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f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  General Discussion  |  Serious Business  |  Topic: Jerry Lewis has died 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
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Author Topic: Jerry Lewis has died  (Read 7528 times)
Brolan
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on: August 20, 2017, 01:00:48 PM

He was a huge star to us growing up in the '60s, and to those a little younger he was known for the MD telethon he used to do.

I talked to my 20 something kids and they basically don't even know who he was.  A shame really.
Selby
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Reply #1 on: August 20, 2017, 02:02:11 PM

Growing up mom used to always talk about how much she disliked his comedy, so we weren't allowed to watch his movies. To this day I don't think I've ever seen anything he has done outside of the occasional standup bit with Dean Martin & his annual telethon. His telethon is pretty legendary though. His decline over the last 10-15 years was pretty hard to watch, sad he's gone.
Sir T
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Reply #2 on: August 20, 2017, 02:07:03 PM

You should watch his movies. They are, in general, pretty good.

I always liked him when I saw him. A sad loss.

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Brolan
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Reply #3 on: August 20, 2017, 02:39:50 PM

Lewis' style of comedy is like Martin Short's, you either love them or you hate them.
Khaldun
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Reply #4 on: August 20, 2017, 04:26:02 PM

He had a few early movies that I thought were good; and he's really interesting in The King of Comedy.

He seems to have been kind of a shit of a human being though.
01101010
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You call it an accident. I call it justice.


Reply #5 on: August 20, 2017, 07:34:41 PM

Nutty Professor was one of the family's favorites. I hated his squeal-y voice... but overall, his telethons were pretty standard.

Does any one know where the love of God goes...When the waves turn the minutes to hours? -G. Lightfoot
Brolan
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Reply #6 on: August 20, 2017, 09:33:29 PM

He had a few early movies that I thought were good; and he's really interesting in The King of Comedy.

He seems to have been kind of a shit of a human being though.


I'm curious what you based this on since with his work for MD it would seem to be the opposite.
Ginaz
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Reply #7 on: August 20, 2017, 11:08:54 PM

He had a few early movies that I thought were good; and he's really interesting in The King of Comedy.

He seems to have been kind of a shit of a human being though.


I'm curious what you based this on since with his work for MD it would seem to be the opposite.

He said some stuff about refugees and was generally conservative politically.  Basically, he was an old white guy that held a world view that old white guys usually do.  That makes him a shit human being to some people even though he raised $2.5+ billion over the lifetime of the MD telethon, which is a greater contribution to society than almost everyone criticizing him can claim. 
rattran
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Unreasonable


Reply #8 on: August 21, 2017, 05:18:39 AM

He may have raised all the money in the world, but he's unfunny and unwatchable to me. I'm only sad that his death has obscured Dick Gregory's. That man was damned funny.
01101010
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You call it an accident. I call it justice.


Reply #9 on: August 21, 2017, 05:40:26 AM

He may have raised all the money in the world, but he's unfunny and unwatchable to me. I'm only sad that his death has obscured Dick Gregory's. That man was damned funny.

Seriously. That is what I was thinking after I heard it... great black comic elbowed out of the spot light by a white comic.   awesome, for real


Does any one know where the love of God goes...When the waves turn the minutes to hours? -G. Lightfoot
Reg
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Reply #10 on: August 21, 2017, 07:01:56 AM

To be fair Jerry Lewis was way more famous than Dick Gregory. I highly doubt he's losing attention just because Lewis was white.
Khaldun
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Reply #11 on: August 21, 2017, 09:58:39 AM

It's not primarily about his politics--read up on his life. He had a huge reputation of being a big dick to other people around him--it was at least one of the reasons that Martin wanted to stop working with him.

I don't necessarily care about the old white man-isms, the various remarks about gays and so on,  but the way the telethons were staged always struck me as gross in some fashion, not unlike those ads for Christian charities that use starving Africans in an almost pornographic way. Plus they always had lots of images of adulation of Lewis himself--there was a cult-of-personality feel to it. I think the criticism from many disabled people goes back a long way, before more recent activism, and Lewis always brushed it off as a "how dare they tell me how to do this" attitude. There's something at least vaguely unseemly about a person whose philanthropy is at least partially about self-glorification and who insists that it has to be done in his own way.
TheWalrus
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Reply #12 on: August 21, 2017, 12:14:50 PM

I always thought it was understood he was an asshole who did a nice thing. Assholes can still do nice things and be assholes.

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Ginaz
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Reply #13 on: August 21, 2017, 01:54:02 PM

It's not primarily about his politics--read up on his life. He had a huge reputation of being a big dick to other people around him--it was at least one of the reasons that Martin wanted to stop working with him.

I don't necessarily care about the old white man-isms, the various remarks about gays and so on,  but the way the telethons were staged always struck me as gross in some fashion, not unlike those ads for Christian charities that use starving Africans in an almost pornographic way. Plus they always had lots of images of adulation of Lewis himself--there was a cult-of-personality feel to it. I think the criticism from many disabled people goes back a long way, before more recent activism, and Lewis always brushed it off as a "how dare they tell me how to do this" attitude. There's something at least vaguely unseemly about a person whose philanthropy is at least partially about self-glorification and who insists that it has to be done in his own way.


He was a step behind as culture changed as to how we speak of people with disabilities but that doesn't mean he was cruel and didn't care.  I'm willing to bet that the $2.5+ billion he helped raise did many times more good than the harm of using outdated terms to describe the lives of those with MDS.  The telethon tanked so badly after he left that it was cancelled entirely in 2015.  Sometimes, people's hearts are in the right place but they just don't express it properly.  I've always thought that it was best to look at the intentions people have rather than the words they use to express them but these days it seems the words themselves are more important.
Ginaz
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Reply #14 on: August 21, 2017, 02:00:18 PM

He may have raised all the money in the world, but he's unfunny and unwatchable to me. I'm only sad that his death has obscured Dick Gregory's. That man was damned funny.

Seriously. That is what I was thinking after I heard it... great black comic elbowed out of the spot light by a white comic.   awesome, for real



I've never heard of Dick Gregory before (though he did look familiar) and I'm willing to bet Jerry Lewis was many times more popular and well known, not just in the US but around the world.  The French, for some fucking reason, adore Jerry Lewis.  Ask someone in France who Dick Gregory is.  I'm not trying to belittle Dick Gregory as I'm sure he was a great comedian, not to mention active in the US civil rights movement, but to infer that the coverage of the deaths of Gregory and Lewis is disproportionate due to race is really pushing it. 
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