Eighty years ago, though the Arsenal of Democracy had vanquished the Axis and weathered a withering Depression, the recovering American people found themselves rich in bills but short on laughs. Enter Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who debuted together on July 25, 1946.<\/p>\n
Unlike Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, or Hope and Crosby, who relied on tightly scripted setups, this disparate yet kindred duo captured America\u2019s heart by being viscerally, uproariously and unpredictably wild.<\/p>\n
Martin and Lewis were the founding fathers of an anarchic, side-splitting brand of comedy that combined pratfalls, ad-libbed wordplay and a sustained demolition of the fourth floor. Orson Welles observed that the duo\u2019s combustible zaniness was so hilarious that it made you wet your pants.<\/p>\n
The boys cavorted about the stage, kibitzing with bandleaders and the audience alike. In between trading impromptu quips, Martin and Lewis overturned tables, cut ties, sheared suits and spritzed seltzer on one and all.<\/p>\n
The suave, dashingly handsome Italian crooner clowning around with his gawky, rubbery Jewish buddy brought the house down every time. It was nonstop, jocular pandemonium: Commedia dell\u2019arte 2.0.<\/p>\n
\u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d Second City, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld and Adam Sandler all owe a debt to the artists who started life as Dino Crocetti and Joseph Levitch.<\/p>\n
Martin and Lewis created a novus ordo seclorum, in its way innovating like America\u2019s founders, spawning a new comedic order of the ages.<\/p>\n
Their alchemy was as ineffable as it was infectious. Variety\u2019s first review of the act noted, \u201cAll they do cannot be detailed, but virtually every bit of it is good for solid laughs.\u201d Carl Reiner similarly declared: \u201cI saw what I thought was the funniest ad-libbed thing I had ever seen. It was a riot, and we never stopped laughing.\u201d<\/p>\n
In their own madcap way, Dino and Jer epitomized Cicero\u2019s notion that comedy is the imitation of life, the mirror of custom and the image of truth.<\/p>\n
Martin and Lewis became the monarchs of all media, conquering radio, nightclubs, television and the silver screen. In 1948, they appeared on Ed Sullivan\u2019s first television show, \u201cToast of the Town.\u201d From 1950 to 1955, the Martin-and-Lewis-hosted \u201cColgate Comedy Hour\u201d frequently bested Sullivan in the ratings.<\/p>\n
When Hollywood beckoned, the boys answered the call, cavorting, cutting up and reconfiguring reality on the silver screen. They starred in 16 films, bringing their boisterous bromance to capacity-crowd movie theaters.<\/p>\n
Though their big-screen adventures could not capture the comedic chaos of their stage act, Martin and Lewis transformed even the most pedestrian screenplay into box-office gold. As film critic Ciara Maloney explained, \u201cTheir brilliance shines through the weakest material: the ineffable, bewitching something between them \u2014 an intimacy, an immediacy, an ingenuity \u2014 frozen in amber for those of us who would never see it in the Copacabana.\u201d<\/p>\n
The essence of this duo was the outr\u00e9 interplay between the Prince and the Putz, the Leading Man and the Monkey. Though he was the comedian by trade, Lewis fully credited Martin as the \u201cgenius\u201d of the pairing: \u201cHe kept the center. He was the spine of the act. And the monkey was constantly attached to that spine, on the spine, next to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
From \u201cSailor Beware\u201d to \u201cThe Stooge,\u201d \u201cLiving It Up\u201d and \u201cArtists and Models,\u201d theirs was a comedy partnership that came to symbolize America. It is little wonder that presidential historian Tevi Troy called the 1950s \u201cThe Martin and Lewis Decade<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n However, many Americans didn\u2019t see these two celebrities as distant icons. Film critic Jenna Ipcar has described how \u201ca perfect comedy duo will make their audience feel like a lucky participant instead of just a passive observer, a welcome guest in a secret world.\u201d Martin and Lewis embodied that ideal.<\/p>\n The boys\u2019 bittersweet final performance took place at New York\u2019s Copacabana on July 25, 1956. Exactly 10 years after their debut in Atlantic City, N.J., Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had pioneered a new brand of comedy, soothed postwar America\u2019s psyche and made a nation laugh again.<\/p>\n Rosario A. Iaconis, chairman of the Italic Institute of America<\/a>, writes<\/a> about Italy and its cultural influence. He is at work on a novel about Harry S. Truman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eighty years ago, though the Arsenal of Democracy had vanquished the Axis and weathered a withering Depression, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1871,7625,1864,8825,2241,164958,164956,164957,77855,164959,148117,5679,48,52,51,1637,47,50,49,164960,88457],"class_list":["post-411927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-act","tag-america","tag-audience","tag-boy","tag-comedy","tag-copacabana","tag-dean-martin","tag-dino-crocetti","tag-duo","tag-ed-sullivan","tag-jerry-lewis","tag-july","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-life","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-silver-screen","tag-spine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}