[Will] Ferrell’s comedy can be cool to the touch in that he doesn’t embody his characters as much as comment on them. Lewis, by contrast, inhabits the soul of the fool.
“If I were to teach a young man what he had to do to be good,” Lewis tells me, “I’d say, ‘Don’t hold anything back.’ You can’t hold comedy back, because it needs to be exposed.” That worldview reflects more than just a lack of irony. It reflects a raw need to turn one’s self inside out—to not just allude to what’s funny but to be it.
—
From Amy Wallace’s interview with Jerry Lewis in the August 2011 issue of GQ.
In addition the very intriguing idea of Lewis as an embodiment of the “pre-irony era,” I find this excerpt fascinating because it confirms my earliest impressions of Lewis’ genius (particularly the dance scene near the conclusion of Cinderfella). I once called his manner of performing “porous,” because it seemed that whatever he was feeling, whatever resided in the deep crevices of his mind, would spontaneously leak out of him during his performances. There seemed to be no barrier separating internal from external. In its honesty and propensity for rigorous self-examination, I find this style of performing to be quite radical, because when you “act” and relate to the world this way, unexpected and transformative things can occur. And in my opinion, it transcends comedy; I think I would call the “raw need to turn one’s self inside out,” to not just allude but to be, the very center of performance itself.
