Monday 3 June 2013

Comedy Cheat #1: Jerry Lewis does the Count.

As you may have noticed, I'm NaBloPoMo-ing again, my eleventh NaBloPoMo as I strive to cover each of the twelve months of the year over five years.  (If all goes as planned, I will finish with December this year.)  Now, the idea of NaBloPoMo is, of course, to blog every day for a month.  This inevitably means that some days I find bedtime is approaching and I need to get something up.  I've learned to have a sort of emergency plan of quick-cheat-posts, and this month, I've pulled together a small collection of comedy moments that have burned into my psyche over the years.

Here's one of the earliest.  Back in the dark ages, we didn't have Netflix, DVDs or even (*gasp*) videos.  If we wanted to see an old film, we either had to wait for it to show up on television, or we had to grab the opportunity should it be screened at an art cinema or at a university.  The latter shows were usually double-features.  When I was quite small, my mother took me to an out-of-way movie house in northern Edmonton to see Bambi which was paired with an old Jerry Lewis comedy. (Heaven knows why.)  Bambi was memorable all right, and I remember nothing of the Jerry Lewis flick except this scene, which I never forgot, along with the music. I haven't seen it since. Until now.

I searched for it on YouTube, using terms such as "Jerry Lewis" "jazz", "business meeting" and "mime", and up it came.  Amazingly, it's pretty well exactly how my childhood self remembered it.  I'm not a huge fan of Jerry Lewis, but this really is comic genius, all set to Count Basie: 

1 comment:

JoeinVegas said...

I too couldn't take his slapstick, but once in a while he did things like this that were more cerebral. But paired with Bambi?