User Reviews

First, it may be a surprise to some, but Jerry Lewis Kept making movies after the failure of Hardly Working. :

1982 Slapstick of Another Kind - 1982/1983 The King of Comedy - 1983 Cracking Up - 1984 To Catch a Cop - 1984 How Did You Get In? We Didn't See You Leave - 1989 Cookie . . .

Plus about 6 or 7 more after that into the early 2000s, some were voice over parts, some playing himself. Best of all of them though, was King Of Comedy, essentially playing his real self.

"Hardly Working" came out April 3rd, 1981, I was 12 and mere weeks away from turning 13. I saw the ads for this on TV and having seen many of his films that way already, I thought how cool is that? A new Jerry Lewis film, which would be my first in a movie theater.

I love comedy movies and given the age I was at the time, it didn't take much in a movie or television show to get me laughing. After I got to the theater and it got underway....there really was no 'good' comedy to be found .

There were things that should have been"comedic" , but they were nothing more than a tired re-hash of all that Jerry had done before. Not only because it's unoriginal but his kind of comedy had it's place in the time he was the most popular for it.

Slapstick, In 1981, it just didn't play as well. Unless of course you surround it with a funny & sensible writing and a good reason for it to be happening. A man having trouble finding steady work and a life could be made funny, but it failed completely here.

"The Nutty Professor" was funny because the comic timing was great and there was a funny "story" to go along with it. Making it a tour de force for Mr. Lewis, as well as his comedies with Dean Martin and his solo efforts.

Jerry Lewis, without question is a comedy / Hollywood icon and always will be but every act has their time and place in which they're meant to be. By 1980, Jerry was 55 and probably in intense pain from all his years of pratfalls. It's not as funny then.

(Disguising himself as a stereotyped Asian chef was not a good move either, but at the time, it was not considered 'improper'. I'm sure his intent was humor and not deliberatly insulting the Japanese or anyone Asian.)

"Hardly Working" is just a great error in sensible judgment, if Jerry were trying to fail on purpose, to let go of the 'boy-man' , he certainly succeeded. .

1 star . (END)

I just saw the Jerry Lewis movie "Hardly Working." I must saw, I was completely floored. I was instantly reminded of Chaplin's "Limelight." Some would say this is an outrageous comparison, but I don't think so. They are both films wherein great aging clowns take a bitter and poignant look at themselves, and at their lives spent as clowns in the midst of a changing audience and landscape.

Lewis' film is an abject fantasy about what would happen if he could no longer be a clown. Here is a middle-aged man who has spent his whole life as a clown, and realizes he has no other skills, there is nothing else he can do. So he takes a bunch of odd jobs where he enacts the clown role by default, hilariously causing havoc and chaos everywhere he goes.

But the genius in the film comes from its "serious" parts. The way he cries when he finds out that he lost his job as a clown, his depression when humiliated by his brother-in-law or mean bosses, etc. There is a strange spirit of defiant anger that runs throughout, from the grotesque depictions of people in the world and their banality and small-mindedness, to Lewis' occasional bouts of defiance towards authority figures. It's all about how humiliating and absurd it is to live in the world and have a job, and about all the little moments that make life unbearable.

In this world of unspeakable awkwardness and grotesqueness, women and girls are his allies, and boys and men his enemies. Women and girls laugh at his jokes, seek to help him, find him endearing, and want to grow up to be like him, whereas men and boys find him to be a pathetic loser and try to oust him at every turn. From the young son of the woman he's dating ("You're happy to see HIM??") to his sister's husband, to his many bosses, males are out to get him, threatened by his affinity with women and animals and jealous of his ability to evade the rules.

When he finally quits his job at the post office (it's the only job he can hold; as one of the character states, "no one loses a civil service job unless he wants to"), it's because he has been asked to "take care of" some rabbits that have ended up in the post office, ostensibly by destroying them. The film thus begins with an act in which his partner is a kitten, and ends with him rescuing rabbits.

In one strange scene in the film, he suddenly stops being klutzy and does everything right when he is being watched by a superintendent. Before this he could not touch anything without making it fall over, now he is perfectly in command of himself. There are more "serious" moments, such as when he is gracious and adult when evaluating the performance of his boss. The tables have now turned. Instead of being the lowest scum of the earth, kicked around by everybody, he is now his own boss. And he proves it by delivering the mail dressed as a clown, freeing the rabbits, and quitting his job.

The film ends with him going back to being a clown, and his journey into the abject world of random jobs remains as a dream, a nightmare. It's as if his perfect performance at his job at the post office was a way of suddenly saying, "All right, the farce is over now. I'm really a professional clown, I'm Jerry Lewis, I'm a physical comedian with full control over my faculties, see, I can do this job if I want to." It's like that moment in the dream where you are just about to wake up, or that moment when the actor takes off his makeup and reveals himself to the audience as his true self. But in this case he is taking off one kind of makeup— the clown he's playing in the film, which is a "non-clown" who's a regular person—and putting on another kind of makeup, his "literal" clown makeup, in which he can finally be himself—Jerry Lewis!

So we have to wonder: who is Jerry Lewis? Is it the actor-writer-director Jerry Lewis we are looking at, or are we simply watching a character in a movie? We see both at once, and that's the genius of the movie. It's an actor watching himself, watching his whole career and also watching the end of a career. As in the move "Limelight," the wrenching sadness we feel is in knowing the history of his earlier work, and how the ugliness of the world he is depicting is a world in which he can no longer thrive, as a clown from another era who is losing his audience to newer tastes, younger entertainers.

Some of the sight gags in the movie are brilliant and get quite surreal, as in one where he delivers mail to a Goodyear blimp and ends up taking the blimp for a ride, and another where a housewife offers him a beer and the Clydesdale-drawn Budweiser truck drives by and tosses him a six-pack. But in spite of its rampant silliness, the movie is strangely subversive and sad, and is Jerry Lewis' comic and reflective tribute to his own brilliant career.

Rather silly film that allows Jerry Lewis to play the clown (literally) as he has done so many times before. The plot is simple: Lewis is an out of work circus clown taken in by his kindly sister and her temperamental husband while he looks for work........and looks and looks and looks.

Our old pal Jerry is never as good as he was alongside Dean Martin all those years ago, and his comic turns lack that real freshness they used to have. "Hardly Working" is basically a one joke movie that did not allow our director much dimension. A real shame. Also starred Susan Oliver.

Sunday, July 12, 1992 - Video