Weird note on french using "ooh-la-la": i play valorant sometimes on central EU lobbys and one time there was this toxic french guy arguing with another french guy on my time and he used "Cool-la-la" 😎 as a sort of "cool story bro"/dismisive backchat. It was the funniest thing ive ever heard I couldnt believe they actually say that
On second thought, the word play could have been cul-la-la( as in the French for ass, sorry for my spelling) but it was said and not written so theres no way for me to know. Regardless, the French kids are still using forms of it today and it's hilarious
I nearly sprayed milk out of my nose when you said that this was a movie about " a German clown who accidentally gets sent to Nazi death camp" just the absurdity of that sentence
Reminds me of Heinz Rühmann, though he lived through it. The premise is very very German though. Anyone who has seen "Der Hauptmann" aka " The Captain"
I mean it makes sense, its pretty good dark humor as a lot people were were sent for whatever reasons. And its good to handle it with a fair bit of dark humor usually, surrealism too very complimentary.
Wild to think that Jerry Lewis could have truly joined the pantheon of visionary directors of the time. At least he'll always have that cameo in Goncharov.
I like how poetic it sounds that a failed clown finds empathy and humanity in people who have been so dehumanized and tortured, and then becomes even more disturbed and sad than before. Although the film ends up talking more about this comedian than the Holocaust itself, it ended up creating a very good idea of representation of the people who had their lives interrupted in the Holocaust, inside and outside of it. I think the film would be legendarily tragic and beautiful if the production and the main actor himself were in a better context, with more support and help.
Tor, please don't change! Love the "90's cable access" video vibe. Fascinating stories with thoughtful delivery, chill vibe and great background sound beats high tech mediocrity every day of the week.
I honestly thought it was a pufferfish & planned to leave some sort of clever, funny "Tor, _LOOK OUT!"_ comment at some point. Now that I know it's only a durian, it makes one level of patrons seem far less exciting.
These give me heavy qxir - tales from the bottle vibes but way longer with far more research put into them, which coincidentally is the only that i think would make tales from the bottle any better. Keep it up man these videos are so good.
I would say that the idea that this movie would actually turn out good is near impossible, But we live in a world where Heavens Gate and Caligula both got decades later recuts which turned out to be actual masterpieces, transforming their reputations as two of the worst films ever made to two of the most misunderstood masterpieces of film history. So anything is possible I guess 🤷
I was born in 1961, and have a little insight into the Jerry Lewis phenomenon. (Fwiw, I also lived in Toulouse, France for about half a year in 2001; don’t think I ran across any adulation of the guy there at that time!) Lewis was damn near revered in my home, primarily by my father (my father was Not a Nice Guy, as it happens, so his endorsement of Lewis made me less inclined to be a fan…). It wasn’t unusual in Jewish households like ours at the time; Lewis was something of a Jewish hero, in large part due to his fundraising efforts. My memories about him centered not so much on his movies, but on the yearly Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon he hosted every Labor Day-it lasted nearly 24 hours, and he would perform and host through the whole thing, clearly exhausted by the end, raising money for the MDA. It was wildly successful, and it was on continuously in our home every year. I’d heard of this movie vaguely some years back, but this is the first in depth examination of it I’ve seen, so thanks! Very interesting. One other thing: I winced a bit when you referred to Schindler’s List being regarded as the “best” Holocaust movie. That is decidedly not the case. Almost certainly the most famous, absolutely, and it does have its merits, but many critics and Holocaust scholars aren’t thrilled that that’s the film most people associate with meaningful Holocaust depictions. I strongly recommend anyone interested in Holocaust filmography check out the video by Lady Knight the Brave titled “The Holocaust is Not a Metaphor: The Grey Zone” (available here on UA-cam and over on Nebula) which is primarily (but not exclusively) about the film The Grey Zone, arguably the most important Holocaust film ever made. She also made a fantastic documentary with a Holocaust film scholar evaluating most of the major (and many minor) films of the genre, available on her channel on Nebula. Personally, I will also recommend the film Korczak, about the doctor and educator Janusz Korczak who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto and chose to accompany the children he cared for to Treblinka, where they all died, despite having been offered the opportunity to escape several times. It’s beautiful, brutal and one of the most intense movie experiences I’ve ever had. And anyone who has HBO (I know I know, Max, whatever) should check out Primo, a filmed version of a remarkable one-man play about the writer Primo Levi’s experiences in Auschwitz.
@marocat4749 All you really need is illustrations. Any idea that can be spread and transformed is a meme. Cave drawings, in that sense, are the first memes.
I feel like the way he refused to ever even talk about it indicates he was aware that he'd turned it into something about himself, and that was the real problem.
There is a way to see some of it publicly the German documentary Der Klown. A few years ago I got hyper fixated on the most disturbing and wrong comedy every made and found the documentary about it and just had to see what the decades of fuss were about. The documentary uses clips from the film totaling about 1/3 of the produced material and some scenes recreated in a stage show format. Either they cut out all the jokes or it isn't comedic as the stories would have you believe. Maybe it's the urban legend bleeding into the viewing experience but I found it more eerie and unsettling than anything else, yet oddly fascinating, the feeling you get when you see something you know you're not supposed to, like a Creepypasta come to life.
That Jerry Lewis was despised by critics is a misunderstanding. His slapstick humor was at best surrealistic, fanciful, and original; he made many classics (The Nutty Professor is still beloved)-and a lot of garbage too, especially when he grew old. Bad and mediocre critics can't hold two perspectives in their heads simultaneously, which is why so many of them are fixating too narrowly on his bad movies.
Maybe the focus on the bad is just used a lot, like Shuemaker is, a great movie maker that , does nt get rarely said about, and i wont pretend batman and robin isnt a good comedy and batman movie
I was 12 when Life is Beautiful came out. I remember the Oscars that year too. I still haven't seen it, but that's going to change now. This was an awesome video! Thanks & Cheers!
boy is this video in my zone of interest! tasteless jokes aside, this is such an insane idea for a film, it's up there with that one Holocaust flick by Roberto Benigni (also about a clown!) i can't remember the name of. i feel like he's basically the Italian Jerry Lewis. that one is such a horrifying flick, though it's got nothing on his version of 'Pinocchio,' which is absolutely psychotic and barely watchable. no idea why he was taken so seriously in the 90s or 2000s or whenever that was. certainly before you were born; thanks for making me feel impossibly old lol. edit: good lord i need to learn to not comment before the video ends, of _course_ you'd mention that benigni film, which is called "life is beautiful," as you helpfully reminded me. also, all those critics were wrong, i watched that movie in a class in 7th grade and thought it was awful.
yeah, I thought you were making fun of me when you said "i feel like he's basically the Italian Jerry Lewis" because I said that almost word for word in the video. I also first saw it in school at around that age as part of the state-mandated Holocaust education program and was weirded out by the concept. I don't hate it but it's definitely not for everyone.
@torscabinetofcuriosities yeah, sorry! i have a horrible habit of commenting on long videos whenever i see something that reminds me of basically anything, which bites me in the ass near-constantly. i went to a weird artsy alternative school for 7th-9th grade and had this incredible teacher who taught a class called "Hollywood Movies" where we would just watch movies every day and then he'd have us write papers critiquing them. It was a great crash course in thinking critically about media, he had a bunch of middle and high schoolers comparing "Life is Beautiful" to "Schindler's List" to see which has a more effective message, though my favorite was that he made us watch (the then-just released on VHS 🫠) "Pocahontas" and write about how it's modern propaganda for settler-colonialism. RIP in peace Tom Feeney, what a fantastic teacher.
@@torscabinetofcuriosities absolutely stellar video by the way! that's the other thing i always do, i leave a long comment halfway through the video and then forget to compliment it. which is a shame because i love everything you got going on here, the set is great, the actual content is great, the delivery is great, it's all great. edit: i mean i guess i said it's in my "zone of interest" but that was just a really tasteless joke and not a sincere compliment 😅
I was born in 1965. It is hard to express his cultural relevance through most of my life. His yearly charity telethons saw to that, if nothing else. I can almost pinpoint the moment he slipped out of relevance (it starts with N and ends with irvana--they didn't just change music).. If you hadn't brought up Life is Beautiful, I would have. You saved me a lot of work. And Nutty Professor really is a good movie. Subscribed.
nutty professor is unwatchable -- and grunge only got popular because mtv propped it up to keep hiphop off their videos, then they went out of business.
A brilliant and insightful overview! I recognized the "grotesque cartoon man laughing" at 15:30. It's actually the hideous logo for Jerry Lewis Cinemas, his chain of tiny multiplex cinemas located in strip malls. I lived near one as a kid, and it was easy to get a ticket for a kiddie movie then sneak into the other dinky theatres to see lurid R-rated fare. Ah, good times...
I was born in 1961. That’s context. I recall Jerry Lewis promoting this on the Tonight Show around 1973. It wasn’t until years later that I realized it was never released nor ever really seen. If you want to see a comedian, make a film about the holocaust. I guess you’d have to see, ‘Life is Beautiful’. That’s a movie that reduces the holocaust to a clown show where the prisoners have to carry heavy anvils.
I met Jerry Louis I had to be 8 to 10 years old. I had no idea who it was, we were on an elevator together on a cruise ship. I do got to say he was nice and said hello but it was probably cuz I was a child.
The whole Holocaust Comedy didn't phase me, and Life is Beautiful is why. For years my friends tried to convince me to watch the Holocaust Comedy. I said that that was bonkers and that it must be terrible insensitive. Eventually, after coaxing from multiple other people and my history teacher (she specialized in the impacts of media on the image of Nazis and their death camps) I finally watched it. It was pretty great for what I was expecting and one of the most 'literary' movie I had watched (no idea if that is the term or not, LiB is the first movie I watched for 2 or 3 years that I did for the movie's sake and not just for social connection, and I haven't watched one since). Movie premises don't mean anything to me anymore.
Lol you're just like me, when I first heard of Jerry Lewis I was a teenager and thought "oh you mean Jerry Lee Lewis"? If you haven't, you should watch The King of Comedy with him and DeNiro, it's funny as hell
I was the exact opposite. I grew up watching Jerry Lewis and only heard of Jerry Lee Lewis as a teen. I'm under the age of 30 too. No, I'm not normal haha.
Algorithm fed me the fake towns video which I enjoyed but had similar notes to the comments. Came here to see how it was coming along and boy did you polish up this channel quick. Great stuff. Can't wait for more.
My (late) grandfather, who was born around 1910 in India, also loved Jerry Lewis. He worked for the UN in the 50's/60's and early 70's, apparently he was really popular outside the states in general.
What an absolute diamond in the rough this channel is! You deliver the no frills well-researched info dumps I've been missing for the last decade ever since YT got its glossy, sponsor-friendly makeover. Your writing is tight and snappy - like, I'm genuinely impressed by it! And, your topic choices are niche without being esoteric. Thank you for your videos
Jerry Lewis' fascinating tribulations remind me that to this day, people still blithely accept Directorate and Napoleonic propaganda-slander against Maximilian Robespierre as a monstrous, bloodthirsty dictator - though his character was in fact precisely the opposite of that; he was only one of 24 completely independent legislators collectively responsible for executing the revolutionary national government of the 1st French Republic against a massive foreign invasion and brutal civil war; and the infamous Revolutionary Tribunal of 1793-94 was entirely run by radical local-level politicians in the Paris Commune. Even across centuries, Winston Churchill's famous observation that "history is written by the victors" remains tellingly relevant.
you have content-farm output but everything is so well written & presented. I instinctually expect slop and i am so glad I'm wrong. Either all this shit is plagiarized or you are a legend (& I think you're just a legend). Thank you!
Dude, you have been a recent favorite of mine! If I may make one suggestion, your theme-song card was WAY louder than your audio. It is undoubtedly a bop, but I'd recommend boosting your own audio (after doing some eq and filtering) so that the whole video is level. I've edited podcasts in the past and helped with several youtube channels. if you need a sound guy, or just want some pointer, hit me up! Keep up the good work
Omg i was waiting the whole time for you to mention Life is Beautiful! Just such a banger film, got goosebumps just thinking about it. Better than Schindler's list imo
Although you requested that I comment "I do not like your spikey banana" I do like your content. It goes right up there with the interesting comment about "Schndler's List" that "somehow a movie was made about the one good Nazi in Germany". It seems that a lot of scholarship is now moving on the "The Grey Zone" as the best film in the category, though it is quite distressing that we even have such a category and a discussion of its contents. Being remembered for a movie that wasn't completed is a pretty meta joke on the populace, and I shudder to consider what would happen if John Malkovich found the script.
Dude your confidence during the intro after the warning right before the title card...fuck yeah dude...fuck yeah. Looks good on you. We see it bro. Keep it up man.
So glad the algorithm chose me to check out your channel at about 1200 subs before the channel wipe and update video. I definitely boosted the click through rate! Keep up the great work young brother.
kinda wild how consistently good this channel is lol. like these are well researched videos that are quite long, uploaded several days after each other. like how do you even have the time to do all of this? i suppose not much editing but the quality is still good either way
this is great! showed up in my recs just like, a day after remembering that the day the clown cried was a thing and trying to dig into any possible new info that had surfaced since i discovered it several years ago. also, respect for the goncharov mention
When I think of movies like "Jacob the Liar" which was an American attempt to compete with the more renown masterpiece "Life is Beautiful", It WAS the movie that starred Robin Williams. I think the Lewis film could have been good, it just wasn't the right time. Only in a post "Life of Brian" world could TDTCC be made. This was the time that "Cabaret" got made and won an academy award. As for the personal sense of decline, I'd also compare that with Peter Sellers adoration of his last character, Chauncey Gardiner, where he worked hard in declining health to complete "Being There" as he felt that this was how he wanted to be remembered...and was.
Jerry Lewis deserved getting the first dragic comedy with more surreale dark humor, or it sounds like that. Dark comedy dramas are a thing too. Honestly it sounds more respectful than life is beautiful. it deserved to be known at lwast as entertaining movie, about the holocaust, it could have changed movie history. Yes it could have been controversal, but it would always be
I remember my mom telling me about this movie years ago. I actually wonder if she may have talked to someone who saw it because my family lives fairly close to where he lived on Vancouver island and the description she gave of the movie had a surprising amount of detail
GONCHAROV LMAO. Sorry I was going to write an in depth response about how I'm really enjoying your deep-dives on batshit topics I've never heard of, how excellent these are and really offer something beyond the prevalent general-summary-from-wikipedia video essays these days... but now I'm just cracking up. Alas.
Huh. That's weird. My great-grandpa bought a huge Jerry Lewis DVD collection from a collector, and as a kid my siblings and I grew up on those, watching them over and over. And I have not once, ever, heard of this one. And I didn't know critics hated him. But I do know he hated his kids and they hated him back. Amazing. I remember they really lambasted him when he died.
TCM recently ran the doco The Darkness To Light and it contains Jerry Lewis discussing the film from before he passed and lots of footage of the film. Intriguing stuff, a shame we can’t see it in full and decide for ourselves.
I remember hearing rumors and mentions about this movie when we talked about depictions of the holocaust. Its crazy to know there was such a backstory behind it!!
the title really had me worried for how terrible it sounds but tbh the movies premise actually sounds like it could be emotional and is interesting to have a movie in that perspective. its unfortunate how poorly this went
I'm a French Gen'X from Bordeaux, the only time we heard about Jerry Lewis was on TV where the "TV aristocracy" was incensing him. Never saw a real fan in the real people, most "elder" I've heard found his movies stupid. It's like some privileged class from Paris showbusiness was trying to advertise him and was telling to the crowd how a genius he was but that didn't really spread to the whole population... The only thing I remember is that play where he "covers" the typewriter song, that was... funny. I think it was a snobbish fanbase because he was "dubbed" "The King of Comedy" (title of one of his movies), and Parisian TV hosts were trying to get the hype for France, and he was during the "French New Wave", but it's a microcosm intellectual fame which showed on newspapers and in TV but was not a mass phenomenon in the country.
The worst part of this is that before Jerry Lewis got his hands on this...I can see the vision, and it could've been really good. A clown, played by someone the world knows as a funny guy being thrown into the horrible, painful reality of the holocaust and faced with the things that actually happened there. And as the FIRST EVER holocaust movie? It could've been so impactful. But Lewis just had to make it about his failing career 🙄
I think lewis making it more about his own career/life is the most disrespectful thing about it, aside from that i absolutely believe it could have been good
Pour les français qui me regardent: Je ne suis pas désolé d'avoir insulté Johnny Hallyday. Les fans de Johnny peuvent mâcher ma culotte.
omlet du fromage!😂
Donne moi quelque chose de Tennessee...
Maitenant!
@@1-eye-willythis is always what I think too lol Dexter's lab was way too good
As a French person, I never met a person who unironnically likes him today
@@torscabinetofcuriosities Johnny holiday peut embrasser mon cul cajun!
Nota Bene: je ne sais pas qui est Johnny Hallyday. 🤷
Weird note on french using "ooh-la-la": i play valorant sometimes on central EU lobbys and one time there was this toxic french guy arguing with another french guy on my time and he used "Cool-la-la" 😎 as a sort of "cool story bro"/dismisive backchat. It was the funniest thing ive ever heard
I couldnt believe they actually say that
On second thought, the word play could have been cul-la-la( as in the French for ass, sorry for my spelling) but it was said and not written so theres no way for me to know.
Regardless, the French kids are still using forms of it today and it's hilarious
oh lo lo
dude this had me actually cracking up at my desktop
Elijah wood killed it in that 30 seconds of French stereotypes lol
I nearly sprayed milk out of my nose when you said
that this was a movie about " a German clown who accidentally gets sent to Nazi death camp" just the absurdity of that sentence
It sounds like one of Sprockets' "Germany's Most Disturbing Home Videos" entries...
Reminds me of Heinz Rühmann, though he lived through it.
The premise is very very German though.
Anyone who has seen "Der Hauptmann" aka " The Captain"
I mean it makes sense, its pretty good dark humor as a lot people were were sent for whatever reasons. And its good to handle it with a fair bit of dark humor usually, surrealism too very complimentary.
Wild to think that Jerry Lewis could have truly joined the pantheon of visionary directors of the time. At least he'll always have that cameo in Goncharov.
Goncharov. Best mafia movie in history
Scorsese’s masterpiece
To everyone in this comment, I like your shoelaces.
@@Max-ir3ed thanks, I stole them from the president
"what a horror. it must be told" a sign of a real man, thank you for sharing his story and letting it be told.
I like how poetic it sounds that a failed clown finds empathy and humanity in people who have been so dehumanized and tortured, and then becomes even more disturbed and sad than before. Although the film ends up talking more about this comedian than the Holocaust itself, it ended up creating a very good idea of representation of the people who had their lives interrupted in the Holocaust, inside and outside of it. I think the film would be legendarily tragic and beautiful if the production and the main actor himself were in a better context, with more support and help.
A holocaust movie to be accepted, yep it needed dark sureal humor, soit could have worked out great, if probably controversal
Tor, please don't change! Love the "90's cable access" video vibe. Fascinating stories with thoughtful delivery, chill vibe and great background sound beats high tech mediocrity every day of the week.
Agreed! The substance of your videos is such high quality, its nice to see a creator just relax and be confident in their research and presentation. ❤
Your channel explores all my niche interests and didn't-know-i-was-even-interested niches
@@ATM180 Maybe you have a little learning addiction like some of us.
Man, it is wild to see how far a channel I checked out because of a durian with a face has grown and is still so awesome.
I honestly thought it was a pufferfish & planned to leave some sort of clever, funny "Tor, _LOOK OUT!"_ comment at some point. Now that I know it's only a durian, it makes one level of patrons seem far less exciting.
French people being obsessed with Jerry Lewis was a well-aged joke when South Park brought it up 30 years ago.
and well before that
These give me heavy qxir - tales from the bottle vibes but way longer with far more research put into them, which coincidentally is the only that i think would make tales from the bottle any better. Keep it up man these videos are so good.
Fuck yeah, Goncharov (1973) getting the recognition it deserves!!!
I would say that the idea that this movie would actually turn out good is near impossible,
But we live in a world where Heavens Gate and Caligula both got decades later recuts which turned out to be actual masterpieces, transforming their reputations as two of the worst films ever made to two of the most misunderstood masterpieces of film history. So anything is possible I guess 🤷
I was born in 1961, and have a little insight into the Jerry Lewis phenomenon. (Fwiw, I also lived in Toulouse, France for about half a year in 2001; don’t think I ran across any adulation of the guy there at that time!)
Lewis was damn near revered in my home, primarily by my father (my father was Not a Nice Guy, as it happens, so his endorsement of Lewis made me less inclined to be a fan…). It wasn’t unusual in Jewish households like ours at the time; Lewis was something of a Jewish hero, in large part due to his fundraising efforts. My memories about him centered not so much on his movies, but on the yearly Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon he hosted every Labor Day-it lasted nearly 24 hours, and he would perform and host through the whole thing, clearly exhausted by the end, raising money for the MDA. It was wildly successful, and it was on continuously in our home every year.
I’d heard of this movie vaguely some years back, but this is the first in depth examination of it I’ve seen, so thanks! Very interesting.
One other thing: I winced a bit when you referred to Schindler’s List being regarded as the “best” Holocaust movie. That is decidedly not the case. Almost certainly the most famous, absolutely, and it does have its merits, but many critics and Holocaust scholars aren’t thrilled that that’s the film most people associate with meaningful Holocaust depictions. I strongly recommend anyone interested in Holocaust filmography check out the video by Lady Knight the Brave titled “The Holocaust is Not a Metaphor: The Grey Zone” (available here on UA-cam and over on Nebula) which is primarily (but not exclusively) about the film The Grey Zone, arguably the most important Holocaust film ever made. She also made a fantastic documentary with a Holocaust film scholar evaluating most of the major (and many minor) films of the genre, available on her channel on Nebula.
Personally, I will also recommend the film Korczak, about the doctor and educator Janusz Korczak who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto and chose to accompany the children he cared for to Treblinka, where they all died, despite having been offered the opportunity to escape several times. It’s beautiful, brutal and one of the most intense movie experiences I’ve ever had. And anyone who has HBO (I know I know, Max, whatever) should check out Primo, a filmed version of a remarkable one-man play about the writer Primo Levi’s experiences in Auschwitz.
I nominate this comment to be pinned.
@ Wow, this is such a lovely compliment! Thank you ☺️
There is no “before memes” in human history, they’ve always been with us.
i think you need some written culture to have memes since then for sure
@marocat4749 All you really need is illustrations. Any idea that can be spread and transformed is a meme. Cave drawings, in that sense, are the first memes.
@@marocat4749 The Venus of Willendorf is almost ten times as old as writing, that can't be totally serious.
Using the Holocaust as a metaphor for the decline of slapstick comedy is WILD.
this guy is PUMPING out straight quality! keep up the good work dude!
I feel like the way he refused to ever even talk about it indicates he was aware that he'd turned it into something about himself, and that was the real problem.
There is a way to see some of it publicly the German documentary Der Klown. A few years ago I got hyper fixated on the most disturbing and wrong comedy every made and found the documentary about it and just had to see what the decades of fuss were about. The documentary uses clips from the film totaling about 1/3 of the produced material and some scenes recreated in a stage show format. Either they cut out all the jokes or it isn't comedic as the stories would have you believe. Maybe it's the urban legend bleeding into the viewing experience but I found it more eerie and unsettling than anything else, yet oddly fascinating, the feeling you get when you see something you know you're not supposed to, like a Creepypasta come to life.
That Jerry Lewis was despised by critics is a misunderstanding. His slapstick humor was at best surrealistic, fanciful, and original; he made many classics (The Nutty Professor is still beloved)-and a lot of garbage too, especially when he grew old. Bad and mediocre critics can't hold two perspectives in their heads simultaneously, which is why so many of them are fixating too narrowly on his bad movies.
I think it's more that Jerry was despised as a person, than anything else.
Maybe the focus on the bad is just used a lot, like Shuemaker is, a great movie maker that , does nt get rarely said about, and i wont pretend batman and robin isnt a good comedy and batman movie
I was 12 when Life is Beautiful came out. I remember the Oscars that year too. I still haven't seen it, but that's going to change now.
This was an awesome video!
Thanks & Cheers!
boy is this video in my zone of interest!
tasteless jokes aside, this is such an insane idea for a film, it's up there with that one Holocaust flick by Roberto Benigni (also about a clown!) i can't remember the name of. i feel like he's basically the Italian Jerry Lewis. that one is such a horrifying flick, though it's got nothing on his version of 'Pinocchio,' which is absolutely psychotic and barely watchable. no idea why he was taken so seriously in the 90s or 2000s or whenever that was. certainly before you were born; thanks for making me feel impossibly old lol.
edit: good lord i need to learn to not comment before the video ends, of _course_ you'd mention that benigni film, which is called "life is beautiful," as you helpfully reminded me. also, all those critics were wrong, i watched that movie in a class in 7th grade and thought it was awful.
yeah, I thought you were making fun of me when you said "i feel like he's basically the Italian Jerry Lewis" because I said that almost word for word in the video. I also first saw it in school at around that age as part of the state-mandated Holocaust education program and was weirded out by the concept. I don't hate it but it's definitely not for everyone.
@torscabinetofcuriosities yeah, sorry! i have a horrible habit of commenting on long videos whenever i see something that reminds me of basically anything, which bites me in the ass near-constantly.
i went to a weird artsy alternative school for 7th-9th grade and had this incredible teacher who taught a class called "Hollywood Movies" where we would just watch movies every day and then he'd have us write papers critiquing them. It was a great crash course in thinking critically about media, he had a bunch of middle and high schoolers comparing "Life is Beautiful" to "Schindler's List" to see which has a more effective message, though my favorite was that he made us watch (the then-just released on VHS 🫠) "Pocahontas" and write about how it's modern propaganda for settler-colonialism. RIP in peace Tom Feeney, what a fantastic teacher.
@@torscabinetofcuriosities absolutely stellar video by the way! that's the other thing i always do, i leave a long comment halfway through the video and then forget to compliment it. which is a shame because i love everything you got going on here, the set is great, the actual content is great, the delivery is great, it's all great.
edit: i mean i guess i said it's in my "zone of interest" but that was just a really tasteless joke and not a sincere compliment 😅
@@elen5871what you’re doing is called jumping the gun
Another Jerry Lewis link to the Simpsons is that Prof. Frink is based on the character he played in the Nutty Professor
I was born in 1965. It is hard to express his cultural relevance through most of my life. His yearly charity telethons saw to that, if nothing else. I can almost pinpoint the moment he slipped out of relevance (it starts with N and ends with irvana--they didn't just change music)..
If you hadn't brought up Life is Beautiful, I would have. You saved me a lot of work.
And Nutty Professor really is a good movie.
Subscribed.
By the 80’s he was a punchline. We saw a bloated guy past his prime taking up good airtime to beg for money.
@12point131 No, not really. When the 80s ended he was gone. Though his Larry King interview got a bazillion eyeballs.
@12point131 Hell his old bud (possible lover) Dean was a joke too, dude did two Cannonball Run movies for Christ sakes
nutty professor is unwatchable -- and grunge only got popular because mtv propped it up to keep hiphop off their videos, then they went out of business.
great video jollibee, dont know who that other guy is, when will he be gone?
A brilliant and insightful overview! I recognized the "grotesque cartoon man laughing" at 15:30. It's actually the hideous logo for Jerry Lewis Cinemas, his chain of tiny multiplex cinemas located in strip malls. I lived near one as a kid, and it was easy to get a ticket for a kiddie movie then sneak into the other dinky theatres to see lurid R-rated fare. Ah, good times...
I was born in 1961. That’s context. I recall Jerry Lewis promoting this on the Tonight Show around 1973. It wasn’t until years later that I realized it was never released nor ever really seen. If you want to see a comedian, make a film about the holocaust. I guess you’d have to see, ‘Life is Beautiful’. That’s a movie that reduces the holocaust to a clown show where the prisoners have to carry heavy anvils.
9:36 omg no one ever talks about Goncharov!! its genuinely one of my favorite movies of all time
Im going insane i have no idea if its real or not atp
@ its real❤️
You can literally find the whole soundtrack and plot on youtube! Doesn't hit like it did in theaters, tho @@Chrys4l1s
peak Scorsese
I met Jerry Louis I had to be 8 to 10 years old. I had no idea who it was, we were on an elevator together on a cruise ship. I do got to say he was nice and said hello but it was probably cuz I was a child.
WHOA WHOA, don't say "thrust into middle school" like that. There might be libertarians listening!
not you mentioning goncharov while im wearing my goncharov shirt lmao
This has quickly become my new favorite channel. I look forward to each new video! Keep up the good work!
ive heard of this before but never in proper detail - i’m so happy to see you cover it. a very a strange case very fitting of tor’s cabinet
The whole Holocaust Comedy didn't phase me, and Life is Beautiful is why. For years my friends tried to convince me to watch the Holocaust Comedy. I said that that was bonkers and that it must be terrible insensitive. Eventually, after coaxing from multiple other people and my history teacher (she specialized in the impacts of media on the image of Nazis and their death camps) I finally watched it. It was pretty great for what I was expecting and one of the most 'literary' movie I had watched (no idea if that is the term or not, LiB is the first movie I watched for 2 or 3 years that I did for the movie's sake and not just for social connection, and I haven't watched one since). Movie premises don't mean anything to me anymore.
Lol you're just like me, when I first heard of Jerry Lewis I was a teenager and thought "oh you mean Jerry Lee Lewis"? If you haven't, you should watch The King of Comedy with him and DeNiro, it's funny as hell
I was the exact opposite. I grew up watching Jerry Lewis and only heard of Jerry Lee Lewis as a teen. I'm under the age of 30 too. No, I'm not normal haha.
So he’s basically the French boomer equivalent of Adam Sandler…
Algorithm fed me the fake towns video which I enjoyed but had similar notes to the comments. Came here to see how it was coming along and boy did you polish up this channel quick. Great stuff. Can't wait for more.
"The first use of emojis..." Ancient Egypt would like a word...
My (late) grandfather, who was born around 1910 in India, also loved Jerry Lewis. He worked for the UN in the 50's/60's and early 70's, apparently he was really popular outside the states in general.
he was very popular in the usa when he was with dino, but not so much solo
What an absolute diamond in the rough this channel is! You deliver the no frills well-researched info dumps I've been missing for the last decade ever since YT got its glossy, sponsor-friendly makeover. Your writing is tight and snappy - like, I'm genuinely impressed by it! And, your topic choices are niche without being esoteric. Thank you for your videos
You're telling me things I already know but in a way that makes me want to keep listening regardless. This rocks dude, thanks for the show :D
Jerry Lewis' fascinating tribulations remind me that to this day, people still blithely accept Directorate and Napoleonic propaganda-slander against Maximilian Robespierre as a monstrous, bloodthirsty dictator - though his character was in fact precisely the opposite of that; he was only one of 24 completely independent legislators collectively responsible for executing the revolutionary national government of the 1st French Republic against a massive foreign invasion and brutal civil war; and the infamous Revolutionary Tribunal of 1793-94 was entirely run by radical local-level politicians in the Paris Commune. Even across centuries, Winston Churchill's famous observation that "history is written by the victors" remains tellingly relevant.
Word.
you have content-farm output but everything is so well written & presented. I instinctually expect slop and i am so glad I'm wrong. Either all this shit is plagiarized or you are a legend (& I think you're just a legend). Thank you!
My God, I damn near burst an appendix at that thumbnail.
Dude, you have been a recent favorite of mine! If I may make one suggestion, your theme-song card was WAY louder than your audio. It is undoubtedly a bop, but I'd recommend boosting your own audio (after doing some eq and filtering) so that the whole video is level. I've edited podcasts in the past and helped with several youtube channels. if you need a sound guy, or just want some pointer, hit me up! Keep up the good work
Love the channel Tor!
Omg i was waiting the whole time for you to mention Life is Beautiful! Just such a banger film, got goosebumps just thinking about it. Better than Schindler's list imo
Literally love goncharov and no one ever brings it up omg thank you for mentioning it!!
I lost count of the amount of times I said, "Jesus fucking Christ..." under my breath during this video.
I love that you use Subways of Your Mind for the intro. Its such a fitting song vibe and lore wise lol this channels awesome dude
Is it a badge of honor that I looked at the thumbnail and immediately knew the movie name and actor name? I'm under the age of 30. Haha
Although you requested that I comment "I do not like your spikey banana" I do like your content. It goes right up there with the interesting comment about "Schndler's List" that "somehow a movie was made about the one good Nazi in Germany". It seems that a lot of scholarship is now moving on the "The Grey Zone" as the best film in the category, though it is quite distressing that we even have such a category and a discussion of its contents. Being remembered for a movie that wasn't completed is a pretty meta joke on the populace, and I shudder to consider what would happen if John Malkovich found the script.
The entire first half of this video I kept thinking about "Life is Beautiful," I was so relieved when you brought it up
Dude your confidence during the intro after the warning right before the title card...fuck yeah dude...fuck yeah. Looks good on you. We see it bro. Keep it up man.
So glad the algorithm chose me to check out your channel at about 1200 subs before the channel wipe and update video. I definitely boosted the click through rate! Keep up the great work young brother.
had to rewind for the goncharov mention to make sure my ears hadn't deceived me
Honored to be this early to a Tor video
kinda wild how consistently good this channel is lol. like these are well researched videos that are quite long, uploaded several days after each other. like how do you even have the time to do all of this? i suppose not much editing but the quality is still good either way
this is great! showed up in my recs just like, a day after remembering that the day the clown cried was a thing and trying to dig into any possible new info that had surfaced since i discovered it several years ago.
also, respect for the goncharov mention
What a compelling story, I’m so glad I found this channel
When I think of movies like "Jacob the Liar" which was an American attempt to compete with the more renown masterpiece "Life is Beautiful", It WAS the movie that starred Robin Williams. I think the Lewis film could have been good, it just wasn't the right time. Only in a post "Life of Brian" world could TDTCC be made. This was the time that "Cabaret" got made and won an academy award. As for the personal sense of decline, I'd also compare that with Peter Sellers adoration of his last character, Chauncey Gardiner, where he worked hard in declining health to complete "Being There" as he felt that this was how he wanted to be remembered...and was.
Jerry Lewis deserved getting the first dragic comedy with more surreale dark humor, or it sounds like that. Dark comedy dramas are a thing too.
Honestly it sounds more respectful than life is beautiful. it deserved to be known at lwast as entertaining movie, about the holocaust, it could have changed movie history. Yes it could have been controversal, but it would always be
Wait this is a brand new vid??? Sweet ❤
Look at the way Jerry treated his kids. Tells you all you need to know about what kinda person he was.
i do not like you'r spiky banananana
Great video!
I love what you're doing on this channel :3
So, Tor I really like your shoelaces.
Thanks, but I didn't actually steal them from the president. I stole them from Strange Aeons.
16:35 so basically Jerry Lewis wrote The Joker, but instead of Arthur Flex, he named him Helmút Doork?
Helmut dork sounds better :P
I mean, one of the big inspirations for Joker was The King of Comedy, which stars Jerry Lewis
You have started such a good channel. Good research and just the right amount of production, I can't wait to see more.
This is the most in depth video about this topic I have ever seen! Thanks as always for your in depth research!
I remember my mom telling me about this movie years ago. I actually wonder if she may have talked to someone who saw it because my family lives fairly close to where he lived on Vancouver island and the description she gave of the movie had a surprising amount of detail
Honestly wasn't expecting the movie to end with him just walking into the gas chamber with the children.
I’m very glad the algorithm led this video to me - this was a great video, probably the most engaging I’ve seen on the topic - thanks!
GONCHAROV LMAO.
Sorry I was going to write an in depth response about how I'm really enjoying your deep-dives on batshit topics I've never heard of, how excellent these are and really offer something beyond the prevalent general-summary-from-wikipedia video essays these days... but now I'm just cracking up. Alas.
Anyone else notice that he slipped goncharov in there lmao
GONCHAROV REFERENCE
Huh. That's weird. My great-grandpa bought a huge Jerry Lewis DVD collection from a collector, and as a kid my siblings and I grew up on those, watching them over and over. And I have not once, ever, heard of this one. And I didn't know critics hated him.
But I do know he hated his kids and they hated him back. Amazing. I remember they really lambasted him when he died.
Came for the content, stayed for the durian(but also the content lol) great work!!
Howard Stern used to talk about this movie like it was the Holy Grail.
TCM recently ran the doco The Darkness To Light and it contains Jerry Lewis discussing the film from before he passed and lots of footage of the film. Intriguing stuff, a shame we can’t see it in full and decide for ourselves.
The speech bubble is getting bigger
I remember hearing rumors and mentions about this movie when we talked about depictions of the holocaust. Its crazy to know there was such a backstory behind it!!
the title really had me worried for how terrible it sounds but tbh the movies premise actually sounds like it could be emotional and is interesting to have a movie in that perspective. its unfortunate how poorly this went
this is my favorite video of yours that ive seen so far also the locust one
Good thing this video had the H word I didn't have to watch a single ad
Bestie I mean this in the nicest possible way but your dad being a European politics expert and you going to fifth grade in France absolutely tracks
"I'm the one that didn't marry their cousin" Jerry Lewis(probably) 1965
I'm a French Gen'X from Bordeaux, the only time we heard about Jerry Lewis was on TV where the "TV aristocracy" was incensing him. Never saw a real fan in the real people, most "elder" I've heard found his movies stupid. It's like some privileged class from Paris showbusiness was trying to advertise him and was telling to the crowd how a genius he was but that didn't really spread to the whole population...
The only thing I remember is that play where he "covers" the typewriter song, that was... funny.
I think it was a snobbish fanbase because he was "dubbed" "The King of Comedy" (title of one of his movies), and Parisian TV hosts were trying to get the hype for France, and he was during the "French New Wave", but it's a microcosm intellectual fame which showed on newspapers and in TV but was not a mass phenomenon in the country.
🗣️I LOVE THIS CHANNELLL NEVER DISAPPOINTS
The A-Ha clips in the intro are wonderful🦄
Don’t think we missed Goncharov in that list
I actually do enjoy JL's comedies, but I'm half-French so I have an excuse.
The worst part of this is that before Jerry Lewis got his hands on this...I can see the vision, and it could've been really good. A clown, played by someone the world knows as a funny guy being thrown into the horrible, painful reality of the holocaust and faced with the things that actually happened there. And as the FIRST EVER holocaust movie? It could've been so impactful. But Lewis just had to make it about his failing career 🙄
I think lewis making it more about his own career/life is the most disrespectful thing about it, aside from that i absolutely believe it could have been good
Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon is what I remember
I mostly remember him as the inspiration for Professor Frink in The Simpsons, though this is quite the wild story
Fascism can be depicted through comedy, but you have to be REALLY careful how you pull it off. "The Great Dictator" comes to mind.
oh thank god someone mentioning the importance of goncharov in the changing film industry
If copyright strikes descend on anybody posting clips, that means the movie in its entirety is posted somewhere as a sample for detection.
9:36 god I forgot about Goncharov. Truly one of the movies of all time.
Thanks for the early Hanukkah gift, my friend. I gave you a sub for X-mas. Happy New Year!