Rereading my favorite book about
Jerry Lewis -
the one by Chris Fujiwara. He mentions
the same tendency I noted about Lewis's character in THE LADIES MAN (pictured). The way Fujiwara puts it: "Herbert comments on his own reactions and his own situation." Fujiwara even cites, as I did, "the skin of his back caught in the crack of the door." Now that's a sight gag you can FEEL! In the very same paragraph, Fujiwara comments on
the sort of dialogue in THE PATSY that fascinates me. It has, he writes, "a rapidly self-correcting, self-denying quality, as if the Lewis character were rewriting his own being and commenting on the process of doing so." Fujiwara!