Jerry Lewis Quotes

I've had great success being a total idiot.

Bono met his wife in high school," Park says. "So did Jerry Lee Lewis," Eleanor answers. "I’m not kidding," he says. "You should be," she says, "we’re sixteen." "What about Romeo and Juliet?" "Shallow, confused," then dead. "I love you, Park says. "Wherefore art thou," Eleanor answers. "I’m not kidding," he says. "You should be.

...Whenever someone says to me, 'Jerry Lewis says women aren't funny,' or 'Christopher Hitchens says women aren't funny,' or 'Rick Fenderman says women aren't funny... Do you have anything to say to that?' Yes. We don't fucking care if you like it. I don't say it out loud, of course, because Jerry Lewis is a great philanthropist, Hitchens is very sick, and the third guy I made up.

I get paid for what most kids get punished for.

Jerry Falwell said that the reason that September 11th happened, the reason that God allowed it to happen, was because of certain people in our country. People like, and I'm quoting, 'the pagans,' which is a motorcycle group. Feminists; he brought up feminists. [...] And I couldn't believe it, he said that God had actually talked to him and said, these were the people. That was the reason. It was those people, and that was the reason God allowed this to happen. And I thought, 'That's odd.' Because God had called me twelve hours before, and He said the reason He was upset was because of people like Jerry Falwell.

Faithfulness in small things leads to faithfulness in great things, and never the other way around.

Most of the time when I have met artists who have meant a lot to me, the experience has been well above expectation. People like Iggy, Lou Reed, Jerry Lee Lewis, Black Sabbath, Nick Cave, Hubert Selby Jr, Billy Gibbons, Al Pacino, John Lee Hooker, James Brown, Johnny Cash etc. have been really great to me. What strikes me is most of the time, the bigger the celeb/legend, the more polite and cool they are. It's the insecure ones who treat you like they're doing you a favor by shaking your hand.

I shall pass through this world but once, any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now, let me not defer or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again

I am right. I`m always right. One time I thought I was wrong, I found out I was right.

Down in Louisiana we call that Boogie Woogie!

It was a ridiculous question. Did I _love_ Char? Did I feel about Char the same way I feel about the Beatles, string instruments in pop songs, the way Little Anthony sang high notes, the way Jerry Lee Lewis played piano?

My momma always said, 'You and Elvis are pretty good, but y'all ain't no Chuck Berry.

If the Lord made anything better than a woman he kept it for himself.

Every man's dream is to be able to sink into the arms of a woman without also falling into her hands

Pity? [If] you don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair, stay in your house!

If I'm going to Hell, I'm going there playing the piano.

Paul McCartney has said, “I emulated Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. We all did.

Jerry says Lewis shouldn’t hold it against Harley. He didn’t know what he was doing. When the whole world hurts, you bite it, don’t you?

He crashed a dozen Cadillacs in one year and played the Apollo. With racial hatred burning in the headlines, the audience danced in the seats to a white boy from the bottomland, backed by pickers who talked like Ernest Tubb. “James Brown kissed me on my cheek,” he says. “Top that.

those of the said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation to send to Canada and North America. This much, Jerry, with his head becoming more and more

He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms—accidental and on purpose—than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played.

Small fruit is better than big words.

When I awoke on Wednesday afternoon, I understood how an amputee must feel.

He watched me breathe. He knew my breath.

Was he a good father?" To their surprise, I shake my head and smile. "No," I reply candidly. "He wasn't a good father, but he was a good man." Where Dad came from, that meant a great deal more.

For the benefit of this naïf, the movie experts ran through an inventory of all the lost movies they could think of: the eight-hour version of Greed, Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown who works in the Nazi concentration camps, the missing reels of The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles’s legendary The Other Side of the Wind, The Blockhouse – a Second World War drama starring Peter Sellers,

The Martin and Lewis Show was developed by NBC in the wake of the stinging CBS talent raids that lured Jack Benny and others to the younger network. NBC announced a talent hunt: the network was searching for rising young performers for radio and television. Soon thereafter a network executive caught the nightclub act of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who had been performing together for several years and had developed some name recognition within the industry while remaining largely unknown to the general public.

Question No. 6 Briefly outline the historical development of castles in western Europe. What, if anything, do they have to do with cannoli? By the way, is “cannoli” singular or plural? Are the vanilla kind better than the chocolate? Question No. 7 Tell why you like reading stories about dragons and castles and fairies and that sort of thing. Have you ever read, say, A la recherché du temps perdu by Marcel Proust? Compare and contrast this book with any genre fantasy novel and explain why a writer would spend 30 pages describing how he rolls over in bed (no kidding). Why do the French think so highly of Jerry Lewis?

Jerry thought of Dean as a brother, but in time, tempers and egos flared in the partnership, leading to their headline-making breakup in 1956, exactly ten years after they had joined forces. People worried what would become of Dean Martin, but Jerry Lewis flourished in his first solo films: The Delicate Delinquent, The Sad Sack, Rock-a-Bye Baby, and Don't Give Up the Ship. His directors include such comedy pros as Taurog and Frank Tashlin. Eventually, Lewis decided that he wanted to write and direct his own films. As a steady and stellar money-maker for Paramount, no one at the studio was prepared to stand in his way. His first effort was his most daring: The Bellboy,

everyone went and had some turkey and cornbread dressing, and hot biscuits, and mashed potatoes running with butter, and when they prayed, they thanked God for the good fortune that had found their boy, who had sense enough to know that if you’re going to be hit by a train, you have to go stand on the tracks in Memphis, Tennessee. Amen.

My name's not Jerry,” he grumbled, raising his head. “I know, but it's the only way I can get your attention, kid.” “What did you want?” Japhet muttered. “I said, do you have a girl?” Japhet squinted at him and rubbed his nose. “A girl?” he asked. “Yeah. You do know what a girl is, don't you? Female version of the male? Whole lot prettier. Sweet temperament. Heard they're great for marrying. Thought a handsome, half starved and nearly dead Jew like you would have one of those by now.

Most of the other early rockers were Welsh, too: Jerry Lee Lewis from Ferriday, Louisiana; Carl Perkins and the Everly Brothers from Tennessee; Conway Twitty (born Harold Jenkins) from Arkansas. Same with Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm. Even Johnny Cash and a lot of the country and western stars: Loretta Lynn. Buck Owens. Kitty Wells. Hank Williams.

If you knock even the most hateful human being, you will come out of the encounter looking less than heroic. People almost always side with the one being attacked.

When we reached the car that was waiting to take us back to the Copa, Dean actually spoke to me for the first time in weeks. "You did that good, pal," he said. "Thanks," I said, and then we were quiet. Very quiet.

Perkins was doing basically the same sort of thing up around Jackson, and I know for a fact Jerry Lee Lewis had been playing that kind of music ever since he was ten years old. You see, from the honky tonks you got such a mixture of all different types of music, and I think what happened is that when Elvis busted through, it enabled all these other groups that had been going along more or less the same avenue—I’m sure there were hundreds of them—to tighten up and focus on what was going to be popular. If they had a steel guitar they dropped it. The weepers and slow country ballads pretty much went out of their repertoire. And what you had left was country-orientated boogie music.

While some siblings accept, and even embrace, their destiny as members of the 'team,' others are (mostly privately) outraged, having experienced the obverse of the soothing stereotype in their own families. A graphic designer whose autistic brother tried to strangle her when they were children, and who struggled for years to get her parents to recognize the danger he presented, is acutely aware of the discrepancy between the illusion and the reality of damaged families: I'm trying to eradicate the Hallmark Hall of Fame Special myth - 'how I learned the meaning of life by having a disabled sibling.' The cover of Newsweek on autism had a beautiful blond good boy. People just want to look at the pretty kids on Jerry Lewis, the sanitized version, not the ugly cases like my brother. The severely disabled aren't telegenic.

stripes on their backs. The twentieth century

mature material. Where once he had hollered through

Either be hot or cold. If you are lukewarm, the Lord will spew you forth from His mouth.

I didn’t know Chuck Berry was black for two years after I first heard his music, and this obviously long before I saw the film that drove a thousand musicians —Jazz on a Summer’s Day, in which he played “Sweet Little Sixteen.” And for ages I didn’t know Jerry Lee Lewis was white. You didn’t see their pictures if they had something in the top ten in America.

Crosby, Sinatra, and Martin were three major male singing stars whose careers overlapped, with the emergence of their stardom in that order. They had distinctly different approaches to the cinematic frame. Sinatra’s entrance, even if he seemed cool, indifferent, and casual, was tantamount to kicking the door down. Crosby slipped in from the side, all low-key and “Don’t mind me.” Martin, perhaps as a result of having to stand around for years while Jerry Lewis swung on the chandelier, always established himself as outside the frame: “I’m just hangin’ loose out here and watchin’ the action.” These three men were all really good actors—great actors, even—but their singing defined them, and in that race Bing was the pacesetter. Although both Sinatra and Martin are probably better known today, and Sinatra is the gold standard of male singers, his role model was always Crosby. Nobody could upstage Crosby, partly because he was so good at appearing not to care. When he was present, everyone else seemed to be sweating it out.*18 Crosby never lost it. He presented himself to any audience as if the very idea weren’t in his brain pan.

Recuerda: hasta los Beatles empezaron como una banda de covers. Paul McCartney ha dicho: “Yo emulaba a Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. Todos lo hacíamos.” McCartney y John Lennon se convirtieron en uno de los equipos compositores más importantes de la historia pero, como recuerda McCartney, sólo empezaron a escribir sus canciones “como una manera de evitar que otras bandas tocaran el set que tenían planeado”.

Dane and Marco and the boys all fled the stage but I was still playing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’. I tried different interesting arrangments. Mozart’s twelve variations and Elton John style. Even Billy Joel/‘Piano Man’-ish. Then I had a brainstorm and thumped it out like Jerry Lee Lewis, with my feet on the keys and everything, and that seemed to confuse the guy waving the gun. Anyway he didn’t shot me. By now I was really getting into ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’, actually getting the old flash while I played it over and over, I don’t know how many times, and I sort of hypnotised myself. I was in a trance. People had thrown every available bottle and can and busted seat at me. Now they started on the fire extinguishers, and they were frothing and spurting and rolling around on the stage. Even the over-roided security joined in, and the bouncers were throwing stuff at me, too. I didn’t care. I was in a daze. I felt bulletproof and above it all, and when I eventually finished I stood in front of the redwood crucifix with my arms out, covered in fire-extinguisher foam like a snowman, and bowed to the audience. And then for some insane reason I pushed over the crucifix, which was difficult because it was heavy and splintery, and it cut my hands so I was bleeding everywhere, and I deliberately rubbed the blood all over my face. Then I put my foot on the crucifix, like a big-game hunter with his kill, like Ernest Hemingway with a dead lion, and raised my bloody fist in victory. And there was a sort of roar then, a deep roar lie a squadron of B-47s. And I passed out on the stage. I came to with someone furiously screaming. An amazing octave range, about five – from an F1 to B flat 6. It was your mother standing over me like a tigress, waving a broken seat, and preventing the Texans from rushing the stage and stomping me to death, they were wary of this wild, high-pitched little chick and backed off. As I stumbled back to the dressing-room, Tania was yelling that she wished the oil-rig guy had shot me, and this was the end, she’d really had it. And the record-company people were just staring at me open-mouthed like I was a lunatic. And outside, our tour bus had been set on fire, and there were no extinguishers left, and the police and fire brigade got involved, on the side of the Texans, and there was suddenly a visa problem. So that was it for Spider Flower in America. And for your mother and me, as it turned out.

that was the real meat of the show. Variety all but ignored the three Latin opening

I need to search you.” He was pretty thorough. I was going to make a joke about him enjoying it or maybe say a boat ride on the Bateau Mouche would be nice before he felt me up, but I wondered about the French sense of humor. Wasn’t Jerry Lewis an icon here? Maybe a sight gag would be more appropriate.

1972, comedian Jerry Lewis took a huge departure from his traditional comedic roles when he directed and starred in The Day the Clown Died.

Sam Phillips’s boys—Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash—were raised on gospel and country music.

I think of this whenever someone says to me, “Jerry Lewis says women aren’t funny,” or “Christopher Hitchens says women aren’t funny,” or “Rick Fenderman says women aren’t funny…. Do you have anything to say to that?” Yes. We don’t fucking care if you like it. I don’t say it out loud, of course, because Jerry Lewis is a great philanthropist, Hitchens is very sick, and the third guy I made up. Unless one of these men is my boss, which none of them is, it’s irrelevant. My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist. So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece “Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of “over,” “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.* If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground—like the rifle range or the car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

Those who made excuses for Jerry Lewis didn't recognize disability bigotry when they saw it, insisted attorney Harriet Johnson, who had one of the diseases Jerry was curing. "When bigotry is part of mainstream culture, it feels like ‘the way things are.'" My grandfather's generation of white men in the South didn't recognize sexism. They thought women really were magnolia blossoms requiring protection. They didn't recognize racism either. They thought African Americans really were inherently inferior, suitable to menial work, and that the structures of segregation were for the good of both races. They'd say it wasn't prejudice, but the way things are. This is where we are with disability today. Lewis says he uses pity because, hey, we're pitiful. And people agree. If you don't see the profound animus in Jerry Lewis's statement, try substituting the minority group. What if he said, "If you don't want to be bashed for being gay, stay in your house"? Or, "If you don't want to be groped for being a broad, stay in your house"? Or  -- if you believe the "charity" work excuses hate  -- consider this scenario. What if the United Negro College Fund hired a white comedian to raise money from white people, using bigotry. "Give because they're so stupid, so hopelessly ignorant, they need their own schools to keep them out of our schools." Would the success of such a pitch justify it? Or would we recognize that the more it succeeds  -- the more people buy into it  -- the more harm it does? I think  -- I hope  -- we're at a point now where people would be up in arms if one of those other minority groups were treated with such profound disrespect, for decades, by a charity ostensibly dedicated to "helping" them. But with disability, it's a lesson yet to be learned.