Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with 'Hardly Working' and 'Cracking Up.'
I think it was somewhere around age 3 when I fell down the stairs at my house, and I got up and did a Jerry Lewis impression and got a big laugh. And I thought, "Oooh, I like that. I think I need to do this for a living!"
Not only do I sing to him, I sing entire conversations. You become Jerry Lewis.
Everywhere I go in America, when they learn I'm from France, the first thing they ask me is if I'm a huge Jerry Lewis fan. I've never been able to figure that out.
As a matter of fact, when people ask where my 'point of view' comes from, it was there in one of the first sketches we wrote for [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis.
I like the Stooges. You know what movie I saw that I sort of discovered late was Jerry Lewis in 'The Nutty Professor'. I really liked that.
(The Nutty Professor) was a labor of love. It was a total film. It was the most productive, creative work of my life.
President Bush has delivered a new resolution to the U.N. saying that Saddam has failed to cooperate with U.N. resolutions, freeing us to get our war on. Don't mess with us France, or we'll send Jerry Lewis to Iraq as a human shield.
My inspiration to do comedy came from many places. Saturday mornings, I would watch Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis movies. I later got into watching stand-ups like Eddie Murphy, who was my main inspiration.
We mocked that concept ['movies are better than ever'] by doing a sketch that was about a theater trying to get one customer to come in...and that customer was Jerry Lewis. It generated so much controversy that Dean [Martin] and Jerry [Lewis] had to apologize in a full page ad in Variety.
Next up [new TV stars] was [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis on 'The Colgate Comedy Hour.'
I had been an abject fan of Martin and Lewis when I was a kid. I just thought they were terribly funny. None of their movies captured the kind of chemistry they really had.
I think when I was young, let's call it high school, and even before that, I just loved comedy, and I loved comedians. I grew up watching Laurel and Hardy. That's really a long time ago. I loved Jerry Lewis. I just loved comedians.
I'm the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction.
I guess the story that best defines us [with Bud Yorkin] and our relationship goes back to the [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis show. The four stage managers on that show became major TV creators and directors - John Rich, Jack Smight, Arthur Penn and Bud Yorkin.
Jerry Lewis has been married twenty times. He gets married on a Tuesday, they find his wife dead in a swimming pool on Thursday. Maybe if you married someone who's old enough to swim next time, Ok Jerry?
A Madagascar Hissing Roach chasing Jerry Lewis. That would be a really neat treat.
Postwar America was a very buttoned-up nation. Radio shows were run by censors, Presidents wore hats, ladies wore girdles. We came straight out of the blue - nobody was expecting anything like Martin and Lewis. A sexy guy and a monkey is how some people saw us.
What I always say is that we're the illegitimate children of Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lewis.
