directly, Warren builds cumbersome and elaborate machinesin order to do the job. His own body is just one component of these machines. I am reminded of BusterKeaton's magical rapport with machines, of Rube Goldberg's complicated devices for performingsimple tasks, and even of Deleuze and Guattari's "desiring machines." Lewis's machines, like all ofthese, cross boundaries and flatten hierarchies. They ignore distinctions between things and theirrepresentations: the bodies in the hotel room and the images on the TV screen are equally affected.

But in one crucial way, Lewis's machines are the inverse of those constructed by Keaton, Goldberg,and Deleuze and Guattari. The difference is that Lewis's machines are neurotic rather than schizo, andreiterative rather than transformative. They only seem able to produce unintended consequences. Forall their ramifying, disproportionate, and transformative effects upon their surroundings, they leaveLewis's own persona weirdly unaffected, or stuck in the same place. At the end of Smorgasbord's pre-credit sequence -- and indeed throughout most of the film, until the very end -- Warren Nefron is stilla "misfit" (as he later calls himself): out of whack with his surroundings, and uneasily trapped withinhimself. Comedy may be purgative and transformative for others, but it seems to have no efficacy forthe comedian himself.

Consider yet another example from Smorgasbord. Warren hires a trainer to help him give up smoking.(The trainer is played by the great Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus). Every time that Warren somuch as starts to light a cigarette, Butkus arrives, seemingly from nowhere, and punches him out. Itdoesn't even seem to matter where Warren is: Butkus shows up in a closed elevator, and comes to lifefrom being a statue in the museum. Giving up smoking is thus an interminable process, just likepsychoanalysis itself. Warren's pain and insecurity drives him to try to relieve himself (or self-medicate) through the comfort of smoking: indeed, Butkus begins the "treatment" by evoking forWarren all the pleasures of lighting up, only to scream at him when he nods and agrees. Subsequently,each time that Warren tries to light up, the brutal interruption of this comfort means that he becomes

still more pained and insecure, which means that he will inevitably reach for another cigarette, sooneror later...

In nearly all of Lewis's self-directed films, his characters have no way to address their dilemmas.They are unable to assert themselves through speech; which means that they are forced to act out (orobsessively repeat) these dilemmas instead. The comedy actively orchestrated by Lewis the directorcan only be suffered passively by Lewis the performer. In The Bellboy, Stanley never gets to speak,because nobody ever gives him the chance to say anything. They are too busy giving him orders, orreproaching him for his errors on the job. In The Nutty Professor, Julius Kelp cannot express his desirefor Stella, except through the voice of his narcissistic alter ego, Buddy Love. In The Big Mouth,Gerald similarly struggles in vain to get anyone to listen to his lengthy explanations of his "problem"(which is not falling in love, as his girlfriend Suzie hopes, but rather his unwanted entanglement withgangsters, as a result of his uncanny resemblance to somebody who is supposed to be dead).

In Smorgasbord, this incapacity is both epitomized and inverted; this is one of many ways in whichthe film works as a culmination of Lewis's entire oeuvre. Speech becomes possible for Warren, onlybecause he goes to the psychoanalyst: somebody who is paid to listen to him. The film insists upon --even as it ridicules -- the necessity of paying the analyst; you can only get someone to listen to you atthe price of what Jacques Lacan called a "symbolic debt." As Doctor Pletchick (the fatuouspsychoanalyst played by Herb Edelman) reminds Warren at one point, "money is no object. We acceptfurniture, television sets, stereos..." Through this sort of payment, the "talking cure" becomes a kind ofrelay, much in the same way that media like television (in the pre-credit sequence) and musicalrecording, and also film itself, work as relays. The analytic sessions do not really relieve Warren ofhis anxieties and incapacities; instead, these analytic sessions (or cinematic scenes) reframe theseanxieties, and offer a space for their endless elaboration.

The confluence of psychoanalysis and Jewish humor is usually taken in a more "serious" (if I may usethat word) manner than Jerry Lewis is ever willing to provide. One may think of Woody Allen's films,which I have already mentioned; in the course of Allen's career, he moves from scattershot absurdistcomedy to a more broodingly existential way of reflecting upon the absurdity of life. One may alsothink of Philip Roth's early novel Portnoy's Complaint, in which several hundred pages of manic self-loathing and self-justification culminate in the punchline of the psychoanalyst saying: "So [said thedoctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?" Both Allen and Roth underscore the interminability ofpsychoanalysis to great comedic effect. But they also both treat psychoanalysis itself with a kind of"seriousness" and "sophistication" (once again I am unsure if these are the proper words) that Lewisrefuses, and that he may well be incapable of.

In other words, Lewis -- unlike Allen or Roth, and in sharp contrast to Freud's own recommendations -- refuses to sublimate. He rejects the notion that psychonalysis could treat a neurotic blockage bytransferring it to a higher plane, just as he rejects the notion that comedy could be redeemed by beingsublimated into a "higher" cinematic genre. Lewis notes, in The Total Film-Maker , that comediesnever win Oscars, and that indeed "there is no comedy category" at all in the Academy Awards: "the

whole smell of 'Comedy, Jesus, that's low-brow' has infiltrated motion-picture-industry awards," hewrites. In his treatment of psychoanalysis no less than his treatment of film as entertainment, Lewisremains resolutely "low-brow." Although his comedies seem to offer -- as I am trying to argue -- asort of purgation, they are never edifying or "elevating." Even the sentimentality of which Lewis isoften accused is the result of his stubborn refusal of sublimation (even when it comes in the anodyneform of "sophistication").

Although Lewis also engages psychoanalysis directly in Three on a Couch, it is only in Smorgasbordthat he pushes the link between comedy and psychoanalysis to its furthest consequences. For here, thefilm itself directly coincides with the process of the supposed psychoanalytic cure. Smorgasbord hasalmost no linear plot; it consists in a series of independent gags -- including the ones that I havealready discussed -- bound together, at best, by the excuse that they are all episodes that Warrenrecounts to the analyst. The incidents could therefore be regarded as a series of flashbacks. But eventhis conceit is stretched, first by Warren's recounting of incidents in the lives of his ancestors (playedof course by Lewis as well), and then by sequences that allow Lewis to impersonate yet othercharacters with whom Warren only comes into momentary contact (like a Southern sheriff, and a NewAge guru).

Many of Lewis's movies -- stretching back to the very first film he directed, The Bellboy, have anepisodic or picaresque structure, rather than a strict linear narrative. But in Smorgasbord, Lewispushes this tendency further than ever before. Warren Nefron needs psychoanalysis because he isbasically an empty shell of a man, devoid of any unity of "character." He is nothing more than adisaggregated collection of nervous tics, irresistible compulsions, and flailing, self-defeating attemptsat what might loosely be conceived as "normality." But psychoanalytic treatment itself rejects the goalof a unified self or stable ego (the latter was conceived by the "ego psychology" that, as far back as the1950s, both Jacques Lacan and Norman O. Brown already denounced as a betrayal of Freudian ideas).And the psychoanalytic method of "free association" -- even if, as Freud claimed, it is ultimatelygoverned by the "strict determinism of mental events" -- appears on the surface as a picaresque,seemingly random, series of digressions and non sequiturs. Precisely because it is a sequence ofseemingly disconnected scenes, Smorgasbord is closer to the underlying logic of Lewis's comedy -- aswell as to both the psychoanalytic conception of neurosis and to the psychoanalytic treatment ofneurosis -- than any more unified narrative possibly could be. (This is evidently also one reason forthe original title of the film: Lewis offers us, as it were, a buffet of culinary alternatives, rather than anarrative that starts with soup and ends with dessert).

What all the multiple, proliferating sequences scattered throughout Smorgasbord have in common isonly (but crucially) that they all turn upon the fundamental lability, and yet seemingly unchangeableklutziness or incapacity, of Lewis's comedic persona. For instance, one sequence recounts the fate ofWarren's distant ancestor Jacques, a French prisoner on Devil's Island. Lewis uses a mock Frenchaccent. (This would seem to be referring obliquely to his popularity in France, and to the way thatmany Americans have come to dismiss him as a figure whom only the French love). The accent is anodd construction: it mixes French words with English ones, mangling the pronunciation of both by

speaking the words of each language with vowel sounds more typical of the other. It also strays intoadditional linguistic territory, introducing Japanese intonations at one point, and German words atanother. The effect is to produce an alarming instability, through a process of continual modulation.

Yet at the same time, the point of this whole episode is Jacques' inability to escape from his prison. Hecarefully crafts "ze dummy zat looks like moi," so that he can leave it in his cell, in order to fool theguards, as he runs away. But when the guards toss out the old mattress in which the dummy has beenconcealed, the dummy leaves the prison and "escapes" to Paris on horseback, while Jacques is leftbehind in his cell. Once again, Lewis's persona is unable to achieve freedom, even as his machinationshave cascading effects beyond the limits of his own confinement.

The actual credit sequence of Smorgasbord, immediately following the failed suicide attempts, showsWarren entering the psychoanalyst's office for the first time. Lewis's brilliance as a physical comedian-- I am almost tempted to say, as a contortionist -- is on full display, as Warren attempts to walkacross the office floor and to sit in its sofas and chairs. The floor is immaculate, waxed to a bright,gleaming finish; the furniture is plastic and smooth. As a result, Warren simply cannot get a grip: hekeeps doing pratfalls on the floor, and sliding off the chairs. Presumably Warren's inability to so muchas get across the room is a physical (or perhaps physiological?) expression of his terror at exposinghimself to the analyst's inquiries. The analyst's office is a "smooth space" (as Deleuze and Guattarimight put it) within which Warren fears that he may simply dissolve or slip away.

Despite this terror, Warren nonetheless tries to deal with the situation with his usual earnestness andconcern for details. He places cigarettes in a trail across the floor, in order to anchor his footsteps.Typically, he crawls forward to lay down the cigarettes, and then -- despite having already reached thechair which is his immediate objective -- lets himself slide back to his starting place, in order to walkthe same distance he has already traversed. As always for Lewis's comedic personae, the procedurethat he settles upon to solve his problems becomes more important in its own right, than actuallyachieving the very goal for which the procedure was originally devised. This is yet another formulafor the interminability, both of comedy and of psychoanalysis.

In the credit sequence, Warren similarly solves the problem of sliding off the smooth plastic sofa andchairs by dousing a pocked handkerchief in alcohol, and then sitting upon it, thereby creating enoughfriction to stay in place. Once again, Lewis's persona tries to resolve an intractable problem byscrupulously ignoring its major causes, and instead focusing on its most minute details. This is whatallows Lewis's gags to continue at such length: each of them involves a series of ingenious partialsolutions that actually do work to a certain extent, but also result in prolonging the basic situation thatthey are meant to address. Yet again, this is the very mechanism by which both comedic invention andpsychoanalytic experimentation are subject to interminable extension.

I am sorely tempted to go on and analyze every single sequence of Smorgasbord in detail. Inparticular, I would like to say more about the psychoanalyst, Dr. Pletchick, who in Herb Edelman'sperformance becomes the last in a long line of overbearing, yet ultimately vain, ridiculous, and empty,male authority figures appearing in nearly all of Lewis's movies. The deflation of patriarchal authority

is a crucial element of Lewis's comedy, and one that dovetails with its psychoanalytic affiliations. Butfor reasons of length I will drop these considerations, and instead skip ahead to the film's conclusion.

I have been arguing that comedy and psychoanalysis are both properly interminable, so that thepurgation they promise is only delivered piecemeal, and can never be achieved once and for all. Yet ofcourse, any film, like any treatment, empirically needs to conclude at some point (even if this, mostgrimly, only happens with the death of the protagonist or analysand). There is no linear progression inSmorgasbord; Warren Nefron is no closer to being "cured" after all his extensive sessions with Dr.Pletchick than he was at the very beginning. The only way out is by some sort of deus ex machina --and Dr. Pletchick accomplishes this by reverting from psychoanalysis to the very technique that Freudhad earlier tried and then rejected: hypnosis.

At the end of the film, then, Dr. Pletchick hypnotizes Warren. For his part, Warren, of course, is onlytoo willing to be hypnotized, since his labile character is such that he is already overly influenced byanything and everything that he encounters. Under hypnosis, Warren is told that his symptoms will alldisappear by post-hypnotic suggestion, once Dr. Pletchick repeats to him the magic word:smorgasbord. Dr. Pletchick awakens Warren, and drags him out of the building and onto the street. Herepeats the magic word to Warren, and the result is instantaneous. Warren is now, for all practicalintents and purposes, "normal." A well-functioning male heterosexual subject, he crosses the streetand starts chatting up some women whom he meets.

Of course, such a magical "cure" cannot come without a price. This cost is a kind of transference(though, in strict psychoanalytic vocabulary, it is probably best described as counter-transference).All the symptoms that have been excised from Warren's body and mind reappear instead in Dr.Petchick. All of a sudden the psychiatrist has adopted all of Warren's mannerisms and incompetencies.He lights a cigarette and gets punched out by Dick Butkus; he flails about, running this way and that,causing cars to crash and structures to topple, spreading chaos all around him. The film cuts from thisto one final sequence: Warren and his girlfriend are coming out of a movie theater, where they havejust been watching "Jerry Lewis in SMORGASBORD (The Movie)." (The transition is actually a slowdissolve, rather than a clean cut; by stopping the DVD at just the right moment, I was able to see DrPletchick, in his confused state, superimposed upon the image of the movie marquee).

At the end of Smorgasbord, therefore, Lewis once again demonstrates his penchant for self-referentiality, which has been noted by many critics. In particular, Chris Fujiwara has shown howLewis's self-referential moments are often autobiographical ones as well. But here, self-referentialiyis linked to another one of Lewis's most important thematic and structural devices: that of comedicdisorder as a sort of infection and contagion. The dysfunctional traits of Lewis's characters --stammering, moving about clumsily, manifesting various nervous tics and speech disorders -- arealways being transferred among numerous personas (in films -- such as The Family Jewels -- whereLewis plays multiple roles), or else transmitted from Lewis-the-actor to characters played by otheractors (this occurs most notably in The Big Mouth).

In Smorgasbord, these two operations -- self-referential doubling, and the contagious transmission of

dysfunctional affects -- seem to be two sides of the same operation. Comedy is supposed to bepurgative and cathartic. But it cannot really get rid of the awkwardness, discomfort, embarrassment,and humiliation that are its representational content and its purgative targets. Instead, it can onlyeliminate these symptoms, or structures of feeling, from one place by implanting them elsewhereinstead. It's as if the world operated according to some weird metaphysical law of the conservation ofaffects. In particular, the negative emotions with which comedy has to deal are never abolished.Instead, the "safety valve" of comedic relief causes them to be transferred from one persona orcharacter to another, and ultimately (through the self-referential leap of aesthetics) from the movie asa whole to its audience. In real life, Jerry Lewis has been a tireless apostle for the healing power ofcomedy; indeed, he has conducted numerous "Laughter & Healing Seminars." But even as Lewis'smovies perform the healing miracle of comedic catharsis, they also continually remind us of just howtenuous, and how interminable, the "healing" process which they dramatize can be.

2. THE JERRY LEWIS ASSEMBLAGE

Consider a scene from The Patsy (1964). Hans Conreid’s stuffy, Germanic music teacher is givingJerry Lewis a singing lesson. Conreid’s performance here is reminiscent of his role, a decade before,as the sadistic piano teacher in the Doctor Seuss film The 5000 Fingers of Dr T (Roy Rowland, 1953).He is one of the pompous male authority figures who are always ridiculed and reduced to impotence inLewis’ movies. Jerry’s own character is a hotel bellboy named Stanley: evidently the same figure whoappeared in Lewis’ earlier film The Bellboy (1960). Lewis’ persona is, as always, earnest and eager toplease, but utterly incapable of doing anything right. There’s an extended routine involving Conreid’scollection of “priceless antiques,” including vases and statues that Lewis bumblingly knocks off theirpedestals, only to catch them just before they would have hit the ground and shattered. Lewis also triesto sit in a number of Conreid’s antique sofas and chairs, all of which seem exceedingly uncomfortable.Despite contorting his body into various grotesque postures, Lewis always ends up either by wreckingthe furniture, or by sliding down off it and onto the floor. As Lewis continues his nearly-silentshenanigans, we get frequent reaction shots of Conreid, whose face shifts alarmingly from an unctuoussmile of obviously false warmth (as he recounts the wonders of music) to various frowns, grimaces,and nervous tics (expressing his displeasure at Lewis’ unwitting assault upon his museum pieces).

After all this, the music lesson itself begins. In order to show how one must sing “with diaphramaticbreathing… from the chest,” Conreid screams so closely into Lewis’ face that the sonic reverberationscause Jerry’s eyebrows to stretch out and grotesquely cover his eyes. This creates a monster effect,with a look that would not be out of place in the transformation scene of The Nutty Professor (1963).But Lewis barely reacts, pausing for a second and then carefully combing his eyebrows back intoplace. Conreid, sitting at the piano, then sings a series of notes for Lewis to emulate – which he does,braying off-key, and exaggerating (amplifying and caricaturing) Conreid’s facial expressions and armgestures. Conreid accompanies one note with a grandiose sweep of his arm. Imitating this gesture,Lewis knocks down the piano’s lid prop, so that the lid closes over Conreid’s hand. Conreid grimaces,and issues a series of screams. But Lewis continues to imitate Conreid’s facial expressions and vocaltones, as if he were just being given additional notes to sing. The caricatures become more and moredemented, but Lewis barely acknowledges that anything is wrong. (At one point, Lewis steps out ofcharacter, and says in a normal voice, in response to a scream, “that’s a good note”; but almostimmediately he returns to his hysterical vocalizations and contortions). Finally, the intensereverberations from Conreid’s screaming destroy the room. We get a close-up of a decorative drinkingglass shattering, followed by a deep-focus long shot of the entire room, with antiques toppling,lighting fixtures swinging as in an earthquake, furniture being shattered or overturned, and portions ofthe ceiling collapsing onto Conreid and Lewis.

Even so detailed a description fails to capture the full complexity of what might well be called theJerry Lewis assemblage (using this last word, as is customary, to translate Deleuze and Guattari’sagencement). How does this assemblage produce comedic effects? According to Bergson’s famousformulation, comedy results from “a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect tofind the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being.” But in a certain way,

Lewis inverts Bergson’s formula. For Lewis’ persona pushes “elasticity”, “adaptability,” and “livingpliableness” to an alarming extreme. Jerry seems to have no fixed inner essence; he is open to any andevery suggestion that reaches him. Lewis’ body is something like an electronic transformer: only itamplifies affects, gestures, and expressions, instead of electric currents. Lewis registers inflectionsand influences from the people around him – and from the nonhuman objects in his environment aswell – and pumps them up into a bizarre hypervisibility.

Bergson writes that “to imitate any one is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed tocreep into his person.” And Lewis does indeed seem to respond helplessly and automatically to all thesuggestions that reach him; this is why his hapless repetitions of Conreid’s tones and gestures makethe latter’s pomposity seem ridiculous. However, Lewis’ mimetic automatisms themselves take on theliveliness and flexibility, and indeed the duration, that for Bergson rather characterize the fullunfolding and expressiveness of élan vital. Bergson tells us that – in contrast to the mechanisticreductions that provoke laughter – life in its full vigor “presents itself to us as evolution in time andcomplexity in space”; living beings are characterized by “a continual change of aspect, theirreversibility of the order of phenomena.” But such are precisely the characteristics of Lewis’comedy. Everything in the sequence I have described depends upon irreversible temporal processesunfolding under conditions of spatial complexity.

One important aspect of the Jerry Lewis assemblage is therefore its articulation of space and time.Lewis usually sets his destructive routines in large, carefully designed three-dimensional spaces, oftenshown to us in deep focus. The most famous example of this is the cut-away three-story house thatserves as the main set for The Ladies Man (1961). But The Patsy‘s music room works in a similarway. The room is packed with kitschy clutter, including the “priceless antiques” I have alreadymentioned, and a large piano, as well as things like a bust of Beethoven under a sign that reads (withfake-German-accent-spelling) “Zing For Your Zupper.” Yet the room is so large that, despite thisclutter, there is also a great deal of emptiness. The space is well-defined, but it cannot be closed uponitself or separated from its outside. This is made evident in a gag where Lewis tries to close a pair ofsliding doors, only to have them slide past each other, opening up the room again. Objects arescattered throughout this large, open volume. These objects at first seem to be entirely independent ofone another; but over the course of the scene, the violence released by Lewis’ body will cause them tointeract, and even to interpenetrate.

The Jerry Lewis assemblage is not given to us all at once; rather, it involves a certain experience ofduration. The timing has to be precisely right; as Lewis says in his book The Total Film-Maker , “twoextra frames spoil a joke.” Bergson identifies repetition, inversion, and reciprocal interference ofseries as the three crucial “methods of light comedy”; these stand in opposition to the way that life“never goes backwards and never repeats anything.” But Lewis, once more, works to have things bothways. His repetitions, inversions, and interfering series are themselves only produced in the course ofa complex, evolving, and irreversible process. When a vase shatters, its pieces will neverspontaneously come together again. But in The Patsy, the vases do not shatter right away; Lewiscatches them before they hit the ground. We need to wait until they all smash up at once, thanks to

sound waves that need time to reverberate invisibly through the space, before they have built upenough to wreak their havoc. Throughout his movies, as here, Lewis makes us endure a long build-up,before he will give us the explosive moment of comedic release. In this way, the empty time of ourwaiting for something to happen itself becomes part of the gag. We watch some four minutes of Lewiscatching vases and sliding off chairs, before the room-annihilating vocalizations are unleashed. Theanticipated “punch line” is withheld for an excruciating length of time. (In some of Lewis’ movies,this “punch line” can even be omitted altogether).

This brings me to three final points about the Jerry Lewis assemblage. In the first place, Jerry’s ownbodily gestures and actions are jerky and discontinuous: these are qualities that Bergson associateswith nonliving, mechanistic repetition. And yet the result of Lewis’ “painful and idiotic corporealextremes” (as Rae Beth Gordon calls them) is to produce a thoroughly animistic universe. Everythingseems more or less alive; the most inert objects, and the most mechanistic processes, seem to bedriven by a strange vitality. But I call this situation animism, rather than vitalism, because theliveliness of the inorganic in Lewis’ films – and indeed the liveliness of Jerry himself – seems morelike a form of alien possession, than an intrinsic principle of expression. There is no autopoietic self-reproduction here, but something more like a process of contagion or contamination, or the uncannyvitality of the living dead. Part of Lewis’ genius is to make nervous comedy out of what in other handswould otherwise register as horror.

In the second place, the animism of the Jerry Lewis assemblage can be understood as an implicitrevision and extension of Bergson’s theory of comedy. Bergson structures his account of laughteraround an opposition between the entropy (or degredation of energy) found in mechanistic processes,and the negentropy (or complex organization) of life processes. But recent biological speculation byEric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan suggests that this is not a true opposition. The negentropic,creative organizing force of living processes (and of certain nonliving ones, like weather patterns andchemical catalytic reactions) is not opposed to entropy. Rather, the complex organization ofphenomena like hurricanes, living organisms, and ecosystems works to reduce energy gradients (likethat of solar radiation streaming towards the earth) more powerfully, radically, and efficiently thanwould otherwise be possible. The limited negentropy of Bergsonian “creative evolution” thus in factworks to dissipate energy (or to generate entropy) on a larger level. And the radical difference (orindeed incompatibility) of scale between these two levels is itself (following the arguments of GilbertSimondon and, following him, Deleuze) a necessary condition for this process. But the Jerry Lewisassemblage already works according to these principles of organization-dissipation and ofincompatibilities of scale. Lewis’ comedy necessarily involves durational movements of both creativeorganization and explosive dissipation; and it mobilizes minute causes which lead to disproportionateeffects. Such processes are readily apparent in the voice lesson sequence of The Patsy.

In the third place, and finally, the animism of the Jerry Lewis assemblage has a double root. On theone hand, it is grounded in the tradition of cartooning and cinematic animation. This is something thatLewis learned (and inherited) from Frank Tashlin, the director of the best Lewis films not directed byLewis himself. Cartoon animation gives exaggerated life to imaginary, and initially inanimate,

figures; Tashlin and Lewis apply such exaggeration to living bodies themselves, creating an“unnatural” more-than-liveliness. On the other hand, this animism equally derives from the uncannyvitality that is produced by commodity fetishism. Every person in Lewis’ films is reduced (as Bergsonwould say) to an inert and repetitive mechanism. But at the same time, every object and mechanism inLewis’ films is like Karl Marx’s table, which “not only stands with its feet on the ground, but… standson its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were tobegin dancing of its own free will.” In this way, Bergson’s theorization of the duality of life andmechanism in comedy is superposed with Marx’s understanding of how the duality between life andmechanism stands at the heart of everyone and everything, in a society organized by “the capitalistmode of production.” A Marxist Bergsonism, or a Bergsonian Marxism: such is the magic formula ofthe Jerry Lewis assemblage.