Jerry's Kids

Forget that bad old joke about only the French loving Jerry Lewis and witness his ingenuity at the Museum of Modern Art's Dec. 6 Gramercy Theater showing of his 1961 film The Ladies Man. Superbly stylized and disarmingly funny, it's one of those Hollywood films that conceals subversiveness within pleasure?a prime example of cinema as pop art, even though early-60s culture-mongers weren't able to appreciate it. Director-writer-actor Lewis works triple-time exposing male sexual fantasies: displaying a private projection of power, measuring the specter of inadequacy, all while recognizing what we today identify as society's ideological control. I'm not stretching; Lewis' discursiveness is practically blatant. It comes through his graphic, outsized and funny visual audacity (like his character's single-man dilemma being replicated in a tv crew's apparatus). To dismiss Lewis' humor is both blind and lazy; it privileges animosity toward a particular artist over the thoughtful beauty of what he actually put on the screen.

Learning to enjoy Lewis at his best is useful?in fact, necessary?when dealing with Eight Crazy Nights, Friday After Next and Jackass, recent comedies that unexpectedly show Lewis' impish influence?although none of these movies matches Lewis' elaborate visual slapstick (he's the closest an American has come to Jacques Tati's surreal social vision). The Ladies Man climaxes with an historic scene: a cross-section view of a girls' boarding house where Lewis (as Herbert Heebert) works as a handyman. This justly famous setpiece turns the spectrum of women's lives into a three-dimensional, full-scale dollhouse metaphor. As the camera travels from room to room, the movie embodies different forms of sexual idolization?and subverts them. It's an audacious reflection of Lewis' satire on masculinity. In service to the boarding house, Hollywood and the institution of romance, Lewis' bold color and striking, self-conscious perspectives comment on men's indoctrination regarding the opposite sex. Fellini would do something like it only a couple years later in 8 1/2 and now, 41 years later, The Ladies Man is undeniable proof of Lewis' creativity, the serious artistry that America's critical establishment still has trouble respecting.

Lewis proved that intelligent work can be done in unexpected formats. He challenges contemporary performers like Adam Sandler, Ice Cube and the Jackasses to extend their cult audience's interest to a larger recognition of behavior and community. While Lewis' film career bloomed with the expansion of mass media, bringing idiosyncratic wit to wider prominence, Sandler, Cube and the Jackasses all started with mass popularity but use the movies to justify their sub-cult appeal. Maybe that explains why they work less hard.

Eight Crazy Nights has promise. Based on Sandler's oft-recorded parody "The Chanukah Song," this animated film bids to be the first Hollywood movie ever about the Jewish festival of lights. Unironically repeating Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Sandler's cartoon incarnation is Davey Stone, a bitter "33-year-old crazy Jewish guy" skateboarding through town on a garbage can lid. He sings, "I hate love, I hate you, I hate me." This holiday humbug suggests Jewish self-hatred, an attitude that never appears in Sandler's live-action films, where the star has successfully combined adolescent grossness (belching, farting, bowel movement and sarcasm) with a benignly (almost secretly) asserted ethnic identity. Showbiz Jews have stopped accusing themselves of self-hatred as a sign of cultural triumph. But Eight Crazy Nights shows a bothersome commercial assimilation by withholding any story, humor or details about Chanukah. At the bottom of Davey's bitterness is a maudlin family memory. It's nowhere near the audacious remembrance Phoebe Cates spoke in Gremlins (a classic moment of holiday grotesquerie that vitiated all modern sanctimony). The great Leslie Fiedler has written, "The world in which Jerry's [Lewis] protagonists find themselves is one in which politics and religion play no important role. State houses and churches seem to be permanently closed." But in Eight Crazy Nights the shopping mall is the open, well-lit community space taking the place of statehouses and churches/synagogues. Like Tim Allen's The Santa Clause 2, this is a lump of coal as a family movie. Irreligious?despite competing menorah and Santa ice sculptures?with department-store sentiments and bargain-basement jokes. (Bring the kids, teach 'em to shop.)

Without ever making a Chanukah movie himself, Lewis' examination of human longing never showed a failure of nerve. Eight Crazy Nights punks out from its cheap tv-style animation down to Sandler's twisted inversion of ethnic awareness in the portrayal of Davey's mentor Whitey Duval, a hairy, diminutive, club-footed basketball coach (a blue-eyed Mr. Magoo) and his twin sister Eleanor. Both mean and funny ("The worst has happened, I'm covered in human feces"), these caricatures allow Sandler to assert punch-drunk self-love?on the b-ball court Davey's stylized physique is tall and strapping, something between Allen Iverson and Jules Munshin.

The Ladies Man screens Fri., Dec. 6, 8:30 p.m., as part of the "Positif Champions: Fifty Years of Cinema" series at the Gramercy Theater, 127 E. 23rd St. (betw. Lexington & Madison Aves.), 777-4900; and again on Dec. 28, 3 p.m., with the filmmaker present.

Friday After Next shows Ice Cube regaining the comic energy that was missing in Next Friday. This hood comedy dares what Sandler won't by satirizing today's de-sanctified ethnic-holiday rituals. (A group of disrespected church ladies throws shoes and hires thugs to chastise a local punk.) Cube and co-screenwriter DJ Pooh push the sentiments of a rap classic like Run-DMC's "Christmas in Hollis" to the limit, showing a crackhead housejacker dressed as Santa pillaging the hood with a sack of stolen goodies on his back. No mawkishness here; Friday After Next finds low-down virtue in the vivacity of characters unleashing their meanest and most amorous instincts. Director Marcus Raboy has learned lots about pacing, and the raucous cast (especially Mike Epps as Cube's cousin-sidekick, a one-man wonder of ambition and self-excuses) conjures memories of Amos 'n Andy. But it's redeemed by irresistible energy, plus the funny-authentic details of a depressed urban strip mall (from Arab store owner and toy cops to shady shoplifters and break-time that swerves into nervous eternity). Barbershop simply wasn't as true.

In Enfant Terrible!, a good anthology of original Jerry Lewis essays edited by Murray Pomerance, Fiedler describes how the dinner-table scene in Eddie Murphy's The Nutty Professor "makes his characters speak, move and relate to one another and to the audience in ways much like those characteristic of a style first used by blackface minstrels and later transmitted to the purely white audience of vaudeville, musical comedies and...by an older generation of Jewish American actors such as Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and, to be sure, Jerry Lewis." Ice Cube inserts himself into that tradition with Friday After Next. It's not a bad thing, just an unexpected cultural readjustment. Visually undistinguished, but so far the funniest movie of 2002.

J ackass is simply a series of Candid Camera skits (videotaped for practical and insulting reasons) in which the crew of MTV pranksters do things we've all witnessed from class clowns and party drunks. The only invention comes from thinking up new outrages like Paper Cuts, Beat by a Girl, Jewelry Store Break-In, Roller Disco in a Truck, Human Pinball, Old Men in Jazzies?lots of these the result of Spike Jonze's incalculable weirdness. Jonze's filmmaking career began with skateboard documentaries, then Beastie Boys videos?giving a new lo-fi visual esthetic to the Beasties' humor, itself derived from Lewis' Jewish nerd subversiveness. But Jackass represents the unruly side of Jonze's ingenuity (and is much preferred to the reach for respectability in Adaptation). Yet these slacker daredevils (including Johnny Knoxville, Steve O, Bam Margera and Chris Pontius) don't investigate sk8-boy hedonism. They fail the Lewis test.

The Jackasses don't realize their part in the human circus; they're the Three Stooges dangerously updated. Hiding behind the reality-tv premise keeps them from doing the artistic work that would make their exploits suitable for cinemas (in this sense, Jackass' success is another nail in the coffin of movies-as-theatrical-experience). Youth anarchy (stunts as dumb as they are funny) goes unmediated by this video-cam carelessness. Though every prank suggests homoerotic subtext (the ultimate joke on fratboys), a friend averred, "It's not homoerotic. It's just homo!"?an accurate reduction given Jackass' inadequate concept. Only the last skit is worthy of Lewis?an elaborately staged parody of movie trailers and today's trash esthetic that works as cultural commentary. It's virtually one big fireball?the impotent rage in today's pampered adolescent mind.