Appreciation Jerry Lewis, the movies' mad and mercurial comic genius
Jerry Lewis didn't just play a nutty professor. For years he reigned as a mad comic scientist of the screen _ a brash innovator who exploded conventions and expectations on either side of the camera, and a take-no-prisoners farceur who mixed slapstick antics with a seething man-child persona of his own making.
Like dispatches from previously uncharted corners of the American id, his experiments could make us laugh, make us cringe or just leave us plain bewildered for reasons that critics and audiences have never stopped trying to get a handle on.
They are unlikely to stop anytime soon. The box-office glories and Labor Day telethons of Lewis' heyday may have ended long before his death on Sunday at age 91, but his reputation has
