Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis
Martin (top) and Lewis (bottom) appearing onThe Colgate Comedy Hour
Notable work	The Martin and Lewis Show The Colgate Comedy Hour (TV series)
Comedy career
Years active	1946–1956
Medium	Film, television, radio, nightclubs

Martin and Lewis were an Americancomedy duo, comprising singerDean Martin and comedianJerry Lewis. They met in 1944 and debuted atAtlantic City's500 Club on July 25, 1946; the team lasted ten years to the day. Before they teamed up, Martin was anightclub singer, while Lewis performed a comedy act lip-synching to records.

They performed innightclubs, and, starting in 1949, on radio. Later they branched out into television and films. In their early radio days they performed asMartin and Lewis but later became hugely popular asDean Martin and Jerry Lewis. These full names helped them launch successful solo careers after parting.

In 1944,Dean Martin met a youngJerry Lewis at the Glass Hat Club at theBelmont Plaza Hotel inNew York City, where both men were performing.^[1] Martin and Lewis debuted atAtlantic City's500 Club on July 25, 1946, when Lewis suggested to the club owner that Martin would be a good replacement for the scheduled singer who was unavailable.

The duo was initially not well received. The owner,Skinny D'Amato, threatened to terminate their contract if the act did not improve. Martin and Lewis disposed of pre-scripted gags and began improvising. Martin sang, and Lewis dressed as a busboy, dropping plates and making a shambles of Martin's songs and a mockery of the club's decorum. They performed slapstick and deliveredvaudeville jokes to great fanfare. Their success at the 500 Club led to a series of well-paying engagements along the Eastern Seaboard, culminating with a run at New York'sCopacabana Club.^[2]

The highlights of their act included Lewis interrupting and heckling Martin while he was trying to sing, which ultimately led to the two of them chasing each other around the stage.

AnNBC radio series,The Martin and Lewis Show, ran from 1948 to 1953. Martin and Lewis made a key appearance on the first episode ofEd Sullivan's show,Toast of the Town, in June 1948, although they may have appeared on TV earlier onHour Glass, the first TV variety show which aired from May 1946 – March 1947, during the time the duo first paired up formally. On October 3 and 10, 1948, the team were stars on the first two episodes of the NBClive television variety showWelcome Aboard – a kinescope survives of this live TV broadcast in theUCLA Film and Television Archive.

On April 3, 1949, they debuted on their TV version of their "Martin & Lewis" radio show on the NBC-TV network, with guestBob Hope, with their inaugural program drawing lackluster reviews in the April 30, 1949, issue ofBillboard magazine. Lewis hired young comedy writersNorman Lear andEd Simmons to improve their act.^[3] By 1950, Lear and Simmons were the main writers for Martin and Lewis.^[4]

Also in 1949, Martin and Lewis were signed byParamount Pictures producerHal Wallis as comedy relief for the filmMy Friend Irma.

Martin was thrilled to be out ofNew York City, a place he had developed a lifelong discomfort with, and he also had a dislike of tall buildings. Martin mostly avoided elevators due toclaustrophobia. He did not like climbing multiple flights of stairs in tall buildings or taking the elevator if he needed to go to a high floor. Even when his success allowed him to lease an apartment in a Manhattan highrise building, he chose one on the third floor. He likedLos Angeles and the fact that it had few tall buildings at the time.

Their agent, Abby Greshler, negotiated for them one ofHollywood's best deals. They received $75,000 between them for their films with Wallis, a respectable film salary in the 1940s. Martin and Lewis were also free to do one outside film a year, which they would co-produce through their own York Productions. Their first starring feature was the independently producedAt War with the Army (1950). They also had complete control of their club, radio, and television appearances, as well as their recording contracts. These collectively earned Martin and Lewis millions of dollars. They made regular appearances onNBC'sColgate Comedy Hour during the 1950s.

TheirComedy Hour shows consisted of musical song and dance from their nightclub act or movies, withDick Stabile's big band, sketch comedy with slapstick or satires of current films and TV shows, Martin's solo songs, and Lewis's solo pantomimes, physical numbers or conducting the orchestra. Martin and Lewis often broke out of character, ad-libbing andbreaking the fourth wall. This early television show established their popularity nationwide.

Although there had been a number of hugely successful film teams before, Martin and Lewis were a new kind of duo. Both were talented entertainers, but the fact that they were such good friends on and off stage took their act to a new level. Lewis later offered an explanation for their success:

Who were Dean's fans? Men, women, the Italians. Who were Jerry's fans? Women, Jews, kids. Who were Martin and Lewis' fans? All of them... You had fans that didn't care that Lewis was on or that Martin was singing. Because if Dean was singing, that was Martin and Lewis. If Jerry was goin' nuts, that was Martin and Lewis.^[5]

Martin and Lewis were the hottest act inAmerica during the early '50s, as well as the highest paid act in show business, according to a 1951Life magazine article. The duo was featured in that magazine while on its most-successful movie tour, promotingThat's My Boy. The tour was so successful, audience members would not leave their seats, so Martin and Lewis began doing "free shows" afterwards on fire escapes or out their dressing room windows, jamming the streets with adoring fans hoping to catch a prize – a hat, a shoe, maybe an autograph. However, the pace and the pressure soon took their toll. Martin usually had the thankless job of thestraight man, and his singing had yet to develop into the unique style of his later years. The critics praised Lewis, and while they admitted that Martin was the best partner he could have, most of them claimed that Lewis was the real talent of the team and could succeed with anyone.^{[citation needed]} Lewis praised Martin in his bookDean & Me, where he called Martin one of the great comic geniuses of all time.

Over the course of their contract with Hal Wallis, during which they co-starred in sixteen feature films, all released through Paramount, the pair's relationship became increasingly strained, with Martin chafing under his perennial straight-man roles, as Lewis's comic antics came to dominate their films. During the shooting of what was to be their final film together,Hollywood or Bust, during the spring and early summer of 1956, their mutual animosity reached the point where, as Lewis later related, "I wouldn't tell Dean what I thought of him, so [director] Frank Tashlin took all the flack."^[6] For his part, Martin at one point angrily told Lewis that he was "nothing to me but a fucking dollar sign."^[7] After the film completed principal photography on June 19, their professional breakup was widely reported in the press, although they subsequently fulfilled a contractual obligation with a farewell engagement at the Copacabana Club, which ended on July 25, 1956, ten years to the day from their first official teaming in Atlantic City.Hollywood or Bust was released that December. Lewis later stated that it was the only one of his films he had never seen, citing it as too painful to watch.

According to Lewis, the two did not speak to each other privately for twenty years, about which Lewis later commented, "the stupidity of that, I cannot expound on. The ignorance of that is something I hope I'll always forget."

Martin's career arguably reached new heights after the team split up, as a recording artist for theCapitol andReprise labels, as a movie actor both on his own (Rio Bravo,The Young Lions, theMatt Helm series) and as a member of theRat Pack (Ocean's 11,Sergeants 3,Robin and the 7 Hoods), and with his own hugely successful 1965–1974 television variety series,The Dean Martin Show.

Lewis remained with Paramount Pictures, appearing in and directing a succession of commercially successful films on his own (The Bellboy,The Nutty Professor), at one point becoming Paramount's biggest star. He also continued with his philanthropic work, which had begun while still partnered with Martin, hostingtelethons formuscular dystrophy research until 2010.

In 1958, Lewis was the guest on an episode ofNBC'sThe Eddie Fisher Show and was bantering with the host when Martin emerged from behind the curtain and said, "Don't sing. Do what you want but don't sing!" Martin was then immediately "pulled back" by singerBing Crosby. Martin said something else, but the rest of his words were drowned out by the wildly excited reaction from the audience. Martin's entire appearance was just eight seconds long, and Crosby was on camera for two seconds. When the applause died down, Lewis crooned the title of Martin's then-current hit "Return to Me" after which Fisher sang a few bars of Crosby's theme song "Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)".

In 1960, four years after they broke up, Martin and Lewis briefly reunited, seemingly without prearrangement. Both were performing separate acts at theSands Hotel inLas Vegas, a club they frequently played while they were together. Lewis caught Martin's closing act and Martin introduced his former partner to the audience, bringing him on stage. For about 15 minutes, they joked a bit and sang a duet of "Come Back to Me". However, the reunion was never duplicated. Later in 1960, when Lewis was rushing to finishThe Bellboy and was too exhausted to perform his stage act, Martin replaced him. The two were also filmed laughing together in 1961 outside Eddie Fisher's opening at theCocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles.

The two men reconciled in September 1976, afterFrank Sinatra orchestrated a surprise appearance by Martin on Lewis's annualLabor Day telethon for theMuscular Dystrophy Association, saying only "I have a friend who loves what you do every year." The pair beamed and embraced, and then had a few minutes of friendly banter, during which Lewis asked Martin, "Uh, so, you workin'?" According to Dean's daughter,Deana Martin, Frank had hidden Dean inEd McMahon's dressing room where he was then briefly spotted by Jerry's son,Gary Lewis. To be safe, he didn't say anything to his father and the surprise went off without a hitch.^[8] The brief reunion was national news and, according to Lewis, the two spoke "every day after that".

In 1987, when Martin's son,Dean Paul Martin, was killed in an airplane crash, Lewis attended the funeral unannounced, sat in the back, and did not reveal his presence to Martin. According to Lewis's 2005 memoirDean & Me andDeana Martin's 2004 bookMemories Are Made of This,^{[citation needed]} when Martin found out about it soon after the funeral, he called Lewis and talked to him for about an hour.^[9] In 1989, the two reunited for the last time on Martin's 72nd birthday at Bally's Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, where Martin was doing a week of shows. Lewis presented him with a birthday cake, thanked him for all the years he gave joy to the world, and finally joked, "Why we broke up, I'll never know."^[10] This would be the last public reunion of the duo before Martin's death on Christmas Day 1995.

Lewis published an affectionate memoir of his partnership with Martin calledDean & Me: A Love Story in 2005.

Martin and Lewis is a 2002 biographicalCBS television movie which portrays the lives of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Directed byJohn Gray and starringJeremy Northam as Martin andSean Hayes as Lewis, the film depicts the years from 1946 to 1956, spanning the entirety of their partnership from the beginning until the end.

In 2016, a tribute show calledDean and Jerry: What Might Have Been, starring Derek Marshall as Martin and Nicholas Arnold as Lewis, started touring North America. Its first performance took place at TheOrillia Opera House.^[11][12][13]

• Old time radio

• The Jerry Lewis Films byJames L. Neibaur andTed Okuda. Jefferson, SC: McFarland, 1994,ISBN 0-89950-961-4
• Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime (Especially Himself): The Story of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis byArthur Marx,New York, NY:Hawthorn Books, 1974,ISBN 9780801524301
• Hayde, Michael J. (2018).Side by Side:Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis on TV and Radio. BearManor Media.ISBN 9781629333526.

• Jerry Lewis interview for theArchive of American Television
• Collection of Martin and Lewis Radio Shows

• American comedy duos
• 1946 establishments in New Jersey
• 1956 disestablishments in the United States
• Dean Martin
• Jerry Lewis
• Film duos
• Nightclub performers
• Performing groups established in 1946
• American slapstick comedians

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