Rise to Fame
The second show at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, July 1946, was where it actually clicked. The first show bombed, so Lewis scribbled gags on a paper bag and he and Dean Martin improvised their way through the next one. Within a week, crowds lined up around the block. By 1951, Life magazine called them the highest-paid act in show business. They made 17 films together. Martin sang straight; Lewis played the chaos around him. The formula ran for exactly ten years before they split on July 25, 1956, the same date as their debut.
In the Spotlight
American critics spent decades treating him as lowbrow. The French disagreed, loudly. Cahiers du Cinema elevated him to auteur status alongside Hitchcock, Godard called him the only American director making progressive films, and French intelligentsia dubbed him 'Le Roi du Crazy.' Part of the case: he invented the video playback system now standard on every film set. His reward in America was getting fired from the MDA telethon after 60 years of it, with no official explanation. He'd raised more than $2 billion for the charity.
Side Notes
In 1972, he directed and starred in a Holocaust drama about a German circus clown who lures Jewish children into gas chambers. The Day the Clown Cried was never released. Lewis locked the reels away and called the finished product 'bad, bad, bad.' In 2015, he donated an incomplete copy to the Library of Congress with a stipulation it couldn't be accessed until 2024. Harry Shearer, who saw a rough cut, described it as worse than he could have imagined. A remake was announced. Whatever you think of the slapstick career, the man who attempted that film in 1972 was not playing it safe.
Final Chapter
He died at his Las Vegas home on August 20, 2017, with family present. Las Vegas Strip marquees displayed his name that night, and Caesars Palace issued a tribute. The White House released a statement the same evening. In September 2024, the Library of Congress opened his donated materials from The Day the Clown Cried to researchers, following the access restriction he set before his death.