these days it's all in the mind
And this I just have to type out in full because, aside from being damned fascinating stuff about linguistics in its own right, articulates (heh) in perfect fabulous detail what I was fumbling towards with my babbling about Jer's use of Yiddish speech rhythms. With added links for the bits I know are on YouTube.
Lewis is one of the main exponents in cinema of the traditon of American Jewish verbal humour. All his films have a clear allegiance to this tradition --- including The Bellboy, in which Lewis is silent for most of his on-screen appearances. Stanley's silence functions as the obstinate and defiant bearing of a mark of difference --- a "Jewish" ironic subversion. Which Way To The Front? is not only the most explicitly Jewish of his films (deliriously so, in the great scene of Byers/Kesselring's meeting with Hitler) but also the one in which Lewis asserts most aggressively some of the "Jewish" aspects of his verbal art: the rough, braying timbre intented to grate, the broken rhythms and musical cadences, creatively mangled syntax, an obsessional insistence on the proper name (Byers' incessant 'Schroeder's), a blatant disrespect for the tyranny and prestige of "correct" linguistic forms (see the scene in which Byers, trying to learn German from a phonograph record, is not content merely to fracture the phrases he's supposd to repeat but also mocks the punctiliousness of the instructor and the sound of the German language.) Playing Byers playing Kesselring, Lewis unleashes and neutralizes the hidden violence of speech.
One of the pleasures of Lewis's films is his distinctive, Yiddish-inflected reinvention of the English language. Lewis's linguistic universe is filled with gerunds. "If it's for drinking or looking --- we'll make it!" proclaims the sign outside the glass factory in Hardly Working. "Stop with the brushing," Jerry Lewis, a VIP guest at the Fontainbleu Hotel, repeatedly tells a member of his staff in The Bellboy. The sequence in which this line is spoken contains several other examples of Lewis' characteristic idiom, abrupt and peremptory in inventiveness: to forestall the inevitable barrage of proferred lighters when he puts a cigarette in his mouth, Lewis declares, "I'll smoke it dry, I'll smoke it dry." His attempt to get his staff to "hold it" becomes an elaborate, parodic address built around repetition of that colloqualism. In Which Way To The Front?, Byers dryly asks Finkel (John Wood) to report on his staff's behaviour: "Are they holding it?"
An apt general title for Lewis's cinema might be 'How To Undo Things With Words'. In The Errand Boy, the scene in which the mailroom manager gives the clerks their assignments is full of strange locutions (starting with the manager's introduction: "Now listen, and listen loud!"), many of them attempts to describe processes of understanding and cognition. "Don't yell or hit," Morty begs his boss, assuring him, "I'm going to listen to every clear" and "I'll do all the things." Signifying his grasp of the principles of mail delivery, Morty says "If I see it says to go to a place, I'll go there, but if I don't, then it'll --- won't be clear." When the truculent manager, with sublime irony or self-ignorance, calls himself "a very patient man," Marty replies, "I noticed before how terrific your mind is." The manager goes on to give an account of his psyche: "It takes a great deal for me to become unhinged for one reason or another. But, you see, when my nerves tip me off that I'm going to become unglued, that's when I have to assert myself, do you understand that, Morty?" Morty replies, "You're about to smack people, right?" The manager delivers one of those speeches, frequent in Lewis's films, in which an elaborate explicitness about emotional and psychological processes combines with an awkward lay vocabulary ("when my nerves tip me off that I'm going to become unglued" is a magnificent phrase) to produce a hilarious and weird parody of self-insight, filled with strange and distorted echoes of things picked up somewhere or other in American mass culture.
For Lewis, words are a contagion. During the rehearsal of the Copa Cafe monologue in The Patsy, Stanley, between garbled attempts at reciting the jokes that have been written for him, repeats fragments that he picks up from the reactions of the handlers ("he needs help"), who are being driven beyond their patience by his incompetence. The scene hinges on a confusion of pronouns and identity that subverts the distribution of roles. "I'd like to introduce myself, but I don't know you either," tries Stanley, only to be corrected by an exasperated Chic: "No! No! 'Me', it's 'me', not 'you', it's 'me'!" Later, when Stanley starts directing Harry (Keenan Wynn) instead of vice versa, Harry yells back, "It's not me, it's you!" Words can pass from one person to another and can occupy, indifferently, one person or another. The shot/reverse shot interplay becomes a relation of absolute otherness, indifference, and mutual rejection in which subjects and proper names are confused (as in Morty's failed attempts to learn the names Wabenlottnee and Babewosentall in The Errand Boy.)
Lewisian speech accomodates radical contradiction: a gangster (B.S. Pully) in The Bellboy tells his underlings (Maxie Rosenbloom and Joe E. Ross) to kick a hole in a guy's chest, knock his brains out, and so on, concluding, "And remember one thing: no violence!" In The Bellboy, a young woman talking to her mother on a payphone irrelvantly produces the phrase, "Movies are your best entertainment." (Repeated in the board-meeting scene near the beginning of The Errand Boy and by the narrator at the end of The Big Mouth, the slogan originated with an industry-wide promotional campaign to boost theater attendance in the late 1930s.) Lewis sees speech as internally self-contradictory, free from the immediate situation, not tied to the speaking individual, as self-defeating as it is tautological and self-affirming. Instead of using dialogue for purposes of naturalism or narrative, Lewis and his collaborator Bill Richmond write dialogue in which speech consists of advertisements, catchphrases, and slogans. They reveal the tendency of language to program and serve stereotyped needs or to interpellate the person who is to be the bearer of the needs. The linguistic difficulties of Lewis's characters disrupt this process by making fun of it.
--- p64-67, Contemporary Film Makers: Jerry Lewis, Chris Fujiwara.
Honestly, I haven't even seen Which Way To The Front? yet and just reading that bit makes me snort. I can totally see and hear him.
God, this book makes me miss uni so much. *sigh*
Lewis is one of the main exponents in cinema of the traditon of American Jewish verbal humour. All his films have a clear allegiance to this tradition --- including The Bellboy, in which Lewis is silent for most of his on-screen appearances. Stanley's silence functions as the obstinate and defiant bearing of a mark of difference --- a "Jewish" ironic subversion. Which Way To The Front? is not only the most explicitly Jewish of his films (deliriously so, in the great scene of Byers/Kesselring's meeting with Hitler) but also the one in which Lewis asserts most aggressively some of the "Jewish" aspects of his verbal art: the rough, braying timbre intented to grate, the broken rhythms and musical cadences, creatively mangled syntax, an obsessional insistence on the proper name (Byers' incessant 'Schroeder's), a blatant disrespect for the tyranny and prestige of "correct" linguistic forms (see the scene in which Byers, trying to learn German from a phonograph record, is not content merely to fracture the phrases he's supposd to repeat but also mocks the punctiliousness of the instructor and the sound of the German language.) Playing Byers playing Kesselring, Lewis unleashes and neutralizes the hidden violence of speech.
One of the pleasures of Lewis's films is his distinctive, Yiddish-inflected reinvention of the English language. Lewis's linguistic universe is filled with gerunds. "If it's for drinking or looking --- we'll make it!" proclaims the sign outside the glass factory in Hardly Working. "Stop with the brushing," Jerry Lewis, a VIP guest at the Fontainbleu Hotel, repeatedly tells a member of his staff in The Bellboy. The sequence in which this line is spoken contains several other examples of Lewis' characteristic idiom, abrupt and peremptory in inventiveness: to forestall the inevitable barrage of proferred lighters when he puts a cigarette in his mouth, Lewis declares, "I'll smoke it dry, I'll smoke it dry." His attempt to get his staff to "hold it" becomes an elaborate, parodic address built around repetition of that colloqualism. In Which Way To The Front?, Byers dryly asks Finkel (John Wood) to report on his staff's behaviour: "Are they holding it?"
An apt general title for Lewis's cinema might be 'How To Undo Things With Words'. In The Errand Boy, the scene in which the mailroom manager gives the clerks their assignments is full of strange locutions (starting with the manager's introduction: "Now listen, and listen loud!"), many of them attempts to describe processes of understanding and cognition. "Don't yell or hit," Morty begs his boss, assuring him, "I'm going to listen to every clear" and "I'll do all the things." Signifying his grasp of the principles of mail delivery, Morty says "If I see it says to go to a place, I'll go there, but if I don't, then it'll --- won't be clear." When the truculent manager, with sublime irony or self-ignorance, calls himself "a very patient man," Marty replies, "I noticed before how terrific your mind is." The manager goes on to give an account of his psyche: "It takes a great deal for me to become unhinged for one reason or another. But, you see, when my nerves tip me off that I'm going to become unglued, that's when I have to assert myself, do you understand that, Morty?" Morty replies, "You're about to smack people, right?" The manager delivers one of those speeches, frequent in Lewis's films, in which an elaborate explicitness about emotional and psychological processes combines with an awkward lay vocabulary ("when my nerves tip me off that I'm going to become unglued" is a magnificent phrase) to produce a hilarious and weird parody of self-insight, filled with strange and distorted echoes of things picked up somewhere or other in American mass culture.
For Lewis, words are a contagion. During the rehearsal of the Copa Cafe monologue in The Patsy, Stanley, between garbled attempts at reciting the jokes that have been written for him, repeats fragments that he picks up from the reactions of the handlers ("he needs help"), who are being driven beyond their patience by his incompetence. The scene hinges on a confusion of pronouns and identity that subverts the distribution of roles. "I'd like to introduce myself, but I don't know you either," tries Stanley, only to be corrected by an exasperated Chic: "No! No! 'Me', it's 'me', not 'you', it's 'me'!" Later, when Stanley starts directing Harry (Keenan Wynn) instead of vice versa, Harry yells back, "It's not me, it's you!" Words can pass from one person to another and can occupy, indifferently, one person or another. The shot/reverse shot interplay becomes a relation of absolute otherness, indifference, and mutual rejection in which subjects and proper names are confused (as in Morty's failed attempts to learn the names Wabenlottnee and Babewosentall in The Errand Boy.)
Lewisian speech accomodates radical contradiction: a gangster (B.S. Pully) in The Bellboy tells his underlings (Maxie Rosenbloom and Joe E. Ross) to kick a hole in a guy's chest, knock his brains out, and so on, concluding, "And remember one thing: no violence!" In The Bellboy, a young woman talking to her mother on a payphone irrelvantly produces the phrase, "Movies are your best entertainment." (Repeated in the board-meeting scene near the beginning of The Errand Boy and by the narrator at the end of The Big Mouth, the slogan originated with an industry-wide promotional campaign to boost theater attendance in the late 1930s.) Lewis sees speech as internally self-contradictory, free from the immediate situation, not tied to the speaking individual, as self-defeating as it is tautological and self-affirming. Instead of using dialogue for purposes of naturalism or narrative, Lewis and his collaborator Bill Richmond write dialogue in which speech consists of advertisements, catchphrases, and slogans. They reveal the tendency of language to program and serve stereotyped needs or to interpellate the person who is to be the bearer of the needs. The linguistic difficulties of Lewis's characters disrupt this process by making fun of it.
--- p64-67, Contemporary Film Makers: Jerry Lewis, Chris Fujiwara.
Honestly, I haven't even seen Which Way To The Front? yet and just reading that bit makes me snort. I can totally see and hear him.
God, this book makes me miss uni so much. *sigh*