Jerry's does a little of his "there's no people like show people" riff, then segues to talking about how he'll be directing The Nutty Professor as a musical for Broadway. He says they're planning on March, year after next, to hit the Great White Way and he brings on Michael Andrew, the "talented young man" who's going to star in the show. Like Robert Goulet before him, Andrew does a Vegasy rendition of a Lerner and Loewe show tune…in this case, "Almost Like Being in Love." Very nice…probably even Broadway caliber. But since Jerry said they're just getting down to the writing of the Nutty Professor musical, I'm a little skeptical about March of '08.
Hour 20 starts with Jerry performing a medley of Al Jolson songs. More shameless pandering to the young.
They come back from an extended local segment for the last ten minutes and Ed McMahon announces the more-or-less final total: $61,013,855. Jerry is emotional, fatigued, overwhelmed, alternately humbled and proud. He sounds, above all, sincere and I can recall a time when he didn't. Something interesting has happened to this telethon in the last decade or so and it's because of Jerry. Back in the seventies, he took a lot of heat for its excesses, its pandering, its promotion of his friends and their careers. But back then, he was just a comedian whose TV shows got cancelled and whose movie career had atrophied. The cause seemed to be promoting Jerry Lewis instead of the other way around.
That was then, this is now. As we've bemoaned on this site before, we're running out of legendary comics. We're going to wake up one morning soon and the Elder Statesman of Comedy will be a Wayans brother.
Benny's gone. Berle is gone and so is George Burns, so is Bob Hope, so is most of a generation of guys who transcended just getting up there and telling jokes. Even Johnny Carson, one generation removed from them, is gone. The other day at lunch, some of us got to naming the great older icons of comedy we have left and I'm afraid it didn't take long: Bob Newhart, Don Rickles, Carl Reiner, Jonathan Winters, Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, five or six others…and Jerry. And depending on when you discovered his work, he may be the biggie.
There was a time when I couldn't watch this telethon but Jerry's mellowed in many ways. He no longer does things that get reviewed so he rarely launches into his little diatribes against critics. He's triumphed over so many medical problems that just making it out onto stage is a triumph of sorts…plus late fatherhood and his new marriage seem to be agreeing with him…and he's reached legend status. So you have a guy with nothing to prove other than that he can still do it. I hope he keeps proving it for a long time.