An Act of Transgression

Will DiGravio reviews Murray Pomerance and Matthew Solomon’s “The Biggest Thing in Show Business: Living It Up with Martin & Lewis.”

By Will DiGravioDecember 2, 2024

• Film

• Biography & Autobiography

ON JANUARY 24, 1954, the What’s My Line? studio audience came alive with an energy like no other. The Sunday evening game show, a CBS staple for nearly two decades, featured a four-person panel, including, at that time, three dashing, witty regulars: columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf, and performer Arlene Francis, all of whom asked yes-or-no questions to surmise their contestant’s profession. Each episode also included a “mystery guest” segment, during which the panelists were blindfolded and asked to identify a celebrity.

The guests on this occasion were the comedy team of Martin and Lewis, then eight years into their partnership and at the apex of their fame. The reaction from the studio audience was so uproarious, their delight in the contained mayhem of the moment so palpable, that Francis speculated their guest must be the MGM lion. After Martin answered the first question in an affirmative, uncharacteristic squeak, she followed up, “It is the lion!”

In contrast to their wild popularity at the time, the team—cool, calm Dean Martin and clumsy, clever Jerry Lewis, remains woefully underappreciated today. Into this void enter Murray Pomerance and Matthew Solomon, film scholars who, in their new book The Biggest Thing in Show Business: Living It Up with Martin & Lewis, offer an explicitly Eisensteinian “batch of reflections” on the artistry of the pair. Drawing on what remains from the fleeting phenomenon that was “Martin and Lewis,” Pomerance and Solomon show how the act remains unique in the history of American comedy: a fresh, singular vision for how a team, “pardners,” could collaborate across mediums.

On July 25, 1946, 10 months and 23 days after the Empire of Japan surrendered on the USS Missouri, Martin and Lewis joined up to become the first great comedy duo of the postwar era, lasting for exactly one decade as the world transitioned into the Atomic Age. Their act was one of playful pandemonium, mirroring the paradox of the period—a populace both excited to accelerate economic growth at home, as other nations reeled from the effects of the war, and terrified of the cold one to come. As the United States built itself up, Martin and Lewis, who came of age during the Great Depression, reminded the nation just how easily things could, with a bang, come crashing down.

A word commonly used to describe the pair is explosive. They entered stages as if shot from a cannon, drawing massive crowds that became the talk of whatever town they entered. Historian Kliph Nesteroff described them as “the closest thing to Beatlemania comedy has ever had.”

That said, Martin and Lewis left behind a wanting archive of their achievement. They never made a feature film nearing the greatness of the Marx Brothers: they had no signature skit, no meetups with Universal Monsters like Abbott and Costello. And despite Lewis’s iconic crew cut and mouthy mug, perfectly juxtaposed against Martin’s “Roman” beauty, their star images pale in comparison to the enduring glimmer of the Three Stooges. Their work on television and the stage remains mostly lost to time. The greatest record of their partnership is the movies, largely star vehicles in the purest, most uninventive form, in which narrative cohesion is secondary to diegesis-breaking vocal performances from Martin, awkwardly placed between scenes intended for Lewis to clown. Entertaining, with flashes of their genius, but forgettable nonetheless.

The What’s My Line? segment far greater demonstrates their gift: controlled chaos, a spontaneity wrought by a friendly danger. Audiences never knew what the duo might do next, but they could always be sure that each man would be in total rhythm with the other. Alpha Martin gives the answers, but not before goofball Lewis tries to blurt out a response, leading the former to quickly place his hands over the latter’s mouth. Martin, cool, always cool, is laughing; Lewis, captive but in command, is annoyed. No beats are missed. The tension builds as Martin continues to answer.

Then comes the killer question from Francis: “Are you male?” It’s too easy. Martin swirls his finger and points at Lewis, finally giving him permission to speak. Lewis purses his lips in exasperation and looks at the audience, before bellowing in his high-pitched, baby-like voice, “How are they gonna know it’s us if they got the masks on?” The crowd explodes.

“The typical Martin & Lewis routine,” write Pomerance and Solomon, “is a play on improbable emergence seen retrospectively as logical.” Or, as Lewis, in his memoir, described his symbiosis with Martin: “He watched me breathe.”

In the past six years, a clip from the appearance, uploaded to YouTube by the program’s top fan page, has earned more than 135,000 views and continues to bring joy to viewers (just look at the comments). But it also radiates a deep melancholy, as it is just a slice of the episode, most of which is lost. Fans have held out hope that the vast personal archive of Lewis, a prodigious chronicler of his own career, might turn out a complete copy, but thus far none has surfaced. In this rare surviving tape, one does not see what must have been a thrilling entrance as the pair stepped—or perhaps ran—out from behind the program’s classic curtain, nor the fallout from Lewis’s decision to give the game away. It provides a brief glimpse into an incomplete history of an otherwise remarkable show, and mirrors, in a cruel irony, the duo’s own place in the American cultural memory.

Concerning their joint legacy, Martin and Lewis may have been their own worst enemies. Decades later, Lewis wrote of the pain and fear that came with their decision to separate: “Could we do anything without each other? Would we be accepted as anything other than what we had been?” They were perhaps too good at covering their tracks, too separately prolific in the decades to come. In the last half of the 1950s, Martin delivered two revered film performances, first under the direction of Vincente Minnelli in Some Came Running (1958), and then later with Howard Hawks, playing the role of Dude in Rio Bravo (1959). With the 1960s came the Rat Pack and the solo albums, enduring love ballads and standards that epitomize 20th-century Italian Americanness. The 1970s brought Martin’s variety show, and, with it, dozens of celebrity roasts that dominate the YouTube classic comedy scene and have served as the inspiration for contemporary iterations.

Meanwhile, Lewis went on to influence a generation of filmmakers as a multi-hyphenate in the tradition of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Underappreciated by reviewers in the United States, his films were devoured by the critics-turned-filmmakers of the French New Wave. “He’s a very good framer, like great painters,” Jean-Luc Godard told Dick Cavett. The Movie Brats held a similar view. Martin Scorsese, who cast Lewis in The King of Comedy (1982), remembered: “It was like watching a virtuoso pianist at the keyboard.”

Critics and historians often treat the Martin and Lewis partnership as a preface to the later, solo work, as few have had such celebrated second acts. Pomerance and Solomon take up no such defense, at least not explicitly, in The Biggest Thing in Show Business. Rather than stake out a position for the duo in the pantheon of comedy history, the authors survey what survives of the Martin and Lewis record, attempting to capture, in their refreshingly frenetic, academic prose, the act’s unique window into the psyche of postwar America. For them, the genius of the duo can be found in the way they “developed a sensitivity to cultural vibrations.” From the moment the pair became an act, the authors convincingly put forward, “something meaningful in the atmosphere of our culture occurred.”

Lewis, in his memoir, saw the comedy partnership of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby as a useful comparison. While the teams were similarly ubiquitous in their moment, Hope and Crosby were at their best when scripted, the heavier the better. Martin and Lewis thrived in the moment, seeing how far they could take their act. Onstage, it often seemed as if they were performing more for one another than for their audience. A famous clashing of these two styles came in June 1952, during a 24-hour telethon hosted by Hope and Crosby to benefit the United States Olympic Fund.

After the Hope-Crosby introduction, Martin and Lewis come out to the stage in cannonball fashion. Lewis jumps into Hope’s arms, kissing him and messing up his comb-over. Crosby, whose singing style was the greatest influence on Martin’s, flees stage right. Lewis calls out to Crosby, urging him to reappear. The crooner does not comply. Crosby, Lewis later revealed, feared that the young comedian would mess with his toupee. It was a stunning lack of trust from the elder statesman, whom Lewis never forgave. Even Crosby demonstrated the layman’s understanding of the Martin and Lewis act: that it was fueled by Lewis, a madman, barely controlled by the longest of leashes held by Martin, a straight man, an accomplice, so gleefully entertained.

Yet the seasoned eyes of Pomerance and Solomon see not chaos in the team’s greater oeuvre but, rather, the illusion of chaos. Martin and Lewis’s performances were tornadoes of their own creation, a collision of molecules that always found their level.

To help readers understand the duo’s comedy, the authors cite the rhetorical principle of “unlimited development,” which “poses the possibility of always going further in a certain direction without being able to foresee a limit to this direction, and this progress is accompanied by a continuous increase of value.” Martin, as the straight man, and despite his cooler-than-thou demeanor, always knew precisely where they were in this development. “He was so intent, always watching for the exact right second to come in,” Lewis wrote. “Never once, in ten years, did he ever get in the way. Never once stepped on a line, spoiled a joke.” Professionals, as John Wayne’s character in Rio Bravo might say, through and through.

As one such example, Pomerance and Solomon point to the beginning of Scared Stiff (1953), a supernatural tale in the style and cadence of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! The outset of the film features the duo working at a nightclub: Martin, naturally, as the suave singer, and Lewis, naturally, as a clumsy waiter. Martin sings a lovely tune but is interrupted by Lewis, who has slowly dripped spaghetti throughout the restaurant, leaving a trail up to a customer, on whom he subsequently spills the entire plate. The sequence only grows more absurd as he tries to salvage the situation, messing up himself, his guests, his manager, and Martin’s act in the process. Pomerance and Solomon refer to this as a “continual upping of the ante.” While other acts might have retired from the poker table from time to time, Martin and Lewis always shoved all-in and walked away with the pot.

The frenzied nature of their act led Martin and Lewis to bound around radio, television, movies, comic books, and the nightclub stage, where their antics at venues like the Copacabana filled the entertainment pages of papers across the country. The pair defy medium specificity in a way that makes a particular challenge for the sometimes siloed field of media studies. Pomerance and Solomon rightly note that it was far more common for stars during this period to do a little bit of everything: Lewis played music, for example; Martin danced. But unlike most stars of their caliber—and, yes, they were A-listers, “the biggest thing in show business”—Martin and Lewis were not heavily associated with one way of performing over another. Milton Berle was “Mr. Television.” Fats Domino sold records. Cary Grant seemed made for the silver screen. Martin and Lewis were cross-platform stars who, in contemporary terms, benefited from the virality of their act in a unique way for the period. The act existed in the air.

Martin and Lewis, the sensation, yielded a conceptual, self-fueling comedic energy. Their act was of, by, and for the moment. Run, run, run. On to the next. Faster. Appear here, there, everywhere. Be remembered in 70 years? Maybe. Who cares? If not, get them in the second acts. In this way, their blending of mediums recalls contemporary virality, when a budding celebrity gains some traction and immediately begins to appear in every corner of our fractured media culture: starts a podcast, records a special, green-lights a pilot, sells Instagram ads, and continues to fan the flames of attention until they inevitably diminish, or extinguish altogether.

Strikingly, Martin and Lewis, who possessed all the talent in the world and sat atop an entertainment landscape with far greater barriers to entry, exhibit the same commercial logic. “No performers had ever been so conscious of marketing,” Pomerance and Solomon write, “of what we would today call cross-platforming, of merchandising the self.” Scarcity mindsets, perhaps?

The act was the act itself, the absurd fact that show business had, in the pair, birthed a new breed of bull, allowing them not merely to stampede free but also to take the means of showbiz production into their own hands and remodel it in their image. Beneath the television proscenium, Martin would often pantomime “as if he were stretching an invisible piece of chewing gum for camera operators and production personnel who might be wondering what unscripted byplay he and Jerry were engaged in at the end of numerous broadcasts. We’re stretching. We’re killing time.” As Berle himself once proclaimed after seeing their act, “I still don’t know what they do!”

The traditional boundaries of performance break down but are held together in the reflexive strand that runs through their work: the television loses its frame. At a nightclub, the live audience becomes the stage. Once Bob Hope, for example, exits the stage at the end of the Olympic Telethon, Martin begins to sing “When You’re Smiling.” Lewis walks right up to and behind the camera, taking over control from the operator, wheeling right into his partner’s face. Pomerance and Solomon argue that Martin and Lewis brought comedic frame breaking “to new levels of disruption.” “Breaking as truth. Breaking as life,” they write. “A wink at the camera, an acknowledgment of the profit-driven core of the whole enterprise, a temporary conga line for the studio audience.”

So much of the Martin and Lewis act is about pleasure that overwhelms the senses, the kind experienced by the audience of What’s My Line?—pleasure that stems from watching Martin as he seems to float, arms wide for a serenade, and from Lewis’s physicality, moving and shouting and miming and upping the ante. But pleasure is serious business. And the great joy of reading Pomerance and Solomon’s study of Martin and Lewis can be found in the way they treat the pair as artists no less essential to their time than those of a “higher” sort. Martin and Lewis offered a unique act at a transient moment in American history, the time between the storms of the 1940s, which concerned fighting fascism abroad, and the 1960s, a renewed reckoning with the institutional flaws of the homeland. They thrived in the 1950s, the decade that even today remains a platonic ideal for (mostly) white America.

Yet, to watch a Martin and Lewis act, and to study it as Pomerance and Solomon do, is to see that while the pair may have thrived during this period, they in fact worked in direct opposition to the purported virtues of the decade: order, optimism, the adoration of the ordinary. They were not like the satirists Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, who came after, but were instead architects of a different, still defiant form, their act structured by the capricious twists of their bodies and the irreverent treatment of their stages. “Most viewers fixed upon Martin & Lewis on television saw them in a world not at all like the world where the television was,” Pomerance and Solomon write. “Martin & Lewis are about transgression, not socialization.”

To speak of Martin and Lewis, then, is to speak of time. Just as their act seemed to speed up time, predicated as it was on a sense of comedic timing, they remain deeply tethered to their own. When the pair ended on July 25, 1956, they left their act to fossilize, to be unearthed by those interested in a window into midcentury America.

While Martin and Lewis are unlikely to surpass their contemporaries on the comedy pecking order, the lessons of their act remain. At a time when the United States seemed so sure of itself, there they were, running mouth-first into the prevailing winds. Their resistance was couched not in language but movement, a breaking of what was believed to be the natural order of things. As those fueled by false, racist promises vow to return the US to the time of Martin and Lewis, may we seek inspiration from them on how, with joy and irreverence, to transgress.