What I thought: An episode of Colgate Comedy Hour, a sketch comedy show with rotating hosts. This week’s episode was hosted by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The show was written by Ed Simmons, and Norman Lear and directed by Ernest Gluckman. This episode aired on Sunday, November 12, 1950 at 8:00 PM on NBC, and is available to view on the Internet Archive. This episode seems to have been cut down from its original sixty-minute length, although there are still commercials in it.
What happened: We open with a sketch about an undertaker’s convention. Oh, I loved this episode on Six Feet Under. The very serious morticians have hired Martin and Lewis to entertain them, but refuse to laugh at any of their japery until one joke enrages them. The duo escape from the angry mob to the front of the curtain, and argue about Jerry’s propensity to mess everything up. Jerry then starts making fun of Dean, not realizing that he’s snuck up behind him.
After a Palmolive commercial, we find Dean leading a dance class at his own studio. The live crowd goes nuts when Jerry enters. You knew he was gonna be on the show, guys. Jerry promptly joins in the dancing, chaotically gyrating until everyone stops to stare at him. He wants to learn to dance, and Dean sounds unusually upset that someone wants to hire his services. Dean instructs him to practice dancing with Elizabeth, who I think was just in the Palmolive commercial. Jerry immediately gets aggressively horny. A wary Dean gets him to dance with a dummy. When this feels, Jerry brings in another dancer to teach him “the rumber”, by showing a demonstration and then immediately telling Jerry to do it. Dean applies a special powder that makes Jerry do the dance. This quickly leads into some nonsense with them throwing a woman between the two of them, to disastrous results. The woman is a pretty good sport about taking some bumps.
The next sketch begins with a babysitter taking a job from a rich couple. True to form, she quickly invites her boyfriend Dean in through the side window. Jerry, of course, is the baby. Baby Jerry torments Dean, playing “51 Pick-Up” and screaming as he watches Faye Emerson on TV. This is a very perverted baby, as he tries to make out with the babysitter. Maybe this is where Seth MacFarlane got Stewie from? They play a game of charades. The sketch ends with Jerry playing both the son and baby through the magic of the movies. (27:00)
The show closes with Dean and Jerry as band members who get into an argument on stage. Dean tries to fire Jerry, but he invokes the fact that it’s a union band. Solidarity forever. Jerry decides to join in on his crooner-like vocals, to a very different effect. When Dean shuts this down, Jerry dumps cups and pitchers of water on him as he sings “Singing in the Rain.” The crowd goes NUTS for this. Dean reverses the situation, and Jerry is forced to go along with it as he too gets soaked. Dean seemingly legitimately slips on the water, much to the audience’s laughter. Even the show’s real bandleader gets drenched. The duo frantically reads the credits as the show goes off the air, and get in a plug for their movie At War with the Army.
What I thought: I think I’m beginning to fall into the rhythm of Colgate Comedy Hour, or at least the Martin-and-Lewis version. I’m no longer surprised when a sketch goes 10 minutes long, and I’ve become at least a little inured to Lewis’s high-pitched voice. (Although, as demonstrated in this episode, he probably could have talked differently if he wanted to.) I wouldn’t say I love the show or anything, but I can see how it would appeal.
At the same time, it already feels like the comedic premises with these two actors and their relatively narrow personae are limited. Last month we had Jerry Lewis learning how to box, and this week he’s learning how to dance. Maybe next month he’ll take up skiing or volleyball. In general, I prefer sketch shows to have bigger casts so that a bunch of different personalities and senses of humour can bounce off each other: here we just get Martin and Lewis, and since Martin is the straight man, it’s really just forty minutes of Jerry Lewis.
I was also interested to see the reference to Faye Emerson. The Faye Emerson Show is one we haven’t had the chance to look at yet, but it was a very influential (if short-lived) talk show program. It was also very popular because of Emerson’s plunging gowns, which exposed more than one might easily see in the Code-ruled Hollywood movies. (Perhaps this was even the occasion of the first person to masturbate while looking at a screen.) It’s a short reference, but a reminder that TV was becoming, little by little, self-referential.
Coming Up Next: We kick off another week with Tom Corbett trying to fix those damn engines.