Jerry Lewis? Oui, oui. (Associated Press)

“I learned a few things today,” Ariane Dagun said from the top deck of the Lady Liberty ferry, which was motoring back toward Battery Park last Thursday morning. “I discovered that Bloomberg and Sarkozy are the same height, which was convenient for the podium. They did not have to change anything, since Sarkozy is very self-conscious about his height.”

Ms. Dagun was one of more than 100 New Yorkers, Frenchmen, and most of all French New Yorkers like herself, who had made the journey to Liberty Island with the president of France and the mayor of New York. They were there to celebrate the statue that country presented the city 125 years ago.

Maybe it was one too many petite croissants at the ceremony, but The Transom wanted to know, who was the bigger American icon, the Statue of Liberty or Jerry Lewis? “Definitively the Statue of Liberty,” said Ms. Dagun, founder of D’Artagnan gourmet foods (find their foie gras in your local grocer’s freezer). “We find Jerry Lewis very funny, we love his ability to make the strangest faces—our own Louis De Funes did that too—but that’s as far as it goes.”

Jean-Jacques de Saint Andrieu, an executive at Air France, has been in the city for 46 years, after coming on a school trip. “I stayed for the Liberty of New York,” he said, and as such, that is where his allegiance lies. “For me, I think it is the Statue of Liberty,” he said. “It represents much more psychologically, historically and socially.”

CharlElie, a gallerist who in a former life was Charlélie Couture, a chart-topping musician with more than 20 albums (he was the first Frenchman ever signed to Island Records) took the side one might expect of a man in a backward beret and forked goatee. “No doubt, Jerry,” he exclaimed. “Simply because Jerry’s American. The Statue of Liberty is even more a universal icon than strictly American. If you would ask to French people Jerry Lewis’ nationality, they’ll say he’s American. If you ask them about the statue, they might say she’s French.”

In the spirit of Jerry Lewis—who got his vote—Pascal Escriout, the owner of the bistro Tournesol in Long Island City, said, “I would love to see a statue of him holding a baguette at the entrance of Paris to greet the tourists.”

Rabbi Levi Djian, the nattiest rebbe The Observer had ever met, said he would pick neither. “The Statue of liberty is a gift from France to the U.S.A., which both share t

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Seventy-two members and invited guests of the Friars Club lined the dais. Mr. Lewis was seated immediately to the left of the podium, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese alongside him.

This was not Mr. Lewis’ first time being roasted, said Stewie Stone. He had also been roasted in 1955, when the only woman on the dais was Marilyn Monroe.

“And in 1986, we roasted you again with, again, Frank Sinatra, Jack Benny”—well, Mr. Benny died in 1974—“Buddy Hackett. And today, we roast you with [Richard] Belzer and Gilbert Gottfried,” Mr. Stone told Mr. Lewis. “You realize five generations of comedians have called you an asshole.” There was another Jerry Lewis Roast in 1971.

“What a hero he is in France,” said Norm Crosby. “Then again, those are the people who invented cocksucking.”

The abbot position has been vacant since Alan King passed away two years ago, exactly, to the day of the roast. That position has also been held by Frank Sinatra, Ed Sullivan and George M. Cohan (twice)—names belonging to the masters of the genre, of which few remain. This knowledge was foremost in the minds of many.

“Most of Jerry’s contemporaries are no longer here,” said Friars Club dean Freddie Roman.

His “iconic status and his age—he’s 80,” might have had a calming effect on the insult-hurling affair, said roaster Richard Klein from his seat on the dais later on. “I have to try to be funny and maybe a little irreverent, you know, but not disrespectful.

“I already sense that it’s tamer than most roasts,” he said. “You know, they get very scatological.”

But was it respect for Mr. Lewis’ reputation, or fear of it, that led some presenters to pull their punches? How do you top a legend, a man who laid the stones for the path so many of those present barely dare to tread.

“I enjoyed this roast because this is legendary—Jerry has been here 80 years long,” said Don King, who was last year’s honoree at a cutthroat gathering that saw roasters jettisoning any semblance of reserve and bringing up some of the muckiest details of Mr. King’s personal and professional background. “You can’t say there’s a line that can’t be crossed. It’s supposed to be impromptu and it’s supposed to be cutting up, and they are born and bred in comedy,” he said. His necktie was in a flashy stars-and-stripes design, with the Statue of Liberty planted in the center. “So, you know, coming in—they’ve got a license to kill you.”

Gilbert Gottfried didn’t even mention Mr. Lewis from the podium. “I don’t really know him,” he said later. “I just met him like maybe twice before, for about less than a minute. I just always enjoyed dick jokes a lot. I just go up, do it as disgusting as possible, and I’m off.”

For his turn, Mr. Klein chose to mock Mr. Lewis by performing a screeching, off-key rendition of him singing Handel’s Messiah. Paul Shaffer also serenaded the guest of honor, with a song strewn with expletives and descriptions of sex acts and defecation.

During Mr. Shaffer’s closing monologue, Mr. Lewis rose from his seat and began to walk off the stage. The Letterman sidekick ran after him and directed him back to his seat.

Mr. Lewis laughed frequently throughout the proceedings. He also flexed his jaw frequently, in an expression that looked a bit like a yawn, but wasn’t.

Richard Belzer served as roast master. “Jerry Lewis, Jerry fucking Lewis,” he said. “One day, he calls me up on the phone and tells me how much he enjoys my work. Me—little Richie Belzer. Turns out Jerry was a huge Munch fan”—Mr. Belzer’s most current on-screen persona is Detective John Munch—“and had been one for as far back as 1948, when one night he went down on every woman in the Copacabana. Three hundred and eighty-one women. And that was considered a lot of pussy in those days.

“Jerry recently played my uncle on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” he said.

“Now he’s been fucking my aunt for eight weeks. And when my Aunt Martha came out of that coma …. ” The creepiness of Mr. Belzer’s appearance made the joke’s suggestion of near-necrophilia that much more comically distasteful.

The comics sometimes found it easier to go for each other. “I’m not going to make fun of Sandra Bernhard,” said comic Lisa Lampanelli. “She’s the only person on this dais who can get chicks.

“Sandra’s very proud to be a lesbeen. You know how I know? Before the show, she made me smell her finger.

“But enough about Sandra,” said Ms. Lampanelli. “We’re here tonight to roast the great Jerry Lewis. Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard a lot of talk about people saying they wish Dean was here to see this. Quite honestly, I would settle for Jerry to be alive to see this. Seriously, Jerry is old. His ball bag hangs so low, he has to hold it when he takes a shit.”

“How can one person be so annoying in so many movies? Seriously, Nathan Lane, you would know—how?

“You may not know this,” she said of Mr. Lane, who was seated to her right, “but he actually was up for a part in Brokeback Mountain, but the producers were afraid he’d make the film seem too gay.

“Nathan Lane has been opened more times on Broadway than Neil Simon plays.”

Mr. Lane looked back at her with a twisted mouth.

“But you look fantastic, Nathan,” she said to him. And then to the crowd: “Up until recently, he had a goatee. He shaved it because it kept irritating Matthew Broderick’s balls.”

Deana Martin, the daughter and feminized namesake of Mr. Lewis’ comedic partner of yesteryear, took the microphone.

“When I was born,” she said, “he and my father, Dean Martin, were the biggest comedy team in history, and I remember that they would go on tour together. Jerry came by the house one day to pick up Dad on his way to the airport, and I said, ‘Uncle Jerry, why is Dad leaving me to go to Las Vegas with you?’, and he took my little hand in his and he said, ‘Because he likes me better.’”

Ms. Martin made no jabs about Mr. Lewis’ weight, age, career, sex life. After the ceremony, she said, “He’s such a good friend, I could have said anything, but I don’t choose to.”

At the end, Mr. Lewis took to the microphone. “I have absolutely no recall in the last 75 professional-forming years that I have remembered such morale-building,” he said.

“Today I am not taking anything for granted. I knew what today represented. It represented part and parcel of what has made a whole lifetime in this business an exceptional one.”

Mr. Lewis never erased, he said, the mental picture he had of himself as “a Jew kid from Newark who’s trying desperately to graduate grammar school wearing his cousin’s white tux that he wore the graduation before. Now,” he said, “I’m sitting next to Robert De Niro, for God’s sakes.”

I had been hearing good things about Mr. Winterbottom’s opus ever since last year’s New York Film Festival, but somehow I had failed to catch it before last week’s official New York opening. So off I trotted to a noon showing of the film at my local multiplex. The reviews had mostly been good, and a predominantly “mature” audience was in attendance. The reactions ranged from shrieking laughter to barely audible chuckles to quiet amusement. (There were also a few walkouts.) I belonged to the quiet-amusement party myself, and consequently suspected that there was at least a trace of cultural exhibitionism in the pockets of wild laughter, as if to say, “We get it, why don’t you?”

To be sure, I found the film steadily witty and funny, but seldom drop-dead hilarious—at least until its end-credit sequence, a competition between the two tongue-in-cheek comic leads on which one can do a better Al Pacino imitation. Indeed, Steven Coogan in the multiple roles of Tristram Shandy, Walter Shandy and Steve Coogan, and Rob Brydon as Toby Shandy and Rob Brydon, function most effectively as a tongue-in-cheek comedy team squabbling over their own actorly ambitions.

Of course, the movie itself is not without a certain highbrow snob appeal, despite all its professed irreverence. I recall having read Tristram Shandy in high school but can’t say I ever “got” it, and I have never been tempted to return to it since. I have always been addicted to orderly narratives, both in books and on film, with the result that I refuse to be impressed (or intimidated) by avant-garde variations in the art of storytelling, even from as far back as the 18th century. Still, I find a curious continuity in the film arising from the jocular competitiveness of two actors jealous of their respective billing and casting potential. The inside-showbiz provenance of their exchanges have become familiar to us in such cable-TV sitcoms as The Larry Sanders Show, Entourage and Extras, not to mention the steady blizzard of independent films concerned with the traumas of making an independent film. Hence, it’s not easy to be original with this sort of material, which is just the feat accomplished here by Mr. Winterbottom and his screenwriter, Mr. Hardy, and their remarkably relaxed and versatile cast, in this (mostly verbally) titillating cock-and-bull story.

With a subject seemingly so amenable to heartless derision, the film is remarkable for its warmth and generosity and conviviality. The pace of this low-budget-production-within-a-low-budget-production is of necessity so frenzied that no merely unpleasant characters have time to develop into full-fledged hateful villains; the stakes are too low for any serious malice to materialize. Jeremy Northam’s Mark patiently presides as the film’s director over cast and crew and assorted hangers-on without ever becoming an authoritarian caricature of a director. Mr. Coogan displays affection for two women named Jenny and Jennie. The first is played by Kelly MacDonald, who comes to the set with their baby in a cradle; the second is played by Naomie Harris, a respected friend and production assistant who provides Mr. Coogan with all sorts of insights into the two characters he’s playing. She is also familiar enough with the novel to provide the audience with a thumbnail summary of Sterne’s deep pessimism about people’s lives and dreams and the wishful stories they inspire.

But when push comes to shove, Mr. Coogan rejects the smart Jennie’s advances to stand by the Jenny who has their child. This mini-drama takes place amid the tumult of a set reverberating from the incessant screams of Elizabeth Shandy (Keeley Hawes), Tristram’s prospective mother, seemingly in the throes of perpetual childbirth. All of this simulated pain and suffering isn’t exactly funny or even chucklesome, but neither is it as harrowing as it might have been were it not so ridiculously overextended. Dylan Moran, as Dr. Slop, the family physician, gets one of the biggest laughs when he squashes a melon while demonstrating how safely he can extract a baby headfirst from its mother’s womb using forceps. As it finally happens, Dr. Slop’s trusty forceps merely chop off part of Tristram’s nose.

But it is in the flawless repartee that Tristram Shandy truly excels, with a wit that goes back to the Restoration dramatists as well as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Noël Coward. It is ever so brightly British at a time when most Hollywood movies strain to be witless for the sake of the teenagers in that slavishly sought-after demographic sample. This brightness is particularly evident in a split-screen cameo in which a British producer negotiates with Gillian Anderson and her American agent to appear in a low-budget movie for a token fee. All the familiar buzz lines of art over commerce are trotted out on both sides of the Atlantic, with no one ever haggling or even cracking a smile. Yet, for all its irony, the scene remains sunny and liberating. And Ms. Anderson plays her scene as the Widow Wadman being courted by Mr. Brydon’s randy Uncle Toby in the full flush and blush of the film’s cock-and-bull impertinence. This movie is not suitable for children or illiterate adults.

Butler Did It?

Sir Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948), from a screenplay by Graham Greene, based on Mr. Greene’s short story The Basement Room, is being revived at Film Forum, and is revealed once more, after more than half a century, as one of the most brilliant demonstrations of P.O.V., or point of view, filmmaking. In this instance, Georges Perinal’s rigorously subjective camera tells a suspensefully melodramatic tale as seen through the eyes of a small child, Bobby Henrey, the son of the French Ambassador to England, who, while his parents are away on a trip, is left in the care of Baines, the butler (Ralph Richardson), and his shrewish wife (Sonia Dresdel). The boy adores Baines and is terrified of Mrs. Baines. One day, he discovers a set of facts that he doesn’t fully understand. For one thing, Baines seems to be very interested in an attractive young French secretary (Michèle Morgan). When he asks Baines about her, Baines tells him falsely that she is his niece. From that point on, the boy becomes enmeshed in a web spun by the lies, deceptions and subterfuges of grown-ups.

When Mrs. Baines is found dead at the foot of one of the embassy’s winding staircases, Baines is suspected of having murdered her. The boy had fled into the night after witnessing Baines violently arguing with his wife after she’d caught him cheating with the secretary. Baines later claimed that she must have slipped on the staircase and fallen to her death accidentally. The boy tries to protect Baines, but he only succeeds in making him look more guilty with his childishly inexpert lies. Things look very bleak for Baines until—but even after half a century, I am not allowed by guild rules to give away the plot, the ending of which is considerably changed from the one in the short story by the screenwriter (and short-story writer) himself.

Still, the film works beautifully and reminds us of the glories of the black-and-white cinema at its peak, shortly before the beginning of its gradual demise. When it came out, I was working at a menial job for the Selznick Releasing Organization, which David O. Selznick was using mainly as the American distributor of Sir Alexander Korda’s British films. Strange to say, The Fallen Idol didn’t do well in America, and it contributed to the eventual economic downfall of both Selznick and Korda.

I recall Selznick on the telephone arguing endlessly and fruitlessly with a Texas owner of a large movie chain, who refused to open the picture in Texas because of the little boy’s fondness for a pet snake. I later learned that in Texas, mothers frightened their children to sleep with stories about snakes. The point is that this little detail about the boy wasn’t in Greene’s original short story, but had been added by Greene himself to the screenplay to make the boy more interestingly complex and, indirectly, to make Mrs. Baines more unsympathetic.

Canadians!

Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies, from his own screenplay, based on the novel by Rupert Holmes, has come and gone in 2005 without making much of a stir, although it wasn’t lacking in sensational elements that have become very much a part of our celebrity culture. I haven’t read the novel by Mr. Holmes, but I gather that it reminded many people of the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy team that both thrived and disintegrated in the 50’s.

Mr. Egoyan decided to change the team into a trans-Atlantic comedy team with a brash Yank, Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon), and a more repressed Brit, Vince Collins (Colin Firth), whose task it is to keep the irrepressible Lanny under control. The story is told in bits and pieces from the vantage point of a 70’s journalist, Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman), trying to piece together the mysterious death of a groupie named Maureen (Rachel Blanchard), whose nude body is found in the bathtub of the comedy team’s hotel suite. Their reputations are besmirched, but since both have ironclad alibis, neither is charged with the crime. Their partnership, on the other hand, is bitterly dissolved, and they never appear together onstage or in a film again.

Mr. Egoyan, a Canadian-Armenian filmmaker, hit his peak, in my opinion, in 1994 with the hauntingly sensual Exotica, in which Mia Kirshner performed a provocative mock-schoolgirl striptease to exorcize the ghosts of her own abused childhood. Ever since then, Mr. Egoyan’s films have continued to reflect his obsessions with the behavioral twists and turns in the relations between men and women. The problem with Where the Truth Lies is that the female characters of Karen and Maureen are too susceptible to the erotic magnetism generated by the star power of Lanny and Vince. The solution to the “mystery” thereby becomes anticlimactic. Nobody would mistake Vince and Lanny for Martin and Lewis, particularly when the currently fashionable bisexual bombshell hits the fan, but Mr. Egoyan makes sure that we don’t entirely forget the Martin and Lewis parallels with his film by staging much of the action at a charity telethon in which both Vince and Lanny participate.

For all its failings, however, Where the Truth Lies reminds us that the most challenging filmmakers from Canada, like Mr. Egoyan, David Cronenberg and Denys Arcand, are at once so near and yet so far from the ingrained inhibitions of the still mass-oriented Hollywood studios. Also, Mr. Bacon and Mr. Firth put together fragments of their lighter and more angst-ridden moments into compelling characterizations that somehow transcend the infelicities of the project as a whole.

I had been hearing good things about Mr. Winterbottom’s opus ever since last year’s New York Film Festival, but somehow I had failed to catch it before last week’s official New York opening. So off I trotted to a noon showing of the film at my local multiplex. The reviews had mostly been good, and a predominantly “mature” audience was in attendance. The reactions ranged from shrieking laughter to barely audible chuckles to quiet amusement. (There were also a few walkouts.) I belonged to the quiet-amusement party myself, and consequently suspected that there was at least a trace of cultural exhibitionism in the pockets of wild laughter, as if to say, “We get it, why don’t you?”

To be sure, I found the film steadily witty and funny, but seldom drop-dead hilarious—at least until its end-credit sequence, a competition between the two tongue-in-cheek comic leads on which one can do a better Al Pacino imitation. Indeed, Steven Coogan in the multiple roles of Tristram Shandy, Walter Shandy and Steve Coogan, and Rob Brydon as Toby Shandy and Rob Brydon, function most effectively as a tongue-in-cheek comedy team squabbling over their own actorly ambitions.

Of course, the movie itself is not without a certain highbrow snob appeal, despite all its professed irreverence. I recall having read Tristram Shandy in high school but can’t say I ever “got” it, and I have never been tempted to return to it since. I have always been addicted to orderly narratives, both in books and on film, with the result that I refuse to be impressed (or intimidated) by avant-garde variations in the art of storytelling, even from as far back as the 18th century. Still, I find a curious continuity in the film arising from the jocular competitiveness of two actors jealous of their respective billing and casting potential. The inside-showbiz provenance of their exchanges have become familiar to us in such cable-TV sitcoms as The Larry Sanders Show, Entourage and Extras, not to mention the steady blizzard of independent films concerned with the traumas of making an independent film. Hence, it’s not easy to be original with this sort of material, which is just the feat accomplished here by Mr. Winterbottom and his screenwriter, Mr. Hardy, and their remarkably relaxed and versatile cast, in this (mostly verbally) titillating cock-and-bull story.

With a subject seemingly so amenable to heartless derision, the film is remarkable for its warmth and generosity and conviviality. The pace of this low-budget-production-within-a-low-budget-production is of necessity so frenzied that no merely unpleasant characters have time to develop into full-fledged hateful villains; the stakes are too low for any serious malice to materialize. Jeremy Northam’s Mark patiently presides as the film’s director over cast and crew and assorted hangers-on without ever becoming an authoritarian caricature of a director. Mr. Coogan displays affection for two women named Jenny and Jennie. The first is played by Kelly MacDonald, who comes to the set with their baby in a cradle; the second is played by Naomie Harris, a respected friend and production assistant who provides Mr. Coogan with all sorts of insights into the two characters he’s playing. She is also familiar enough with the novel to provide the audience with a thumbnail summary of Sterne’s deep pessimism about people’s lives and dreams and the wishful stories they inspire.

But when push comes to shove, Mr. Coogan rejects the smart Jennie’s advances to stand by the Jenny who has their child. This mini-drama takes place amid the tumult of a set reverberating from the incessant screams of Elizabeth Shandy (Keeley Hawes), Tristram’s prospective mother, seemingly in the throes of perpetual childbirth. All of this simulated pain and suffering isn’t exactly funny or even chucklesome, but neither is it as harrowing as it might have been were it not so ridiculously overextended. Dylan Moran, as Dr. Slop, the family physician, gets one of the biggest laughs when he squashes a melon while demonstrating how safely he can extract a baby headfirst from its mother’s womb using forceps. As it finally happens, Dr. Slop’s trusty forceps merely chop off part of Tristram’s nose.

But it is in the flawless repartee that Tristram Shandy truly excels, with a wit that goes back to the Restoration dramatists as well as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Noël Coward. It is ever so brightly British at a time when most Hollywood movies strain to be witless for the sake of the teenagers in that slavishly sought-after demographic sample. This brightness is particularly evident in a split-screen cameo in which a British producer negotiates with Gillian Anderson and her American agent to appear in a low-budget movie for a token fee. All the familiar buzz lines of art over commerce are trotted out on both sides of the Atlantic, with no one ever haggling or even cracking a smile. Yet, for all its irony, the scene remains sunny and liberating. And Ms. Anderson plays her scene as the Widow Wadman being courted by Mr. Brydon’s randy Uncle Toby in the full flush and blush of the film’s cock-and-bull impertinence. This movie is not suitable for children or illiterate adults.

Butler Did It?

Sir Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948), from a screenplay by Graham Greene, based on Mr. Greene’s short story The Basement Room, is being revived at Film Forum, and is revealed once more, after more than half a century, as one of the most brilliant demonstrations of P.O.V., or point of view, filmmaking. In this instance, Georges Perinal’s rigorously subjective camera tells a suspensefully melodramatic tale as seen through the eyes of a small child, Bobby Henrey, the son of the French Ambassador to England, who, while his parents are away on a trip, is left in the care of Baines, the butler (Ralph Richardson), and his shrewish wife (Sonia Dresdel). The boy adores Baines and is terrified of Mrs. Baines. One day, he discovers a set of facts that he doesn’t fully understand. For one thing, Baines seems to be very interested in an attractive young French secretary (Michèle Morgan). When he asks Baines about her, Baines tells him falsely that she is his niece. From that point on, the boy becomes enmeshed in a web spun by the lies, deceptions and subterfuges of grown-ups.

When Mrs. Baines is found dead at the foot of one of the embassy’s winding staircases, Baines is suspected of having murdered her. The boy had fled into the night after witnessing Baines violently arguing with his wife after she’d caught him cheating with the secretary. Baines later claimed that she must have slipped on the staircase and fallen to her death accidentally. The boy tries to protect Baines, but he only succeeds in making him look more guilty with his childishly inexpert lies. Things look very bleak for Baines until—but even after half a century, I am not allowed by guild rules to give away the plot, the ending of which is considerably changed from the one in the short story by the screenwriter (and short-story writer) himself.

Still, the film works beautifully and reminds us of the glories of the black-and-white cinema at its peak, shortly before the beginning of its gradual demise. When it came out, I was working at a menial job for the Selznick Releasing Organization, which David O. Selznick was using mainly as the American distributor of Sir Alexander Korda’s British films. Strange to say, The Fallen Idol didn’t do well in America, and it contributed to the eventual economic downfall of both Selznick and Korda.

I recall Selznick on the telephone arguing endlessly and fruitlessly with a Texas owner of a large movie chain, who refused to open the picture in Texas because of the little boy’s fondness for a pet snake. I later learned that in Texas, mothers frightened their children to sleep with stories about snakes. The point is that this little detail about the boy wasn’t in Greene’s original short story, but had been added by Greene himself to the screenplay to make the boy more interestingly complex and, indirectly, to make Mrs. Baines more unsympathetic.

Canadians!

Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies, from his own screenplay, based on the novel by Rupert Holmes, has come and gone in 2005 without making much of a stir, although it wasn’t lacking in sensational elements that have become very much a part of our celebrity culture. I haven’t read the novel by Mr. Holmes, but I gather that it reminded many people of the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy team that both thrived and disintegrated in the 50’s.

Mr. Egoyan decided to change the team into a trans-Atlantic comedy team with a brash Yank, Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon), and a more repressed Brit, Vince Collins (Colin Firth), whose task it is to keep the irrepressible Lanny under control. The story is told in bits and pieces from the vantage point of a 70’s journalist, Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman), trying to piece together the mysterious death of a groupie named Maureen (Rachel Blanchard), whose nude body is found in the bathtub of the comedy team’s hotel suite. Their reputations are besmirched, but since both have ironclad alibis, neither is charged with the crime. Their partnership, on the other hand, is bitterly dissolved, and they never appear together onstage or in a film again.

Mr. Egoyan, a Canadian-Armenian filmmaker, hit his peak, in my opinion, in 1994 with the hauntingly sensual Exotica, in which Mia Kirshner performed a provocative mock-schoolgirl striptease to exorcize the ghosts of her own abused childhood. Ever since then, Mr. Egoyan’s films have continued to reflect his obsessions with the behavioral twists and turns in the relations between men and women. The problem with Where the Truth Lies is that the female characters of Karen and Maureen are too susceptible to the erotic magnetism generated by the star power of Lanny and Vince. The solution to the “mystery” thereby becomes anticlimactic. Nobody would mistake Vince and Lanny for Martin and Lewis, particularly when the currently fashionable bisexual bombshell hits the fan, but Mr. Egoyan makes sure that we don’t entirely forget the Martin and Lewis parallels with his film by staging much of the action at a charity telethon in which both Vince and Lanny participate.

For all its failings, however, Where the Truth Lies reminds us that the most challenging filmmakers from Canada, like Mr. Egoyan, David Cronenberg and Denys Arcand, are at once so near and yet so far from the ingrained inhibitions of the still mass-oriented Hollywood studios. Also, Mr. Bacon and Mr. Firth put together fragments of their lighter and more angst-ridden moments into compelling characterizations that somehow transcend the infelicities of the project as a whole.

No, to understand what all the fuss was about, you have to watch them working live—I recommend the DVD’s of The Colgate Comedy Hour from the early 50’s. Live, they’re electric, rambunctious, funny and genuinely dangerous in that you’re never sure what’s coming next.

As Mr. Lewis’ memoir of his beloved partner proves, to a great extent they were what they played. Dean Martin was the Cat Who Walked By Himself—there but not there, apparently coasting on charm and a smile, but in reality rigidly controlling what he gave and what other people got. Attempt to draw him closer and he’d ease away. “The day you’re born, you get the pink slip on you,” Martin announced early on. “Outright ownership. You must only share that life with those that you, and only you, choose. We are not brought on this earth as an object of sacrifice.”

Jerry Lewis, on the other hand, was a grabby adolescent in permafrost. Jerry gave lavish gifts, Dean didn’t. Jerry was hot, Dean was cool. Jerry would do anything to be noticed, while Dean gave the impression that he couldn’t care less if you noticed him or not. (Can you imagine Dean writing a book entitled Jerry and Me?) Jerry worshipped Charlie Chaplin, Dean was content with comic books and westerns on TV. “I remember third shows at the Copa where he’d speed up so as not to miss the three a.m. showing of John Wayne in Red River or Stagecoach,” Mr. Lewis writes.

The disconnect in personalities was nearly total—the wonder is that the partnership lasted as long as it did.

Martin’s recessive, slightly mysterious quality explains why he’s experienced something of a renaissance since his death, including memoirs by two of his children, the overdone but emotionally accurate Nick Tosches biography and now this book. Meanwhile, Jerry Lewis is on his way to being the Danny Kaye of his generation—a period curio remembered as much for a general impression of Good Works as for his comedy.

Dean & Me is just about evenly divided between the road up and the road down. The road up was Kismet—they met and started working together mostly by accident—which makes the road down more interesting. As the team took off, as movies and TV and nightclubs all competed for their time, the audiences and the critics were all enchanted by Jerry. So was Jerry. Martin was regarded as nothing more than a competent straight man with a vocal style borrowed from Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo. But his partner knew better.

“Dean’s ad lib had been not just fast but instantaneous,” Mr. Lewis remembers about an early nightclub appearance. “I’d already been in the business long enough to know how incredibly rare that was. Over the next sixty years, I would come to understand it better and better. The vast majority of comedians with good rhythm use beats— small hesitations, often with some comic business or other—to set up their jokes. Dean didn’t use beats …. Never once, in ten years, did he ever get in the way. Never once stepped on a line, spoiled a joke.

“He was, quite simply, impeccable at what he did.”

For a comedian, there can be no greater security than knowing your straight man can keep up, no matter what.

But Jerry never seems to have understood that what Dean most wanted was to be left alone. At one point, Jerry even went to the trouble of surreptitiously learning to play golf, and showed up on the tee to surprise his partner. According to Mr. Lewis, they played even for the round, but Mr. Lewis won a side bet. (Believing this story requires a leap of faith: Dean played around a four handicap and Jerry was only a beginner.) The point, however, is that Jerry was acting more like a clinging woman than a partner. Dean already had one wife—he didn’t need another.

Mr. Lewis is perfectly prepared to admit that he was insufferable. “Was my ego growing? Was I enthralled, enamored, enraptured by all that I was learning about film? Was I knocked out by the unlimited comic possibilities for the Jerry character onscreen?

“Yes, yes, and yes. It all happened silently, the way one week you can see perfectly and the next week you need glasses: I was developing a certain myopia about Dean. And since my partner feared and hated any sort of showdown, he wasn’t calling me on it. Yet.”

But when Dean had had enough, he’d had enough. At 3 p.m. he’d be ready to stop filming, saying “That’s all you’re gonna get from me.” If he came in late, he’d snarl, “Anytime you want to call it quits, let me know.”

“What would I do without you?” asked Jerry.

“Fuck yourself, for starters.”

Clearly, this was a man who wanted a divorce. (In fact, as Mr. Lewis describes it, the relationship was a lot like a marriage without sex, eerily close to Rupert Holmes’ 2003 roman à clef about the team, Where the Truth Lies.)

At the end—July 1956—the two men were Not Speaking, and Dean conspicuously failed to invite Jerry to his birthday party. That’s the way it stayed for 20 years, until Frank Sinatra stage-managed the awkward reunion during the 1976 Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon. It was touching, but it was also too late. Jerry was headed downhill, physically and professionally—and, in a few years, so was Dean, devastated by the death of his son Dean Paul in 1987. There were phone calls, and a single accidental meeting in a Beverly Hills restaurant, but when the partnership failed, it took the intimate friendship with it.

For those of us who run counter to the French enthusiasm for Mr. Lewis, Dean & Me serves as a modest but welcome corrective. He spends a fair amount of time talking about “Me” but more time talking about his partner, the big brother he never had, a man that men wanted to be like and women just wanted.

Co-author James Kaplan keeps the narrative moving smoothly; the book always sounds like Jerry Lewis, but avoids most of the excesses of his personality. Mr. Lewis still has a tendency toward neo-rabbinical pronouncements—“A man that can’t have fun, can’t have love,” he says, apropos of Bing Crosby—and the occasional gaffe: “Henry Fonda never played a murderer in his entire career,” overlooking the not-exactly-obscure Once Upon a Time in the West.

Although Mr. Lewis confesses to egomania, giving the impression all that is in the past, it still slips through, as in the passage quoted above about Martin never getting in the way—as if Martin were the comic equivalent of Carol Merrill, just striking poses while showing off the new Lewis marvel behind Door No. 3.

Martin showed what he could do in Some Came Running (1958), Bells are Ringing (1960), Rio Bravo (1959) and the merciless self-parody of Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), among other movies. Eventually, the pose became reality and he actually did start coasting. But as his old partner knows, there was a great talent locked behind that perpetually smooth, smiling exterior.

Scott Eyman’s Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer (Simon & Schuster) was published in May. He reviews books regularly for The Observer.

I believe, based on a lifetime of consideration, that Frank Sinatra was the greatest interpretive musician this country has ever produced. By that I mean he took the music and words of composers and lyricists, passed them through his own emotions, intellect and life blood, and distributed them to grateful recipients all over the world for 60 years. His singing was, for the most part, virtuosic. It was also intimate, honest and accessible, even to those who spoke no English. His recordings of more than 1,300 songs, collected in a towering stack of albums and a cornucopia of repackagings from dozens of countries as well as the United States, will stand forever as a living archive of excellence unsurpassed in its field and beloved by plumbers and dentists, entrepreneurs and violinists, octogenarians and grandchildren, astronauts and politicians, and inhabitants of tiny huts made of twigs.

Any book called Sinatra: The Life would be well advised, therefore, to follow the music. Without it, there are no girls, gangsters or Presidents, no private jets, bowls of caviar, sprawling mansions or astronomical phone bills. There are no movies to star in, private tables in fabled restaurants, Congressional hearings or stretch limousines; no Gregory Peck, no Dean Martin, no Liz Smith. And, to be sure, no Ava Gardner.

This scurrilous little book (little in substance, not in size-it's hefty) was compiled laboriously by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan and published, in a curious lapse of judgment, by the reputable Knopf. The authors try to persuade the reader that Frank Sinatra lived much of his life on the book's gutter level.

That premise is demonstrably false and invalidates any book purporting to be a legitimate biography of Sinatra, who was first and foremost a musician of rarefied talent. Music, rather than centering the book, laps at its edges. Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan seem to regard this dominant part of Sinatra's life as an inconvenience for them as biographers. What they write is sparse, superficial and often wrong: "[J]azz gave Sinatra his sense of rhythm and his lifelong readiness to improvise," they say. Deconstructing such a dramatically fallacious statement would require paragraphs. The essential facts are that, although jazz enriched Sinatra, he was never a jazz singer and rarely "improvised," as that term is used in jazz. As for rhythm, nothing or nobody gave it to him; it came naturally.

A genuine biography of Frank Sinatra must nourish itself with the history of American popular music. That means-in grossly simplified terms-showing how European drawing-room ballads began to fuse around the turn of the 20th century with African-American slave chants and rhythms. In the hands of a few dozen American composers (Berlin, Gershwin, Kern and Ellington are obvious examples), a new form of music evolved and swept the world.

Then the biographer must show how the young Frank Sinatra, fueled by his talent and tenacity, and helped along by the fact that his birth coincided with that of the new music, learned to render the music in a way unmatched by anyone else, and then kept doing it for six decades, transcending generations and newer musical forms, most notably rock. The efforts made by Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan to fathom and explicate these central elements of the Sinatra phenomenon are, to put it politely, deficient. Without a trenchant analysis of his music, his life story has little context, less meaning and a false importance. Telling the story without sufficient attention to the music leaves a gaping hole at the center of the book.

Tell it they do, however, and their effort is exaggerated and poorly sourced. Did Frank Sinatra know gangsters? Without question. How could he not have? He grew up in the Italian ghetto of Hoboken, N.J., during Prohibition, when bootleggers and loan sharks (his uncles among them) were as ubiquitous as milkmen and newsboys. Did he associate with gangsters as an adult more than the average person? You bet. He worked in nightclubs, many of which were owned by gangsters. Did he hang out with gangsters more than his public-relations representatives would have wished? No doubt. In some perverse way, the cut of their jib, their fuck-you mien, captivated Sinatra.

But there's a formidable gap between that cluster of long-known facts and the authors' central assertion about Sinatra and gangsters: "His business would be entwined with their rackets for fifty years." If that were true and verifiable, Sinatra likely would have been prosecuted and sent to prison. The feds certainly tried. Frank Sinatra was "the most investigated American performer since John Wilkes Booth," in the words of Pete Hamill, a thoughtful Sinatra enthusiast. As for the results of the investigations, the historian Michael O'Brien, in his new biography of John F. Kennedy, determines that "despite Sinatra's associates, there is no evidence that he engaged in criminal acts for the mob."

Thus does the central thesis of Sinatra: The Life collapse.

Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan all but demand an examination of their documentation and verification, so let's oblige. "Notes and Sources" and the index take up nearly a third of the book, 174 pages of tightly packed, small-print citations, which are skillfully designed to appear authentic. With patience and a magnifying glass, however, the reader will discover that much of this material falls short of genuine verification.

The authors interviewed the entertainer Jerry Lewis, who claims that Frank Sinatra was almost "caught" carrying a briefcase containing "three and a half million in fifties" through customs in New York, presumably for the Mafia, presumably in the late 1940's. "Customs opened the briefcase, then-because of a crowd of people pushing and shoving behind Frank-aborted the search and let him go on. 'We would never have heard of him again,' Lewis reflected, had the cash been discovered."

Intriguing-if true. A few questions, please. How did Jerry Lewis acquire this information? Whose money was it? Where was Sinatra coming from, and what was his destination? Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan tell us in the source notes that they interviewed Jerry Lewis, but they don't indicate that either he or they can answer such questions. Nor do they acknowledge that Mr. Lewis, who is 79 years old and has struggled through several serious illnesses and medicinal regimens, may have a faulty memory of events, or rumors of events, that allegedly occurred more than half a century ago. Are there other sources to document Mr. Lewis' story? The authors cite "former policeman and New York Crime Committee investigator" William Gallinaro, who "said he learned of Sinatra's courier role in 1947 from a Cuban police contact." But there's no indication that Mr. Gallinaro had any real evidence, or that he knew anything about the episode Mr. Lewis recounts, even though the reader is encouraged to infer that he did by the juxtaposition of citations. As for the "Cuban police contact," has there ever been such a flimsy appeal to authority? The "contact" simply fades unidentified into the distant mists of 1940's Havana, a milieu that gave new pungency to the word "unreliable." If Jerry Lewis, William Gallinaro or the "Cuban police contact" were reliable witnesses, Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan would have extracted verifying details and used them. Their failure to do so leaves the entire incident in serious doubt, and their inclusion of it in the book violates even minimal standards of evidence and verification.

The book contains many such failures. There's negligible qualitative discrimination between sources: Luigi Barzini's book The Italians, a recognized authority, and the September 1956, edition of Photoplay magazine, an ancestor of today's tabloids, are given equal weight. Then there are the "reports" and "memoranda"-numbering in the hundreds-from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The better journalists I know tell me that such documents often are unreliable. They typically represent one person's observation-typically incomplete, unverified, un-cross-examined and inadmissible as evidence in court. And yet Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan cite them as Holy Writ on the subject of Frank Sinatra.

Another failure of Sinatra: The Life: I believe a biographer is obliged to make every effort to put the reader in the room with the subject-to show (not tell) what he's like to be around, how he behaves, talks, thinks, intuits, schemes and reasons in a variety of situations. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan don't do this job well, either. Instead, they quote what seem like hundreds of people (I lost count) talking about Sinatra, and-because of the dubious sourcing-it's often unclear whether these people know what they're talking about.

A definitive biography of Frank Sinatra is long overdue. Sinatra: The Life, which claims to be definitive, is quite the opposite.

Jonathan Schwartz presents music and commentary on WNYC in New York and XM Satellite nationwide. The paperback edition of his memoir, All in Good Time, will be published next month by Random House.

The world (not including France, of course), is broken down into two distinct camps: those who hate Jerry Lewis, and those who love him. There is no in-between. I've always fallen into the latter, which is why it's a treat to finally see Mr. Lewis receiving his due as a great film artist. (He is about to receive the L.A. Film Critics Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. Will a special Oscar be next?) The recent release of some of his best films on DVD is another reason for Jerry Lewis fans to rejoice, and for those who find his brash brand of humor obnoxious and low-brow to take another look.

Arguably his masterpiece, and certainly his most personal and consistently funny film, The Nutty Professor (co-written by Bill Richmond), was a big hit for Paramount in 1963 (J.F.K. reportedly howled with laughter during a screening), and was the culmination of everything Mr. Lewis had been working toward as "the total filmmaker" since being mentored by the great Frank Tashlin. Tashlin had been one of the most innovative animation directors at Warner Bros. in the 1940's before branching out into feature films and directing some of Bob Hope's funniest films (such as Son of Paleface) and, later, the Martin and Lewis hits Artists and Models and Hollywood or Bust. In Mr. Lewis, he found his Galatea, a malleable human cartoon, and never did the actor seem to be more made of rubber. Mr. Lewis' antics, under Tashlin's direction, became more physical and more distorted than ever, like Daffy Duck come to life. Tashlin's films with Mr. Lewis in the late 50's and early 60's even looked like cartoons, using bright colors, loud, brassy music and outrageous slapstick sight gags.

Mr. Lewis would eventually direct himself, and as examples of fast-paced physical comedy, his first few films were right on the mark. So much so that, in The Bellboy, Mr. Lewis' character dispenses with dialogue altogether, performing in pantomime, a modern-day silent comedian.

The sixth film Mr. Lewis directed, The Nutty Professor, borrows the familiar Jekyll and Hyde theme, updating it to a modern university setting, with Mr. Lewis as the nerdish, clumsy, bucktoothed science professor, Julius Kelp. The over-six-foot-tall Mr. Lewis achieved the effect of portraying Julius as small and weak by casting giant male actors to play against him. Kelp is sick and tired of being bullied by faculty and students alike, and to make matters worse, he finds himself falling in love with blond, pouty co-ed Miss Purdy, played by Stella Stevens.

Julius' first attempt to "get physical" by pumping iron in Vic Tanny's Gym leads to a hilarious, pre-computer animation sight gag that has to be seen to be believed. Having failed at body building, Kelp starts experiments to develop a potion that will transform him into a "he-man." How the results of the experiment are revealed to the audience shows Jerry's great talent as a comic director. Kelp approaches the hip, college hangout, the Purple Pit, in a series of subjective shots, where only his footsteps are heard.We see not the transformedprofessor,butthe shocked, horrified reaction of the people gathered there. The film's twist is that the homely Julius Kelp has changed into the handsome Buddy Love-all the more surprising since Julius was last seen writhing on the floor after drinking his potion, seemingly turning into a buck-fanged monster.

Similar to Spencer Tracy's 1941 portrayal of Mr. Hyde, which employed little makeup and relied on subtle gesture and attitude, Kelp's alter ego Buddy Love is nevertheless a monster. He's a self-absorbed, overly suave, greasy-haired lounge-singer swinger in an electric-blue Sy Devore suit.

For years, it has been commonly assumed that Buddy Love is meant to be a parody of Dean Martin-a theory which, when examined, does not hold much merit. Martin and Lewis had dissolved seven years earlier, and there was no particular reason for Mr. Lewis to harbor any animosity toward Mr. Martin. Both were huge movie and recording stars, as Mr. Lewis had actually recorded a hit album of standards, sung in a Jolsonesque style (he seemed to favor tunes by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, whose "That Old Black Magic" is Buddy Love's trademark tune). Rather, the character of Buddy Love seems to be based on the showbiz types Mr. Lewis had encountered over the years, as well as a caricature of himself. Had Mr. Lewis wanted to lampoon Mr. Martin as Buddy, he could have used his incredible talent as a mimic to employ that unique amalgamation of Dean Martin–speak-South Carolina by way of Steubenville, Ohio-but he didn't.

Some have observed that, eventually, Mr. Lewis himself evolved into Buddy Love, but aside from borrowing the Vitalis, Mr. Lewis was never as narcissistic and mean-spirited as Buddy. Who could imagine Buddy Love hosting a telethon for muscular dystrophy for over 50 years? It's also been rumored that Mr. Lewis had a thing for former playmate Stella Stevens. Miss Purdy was her first major role, and Mr. Lewis did his best to build her up, lovingly filming her in extreme close-ups (and showing her legs as much as possible). He even named her character Stella and used the haunting Victor Young tune "Stella by Starlight" throughout the soundtrack. Miss Purdy struggles with her ambiguous feelings as the personalities of Julius and Buddy overlap, eventually preferring the goodhearted Julius. Alas, Stella Stevens would soon appear in one of Dean Martin's Matt Helm films, much to Mr. Lewis' dismay; in all likelihood, he remained competitive with his erstwhile partner.

The ending sequence of The Nutty Professor is possibly the highlight of the film, showcasing Mr. Lewis at his comic, moviemaking best. As the actors take their bows, the ever-clumsy Jerry/Julius actually trips forward and falls into the camera lens, abruptly ending the film. The DVD edition includes never-before-seen bloopers and outtakes, including a 17-year-old, pre–"This Diamond Ring" Gary Lewis, awkwardly attempting to order a drink in the Purple Pit. There is also audio commentary by Jerry and … none other than Steve Lawrence! Is it possible Mr. Lewis is thinking of teaming up with Mr. Lawrence? Lawrence and Lewis! Where would that leave poor Eydie?

Well, now we know what happens when we plug in our hair dryer and our flat iron at the same time …. Since our calves are still aching from our unfortunate decision to live on the 30th floor , tonight we're plopping our bumsey on the grounds of Rumsey Playfield in Central Park. Champagne-haired alterna-songstress Aimee Mann , whose razor-edged songs inspired director Paul Thomas Anderson to make the movie Magnolia , takes the stage for the season's penultimate Summer Stage concert. Look for lots of balding 42-year-old guys insisting to their tired wives, "Hey, I was into Aimee Mann back when she was in that band, Til Tuesday." Meanwhile the wife is thinking, "That's just swell, buster-why don't you try having a baby?"

[Central Park SummerStage, 6:30 p.m., Central Park, 69th Street and Fifth Avenue entrance, www.summerstage.org.]

Thursday 21st

The naked chef? He's one of the top chefs in New York -maybe in the top three-but we worry that Rocco DiSpirito is squandering his amazing talent with his reality-TV show, The Restaurant . (Shouldn't a chef's only audience be his regular diners , not a bunch of couch potatoes?) The sooner he pulls out of that silly show, loses the floozy groupies (we've lost count … ) and gets back behind the grill, the better, we say! Tonight , another toque-and-TV chef, Emeril Lagasse, slings hash at the International Taste of Tennis benefit for Citymeals-on-Wheels. Celeb aces in attendance include Andre Agassi and Andy Roddick, who's been serving singer-actress Mandy Moore off the court.

[International Taste of Tennis benefit, W Hotel, 541 Lexington Avenue, 7 p.m.]

Friday 22nd

Mostly Mozart is mostly over, so stop by tonight and you can say you did something cultured this summer besides that docent from MoMA. So, while much of Manhattan's striving set is stuck in a sweltering traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway , you can woof it up instead with the rest of the audience for conductor Louis Langrée , soprano Cyndia Sieden and tenor Bruce Ford , who's performing for the first time at the festival tonight. Meanwhile, if you're suffering from the sensation of having nothing to do between now and Labor Day , you ain't alone: Perhaps because of the limpin' economy, the solar chart and a certain pre–Sept. 11 anniversary anxiety, the city is oddly bereft of jazz and pizzazz as summer winds down …. We have three words of advice: Ben and Jerry's. In fact, rather than fight the recent news that 20 percent of New Yorkers are obese , we say let's join 'em , and everyone agree to quit those gym memberships and yoga classes and ge t really, really fat for the next year …. The whole thing will have that manic, kooky, party-like atmosphere that prevailed during the blackout …. Dare to be fat!

[Lincoln Center, Avery Fisher Hall, 65th Street and Broadway, 8 p.m., 212-721-6500.]

Saturday 23rd

Now that most people who live in the East Village do so courtesy of Mummy and Daddy's bank account , the Howl! Festival doesn't quite have the thrill of danger and rebelliont hat Allen Ginsberg would have recognized …. Still, you get to catch glimpses of Steve Buscemi, Lou Reed, members of Sonic Youth and others who haven't sold out …. Tonight as part of the festivus, mantastic drag queen Lady Bunny hop- hop- hops to Tompkins Square Park to host Wigstock . "Hopefully, the blowjobs that I have offered the individual members of the Police Department will enable them to be lenient with the time," the lusty lapin told Special Eight-Day Week correspondent Jake Brooks. Ms. Bunny insisted that Liza Minelli may turn up, but our big-cheese editor says he knows otherwise ….

[Wigstock, Tompkins Square Park band shell, Seventh Street between Avenues A and B, 4:30 p.m., www.howlfestival.com.]

Sunday 24th

Wake up in a shabby-chic share in the Hamptons? Roll your flea-bitten body off that concupiscent Goldman Sachs trainee and lace up for the Steps for Breath 5K Fun Run/Walk. If you're like us, and believe "fun run" -much like "good morning" -is a contradiction in terms, make the check out to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and hit "snooze" …. Later, Nick and Toni's restaurant celebrates its 15th-anniversary party. "They're getting ponies for the kids to ride, and cigars for the adults!" said Steve Haweeli, a publicist whose firm is handling the event. Mr. Haweeli used to be the barkeep at Nick and Toni's. "I'll be pouring drinks. Absolutely!" he said. "Margaritas with egg whites are my specialty. Egg whites give the drink a tremendous natural frost. It takes the bite out of the tequila and the sour out of the lime. You gotta shake it about 20 times. It's almost like a milk shake." Alec Baldwin will be first in line ( burp! )-along with Chevy Chase, Sarah Jessica Parker (who, if you haven't noticed, has worked overtime to make sure the world knows she's super- skinny within minutes of giving birth- three cheers for feminism … ), Steven Speilberg , Billy Joel, Calvin Klein , the Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft posse, and good-time gal Kathleen Turner. "No cocktails for her !" said Mr. Haweeli. "I'll refuse. I won't serve her. I'll turn her away. Get it? Turner away ! Ha!" Once you've had enough, trot over to the Hampton Classic Horse Show , which features over 1,500 horsies and 50,000 horsy boarding-school gals -which automatically activates an orange-level Bill Clinton alert ….

[Steps for Breath, 2 Pond Lane, the Cultural Center of Southampton, Southampton,

9 a.m., 212-639-7975; Nick and Toni's 15th Anniversary, 136 North Main Street, East Hampton, 3 to 8 p.m., 631-324-3550, by

invitation only; 28th Annual Hampton Classic Horse Show 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., show grounds, 240 Snake Hollow Road,

Bridgehampton, 631-537-3177.]

Monday 25th

The U.S. Open opens for bidness today. Pete Sampras sits this one out as Serena Williams puts her knee on ice and watches sister Venus tear up the hard court, battling the likes of Lindsay Davenport and those two Belgian chicks that just don't do it for us. Back here on greener pastures, the Bryant Park Film Festival concludes its series tonight with light summery fare: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey . (What, they couldn't get Peckinpah's Straw Dogs ?) Come for the HBO intro song, during which it's customary for audience members to stand up and dance around like fools.

[U.S. Open, USTA National Tennis Center, Flushing, 11 a.m., 866-OPENTIX; 2001: A Space Odyssey , Bryant Park, Sixth Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets, sunset.]

Tuesday 26th

Touby or not Touby: The Sex and the City "death watch" has begun-the show's final season is dribbling to a close, with HBO having convinced an entire nation that the average New York single woman has the I.Q. of a shoe …. Mediabistro editor Albert Lee and feather-boa-toting muse Laurel Touby have rustled up Sex and the City script writer Aury Wallington to teach a seminar, "Write for TV!" (exclamation point theirs). Ms. Wallington, a plucky 28, gave us some advice. "The biggest mistake people make who want to write for, say, Will and Grace is to sit down and write an episode of Will and Grace , send it off to producers, and expect that in a month it'll be on the air and they'll be living in Hollywood," she said. "It's a common mistake. I did it- I wrote a Simpsons episode when I was in college [at Tufts] and was shocked when it didn't end up on the air. Every single one of my friends has written a Sex and the City script, and I can't read any of them for legal reasons. You can also submit a script to a TV-writing contest. Scriptapalooza comes to mind-that's a big one. Otherwise, you usually can't do anything without an agent. To get an agent, you have to send them a spec script." All clear now, kids?

[Mediabistro.com offices, 494 Broadway, third floor, 7 to 10 p.m., sign up at www.ervsp.com/reply/tvseminar.]

Wednesday 27th

Gwyneth Paltrow, who we're sure is very distressed about her ex-flame Ben's troubles with his gum-snappin' Latina firecracker, has been railing against Bonnie Fuller and blaming tabs like Us Weekly for hounding herself and other celebs with paparazzi. (Hmm, so basically what Ms. Paltrow is saying is that her job is taking over her life and she can't seem to escape the office? Welcome to real life, Gwynnie. Population: Everyone else .) Alas, if you wanna see celebs tonight, your best bet is the tube: Watch 'em get harassed on our latest addiction, E!'s Celebrities Uncensored . Thus far, our favorite uncensored moment is a tie between Andy Dick spitting at the camera and every scene involving Jack Nicholson. Hey, we warned you back in May this wasn't going to be an easy summer ….

[E!, 24, 10 p.m.]

Thursday 28th

Ladies, there are two things you can do today: one, purge your Louis Vuitton Murakami bag-frankly, it looks like Hello Kitty. (In fact, how about not all swooping down and buying "the handbag" every season, ladies, like a bunch of sheep!) Or , if you have a thing for men with nicer hair than you, you could check out Anthrax -not the microscopic organism that once prompted an Observer intern's parents to force her into early retirement rather than risk opening mail, but rather the heavy-metal band , which clangs into Irving Plaza tonight. On a side note, none of the band members actually contracted anthrax. In case you were wondering ….

[Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Place, 8 p.m., 212-307-7171.]

Friday 29th

Eat like a swell for cheap! If you're going down in flames with the economy, and that rich boyfriend/girlfriend never quite materialized over the summer, why not go out with a big burp ! New York Restaurant Week has been extended, so you and your unwashed pals can finely dine for chump change: $20.03 and $30.03 buys you lunch and dinner, respectively, at chow houses like Olives, Tao, Park Avenue Cafe, Tavern on the Green, Artisanal and other eateries. Who knows-you might even end up on TV! (See Aug. 21.)

[www.restaurantweek.com for info.]

Saturday 30th

" I heard Arnold Schwarzenegger is hung like a hamster -they said the steroids are killing him, and that it's the only thing that's small on him," The View 's Joy Behar told Special Eight-Day Week correspondent Michael Mohammed. Tonight, Ms. Behar is doing ha-ha stand-up at the ho-ho-Hamptons' Guild Hall. "You know," she said, "Ann Coulter came on The View and she was wearing a skirt that was around her mid-thighs, and I said to her, 'Well, you really are a Bush girl!' You can print that." Thanks , sister. Me- ow! Meanwhile, if it's your weekend with the kids, bring the wee ones to Times Square for the Big Apple Anime Fest -chockablock with Japanimation and 30-year-old male virgins. "You're gonna see people dressed in these weird, outlandish costumes," said Anna Wang , who's doing publicity for the festival. "There's something called 'The Big Battle,' where people dress up in these monster costumes and battle each other. Like, they just fight." Typical guy stuff.

[Joy Behar, Guild Hall, 158 Main Street, East Hampton, 8 p.m., 631-324-4050; the Big Apple Anime Fest, the Loews State Theater and the Marriott Marquis, Times Square, info at www.bigappleanimefest.com.]

Sunday 31st

Hey, layyyy-deeee! More on fat New York ! As he took medication to battle pulmonary fibrosis, Jerry Lewis became a rolypoly love-pug, and we love him that way! Tonight, you can sit your widening rump on your A.C. (which, face it, is really just a glorified fan) as Mr. Lewis hosts his 37th annual telethon to battle muscular dystrophy …. But first, take in an afternoon in the most over-air-conditioned spot on the planet, the American Museum of Natural History, where you can sample the Chocolate exhibition. The installment oozes on for a few more weeks, but this is the last weekend they're handing out free chocolate by Godiva . If New York men had a brain in their heads, they'd be here cruising chicks instead of smoking Gauloises at Cafe Lebowitz.

[Jerry Lewis M.D.A. Telethon 2003, UPN 9, 9 p.m., www.mdausa.org; American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street, 10 a.m. to 5:45 p.m., 212-769-5100.]

Monday 1st

It's Labor Day, and guess who doesn't have the day off? That's right- the Amazin' Mets! So if you can tolerate the "tomahawk chop" (they're playing Atlanta) , as well as that looong No. 7 train ride (anything that travels that far ought to have a damn stewardess on it), head on out to Shea . Oh, and don't be alarmed when security searches your bag at the front entrance -terrorists won't be bombing the game. The Mets'll do that on their own.

[Shea Stadium, Flushing, 1:10 p.m., 718-507-TIXX.]

Tuesday 2nd

Can't beat the sight of size-two women surreptitiously sizing each other up in the communal dressing room at Showroom Seven, can ya? Today, get markdowns on faux-bohemian overpriced labels like Jiwon Park and Imitation of Christ …. Meanwhile, gamine coeds from Columbia and N.Y.U. canter off to their first classes today, bare tummies spilling out over last summer's jeans, and then hurry back to their dorms and use their Ethernet connections to surf bluefly.com (50 to 90 percent off Prada, Gucci, Christian Dior, etc.) for that perfect "fall statement."

[Showroom Seven Sample Sale, 498 Seventh Avenue, 24th floor, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., 212-643-4810.]

Wednesday 3rd

Signs that summer is over? Dour Henry Kissinger -a politician who always wanted to be a Hollywood action star -drops in on the 92nd Street Y to lecture on "Diplomatic Crises." Still awake? It's $25 for the cheap seats, $50 to sit in the front row (where gadfly columnist Christopher Hitchens will be holding up a mirror, trying to prove that Mr. Kissinger has no reflection). Or stay home and start dreaming of Charlie Brown's Great Pumpkin.

[1395 Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street, 8 p.m., 212-415-5500.]

would come. It was about a half hour into his sold-out motivational speech at

Congregation Rodeph Shalom on West 81st Street, and Mr. Lewis-unaided by notes

or the stricture of any discernible order in the things he talked

about-swiveled his neck to hear the question being shouted out from the third

row at the opposite end of the stage. By the time he was interrupted, he'd

already uttered nine of the evening's 30-odd " wondehful s." A few minutes earlier, Mr. Lewis had made it through

the story of the time he'd rushed to the bedside of a kid with muscular

dystrophy, who, upon his hero's arrival, said, "Jerry, I'm feeling a little

tired. Can I rest now?" Mr. Lewis choked out the words, "Of course,

sweetheart." At this point in the story, the boy closed his eyes and died.

A few in the audience snuffled un-self-consciously.

Then Mr. Lewis was walking to the other end of the stage,

squinting, cupping his hand to his 75-year-old show-business ear, trying to

hear the question that half the auditorium, blessed with better hearing, had

already heard.

" The Day the Clown

Cried ," the man, who appeared to be a shaggy blond about 30, bellowed up at

him from 10 feet away. He was talking, of course, about the unreleased 1972

film that became emblematic of Mr. Lewis' 13-Percodan-a-day downfall years. It

was the last film he would make for more than a decade. In it, Jerry Lewis

played a circus clown in a Nazi concentration camp, entertaining Jewish

prisoners before they were delivered to their execution. That was not a

particularly happy time for Jerry Lewis.

Jerry Lewis straightened up, took a step back and narrowed

his eyes. "Yeah, what about it?" he said.

"I've heard that it might come out," the man called back.

Jerry Lewis took a breath. "Well, let me tell you

something," he said gingerly, "and this is only because sometimes we recognize

an attitude that might be different than people you care about."

"Exactly," the man said.

"Right," Jerry Lewis said, fixing the man with a

heavy-lidded, increasingly lethal stare. There was a moment of silence. "None

of your goddamned business!" he shouted, and stiffly strode back to the safety

of a cheap wooden podium affixed with a sticker from the Learning Annex. He

picked up his can of caffeine-free Coke and took a monster swig, while also

drinking in his first deafening ovation of the evening. A rotund woman wearing

a crown made out of yellow ping-pong balls imprinted with smiley faces cheered.

Jerry Lewis looked out over the audience, smiled, and gave

the crowd of 700 a robust O.K. sign.

In spite of the evening's previous Oprah-isms, it was as

though he wanted to reassure them that Bad Jerry was still in there, but in

check, in control and safely away from the deep end. A good chunk of the

audience-solidly white and middle-aged, sporting a surprising number of

sequined berets and baseball caps-watched him worshipfully.

People say that Jerry Lewis is a changed man. To people of a

certain age who do not remember his early movies, the smoking, stalking Jerry

Lewis of the 70's and 80's M.D.A. telethons is a pretty scary character,

carrying with him the sort of dark psychic impact of an uncle who shows up at

Thanksgiving in a cloud of cologne, handing out $50 bills to all the kids, but

by day's end is yelling at the dog in the backyard, chasing it with a shovel.

Jerry Lewis, being Jerry Lewis, didn't remark on the oddity of being a guy who

admits that, at one point in the 70's, he had the barrel of a gun in his mouth,

and yet is still instructing others in how to talk to their kids, how hugging

heals, how a crank call a day keeps the doctor away. But Desperately Despondent

Jerry, just like now-ancient Monkey-Boy Jerry and Percodan-Jerry, was one of

the Jerrys of yore, before the new, improved old codger. Call him Nearly-Zen

Jerry.

He's certainly changed physically. When he walked out on the

stage in his rose-colored shirt, unbuttoned, double-breasted pinstripe suit and

patent leather shoes, there was no doubt it was him. He still has those gold

aviators, that black hair (though he doesn't appear to sop it with Brylcreem

anymore), and he still walks with the Jerry swagger, a weightiness offset by

the odd rolling of his left hand, with that strangely fey turned-out pinky that

seems, every time he swings his arm, to be trying to escape his body. But he's

heftier, especially compared to the 20-year-old photo that accompanied his Learning

Annex course listing. The weight seems to have settled strangely on the sides

of his face, around his ears, giving him the aspect of a grandfatherly python

mustering the attack mode one last time.

But more than any physical deterioration that arrives with

age, Jerry Lewis has changed mentally. After a heart attack, prostate cancer

and a nasty bout of viral meningitis two years ago, many think that Jerry must

have found his own mug face-to-face with death's, and it scared the bejeesus

out of him. If Jerry Lewis has had Seven Ages in his career-the Dean years; the

Paramount boy-auteurist years; the pill-addled years of financial and spiritual

ruin; the Scorsese-directed resurrection of The

King of Comedy ; his reacceptance as the Tony Bennett of yuks; and finally, The Nutty Professor franchise being

taken over by Eddie Murphy-just where exactly is Jerry Lewis now? Jerry Lewis,

who for years represented one of Hollywood's darkest souls, seems hell-bent on

a redemption that necessitates revisiting his past and cleaning it up, and

recasting himself in his dotage as the kind of guy who thinks there's nothing

more amusing than cleaning up baby shit and building sand castles.

But maybe Jerry Lewis has not really changed all that much.

Maybe just his focus has changed: He used to obsess about being Darryl F.

Zanuck, control freak and autocrat. Now he seems obsessed with being a softer,

more philosophic comedian-pre-Jerry-atric, a kind of Jewish Bill Cosby.

For the new Jerry Lewis, here, apparently, is where the

Learning Annex brand of motivational speaking comes in. The organization's

literature promised that "in this unforgettable evening, you'll have the rare

opportunity to get to know Jerry Lewis the man," a rarity only mildly offset

when Mr. Lewis proudly announced that it was his 646th such speaking

engagement. The literature also promised that Mr. Lewis would be addressing,

among other things, "making the tough decisions" and "learning from success and

difficulty."

But it quickly became apparent that Jerry Lewis was not

doling out any peppy, Tony Robbins–style self-improvement, but rather sweating

through a three-hour lesson on how you too can be a better Jerry Lewis, mixed,

naturally, with a healthy dollop of Jerry-ana. (" Time magazine printed the 10 most recognizable people on the planet

three years ago," he said. "No. 5 was the Pope, and Jerry Lewis tied! And it

was wondehful .")

"I'm just-oh, I'm such a pain in the ass," Jerry Lewis said.

Mr. Lewis was knee-deep in one of several monologues about his 9-year-old

daughter, Danielle, the product of his 1983 marriage to his second wife,

SanDee. Mr. Lewis was extolling the joys of fatherhood and cautioning parents

not to say things to infants like "I wish you were never born." "You get

Jeffrey Dahmer from that little kid!" he exhorted. (Mr. Lewis did mention his

six sons from a previous marriage to Patti Lewis once, but not that the

youngest, Joseph, had sold a Jerry

Dearest –style account of family abuse to the National Enquirer in 1989.)

He had gotten breathy, and his eyes were moist. "I'm always

kissin' her. I took her to New York last month, just she and I-no Mommy," he

said. "We had our date. I said to her, 'You're going to put on white gloves,

cute little black patent-leather shoes, a gorgeous dress, a hat and a cape, and

we're going to walk together in Central Park."

The audience emitted a delighted sigh.

"So we come to New York, check in at the Waldorf," he said,

"and we're walking in the park the next morning, and I can't contain my limbs!

My joints, that should be moving like this as a normal person, they were locked

up-I couldn't move! The ecstasy of having her holding my hand!" Jerry Lewis, in

full revival-tent mode, was grabbing at the imaginary love swelling in his

legs, his arms, looking stricken to the point that it appeared he was in the

midst of yet another heart attack. But he bounced back; the love angina passed.

Even though Mr. Lewis spent a good deal of his lecture time

extolling the virtues of random acts of kindness, including kissing other men

for the hell of it, hugging strangers and just telling people "I love you," he

seemed a bit discomfited, and stood silently for a moment, after a

curly-haired, middle-aged woman in the front row asked if she might lay a

smacker on his lips. "I save those kisses for my daughter and my wife," he

explained, not unkindly. But he proceeded to grow frustrated that he had lost

his place.

"So now I don't know where the hell I am," he said. "Where

was I?" Mr. Lewis discovered where he'd been, then proceeded to amend his

previous statements about loving absolutely everybody, which seemed to mean

that the mad kisser down in front was the kind of loony the crowd might want to

steer clear of. "People in general, on the whole, are terrific," he said, "But

you find one or two who are ill-mannered, that don't particularly care, are

ignorant, and they just will spoil a room of 100 people." The woman in front

appeared so clearly crushed that it seemed she might never, ever be the same

again. "Was it me ?" she could be seen

mouthing to her female companion.

"If I hear about a man who's sick in a hospital," Mr. Lewis

went on, "I swear to God, in under 90 seconds I've changed that man's life.

'Hi, it's Jerry Lewis. I hear you're not feeling well. You O.K.? ….' And the

man's life has changed in a microsecond. In the next few months, all he's going

to do is to tell his friends and the guys at the plant that he got a call."

And there were points when Mr. Lewis' stories strained

credulity. He said that when he comes to New York, just to cut himself up, he

likes to jump on board city buses as they're picking up passengers and, from

the front, yell in his " Hey Laa-aady! "

voice, "I'm a famous Jew! You know me?" and quickly jump off. John F. Kennedy,

he said, had pleaded with him not to

go out on the stump for his 1960 campaign, which elicited a few initial laughs

and seemed, perhaps, to be  leading up

to Mr. Lewis' first self-deprecating moment of the night. But he continued.

"I said, 'Gee, I didn't think that I was going to be that bad, Jack.' He said, 'No, no, no,

you'd be wonderful for me, but you'd not be wonderful for yourself. Come Labor Day and you have to turn to an entire audience

of people for help, you can't have 50 percent of them turning you down because

you went with the Democrat," he said. Several in the crowd nodded.

Anybody who has ever seen the first live telecast of his

1963 ABC variety show, during which Mr. Lewis nearly jumped over his desk to

throttle a producer, might find it even more hard to swallow Mr. Lewis'

mini-anger-management seminar. "My philosophy is," he announced, "if you think

it's easy to get rage, it's a hundred times easier to get … silly !" Mr. Lewis elaborated, apparently

drawing on some personal experience as a retail shopper: "How many times have

you wanted to say to somebody, 'You hold your finger up to me once more and I

will blow your face off with a bazooka?'" The crowd murmured.

"You're not going to be as annoyed with the lazy sales girl

at Kmart if you seek your own personal esteem," he said, "and if you recognize

that you're better than her because you

recognize your value. We should feel

sympathy for her."

Mr. Lewis said that at one point, rather than get angry, he

had 3,000 cards printed with sayings like "I love you anyway" that he planned

to give out to people who had infuriated him in traffic. But then he had

trouble finding the right card: "I couldn't get the card I needed because

they're all over the seat. It never worked! I'm stuck with 3,000 cards."

Jokingly, he suggested that if he couldn't find the

appropriate card, he could always "kill their dog."

See what I meant about the uncle with the $50 bill?

"Is it hot in here?" Mr. Lewis asked the audience. It really

wasn't too bad. "I'm schvitzing." Mr. Lewis pulled at the body of his jacket,

fanning himself, and revealed a bib-shaped sweat ring stretching from his neck

to his belly that could have passed for a gunshot wound. "Good spirits," Jerry

Lewis said, quoting Albert Einstein, "have always encountered violent

opposition from mediocre minds." He repeated the quote like an incantation,

like an epitaph.

"Good … spirits … have … always

… encountered … violent … opposition … from … mediocre … minds!"

"Albert Einstein," he said, "saw the incompetence factor,

the corporate factor, the Ayn Rand factor. You get a bunch of people in a

corner like robots, get 'em to do what you want! You've got industry! You've

got this. You've got that. And all of a sudden they're accusing her of

Communism, and she was just a very great, marvelous, wonderful, talented lady

that knew the human condition to the core and to the very marrow of her bones,

and that people meant something." Was

that Ayn Rand in The Ladies' Man , or

Kathleen Freeman?

Jerry Lewis was tired, you could tell.

Without the aid of notes, he had made a few unwise choices,

like positioning a string of Polack jokes right before reciting his acceptance

speech for his 1977 Nobel Prize nomination. The talk of his aching bones of

love were gone. He was talking about Dean and Frank and Sammy. "Nobody knew

them better than I," he recalled. He told about hoisting little Sammy Davis Jr.

aloft and thanking the NAACP for the award.   And maybe "retard" wasn't

the best word to use.

Jerry Lewis began winding down the clock with questions as

Stephen Schragis, the Learning Annex booker, hoofed around the audience with

the microphone. A man ran up onstage and showed him the smiling Jerry Lewis

cartoon head tattooed on his arm. A woman up front said she'd never speak

harshly to her child again. Mr. Lewis jumped offstage and put his arms around a

tearful, and attractive, single mother. And just as the goodwill and warmth

were beginning to turn the hall into a warm, gooey, Jerry-healing place, a

woman with distressed blond hair in the center aisle got hold of the mike. She

had a thick Russian accent, seemed petrified, and spoke with difficulty.

"I cannot believe I am talking to you now," she exclaimed.

Try as she might, she couldn't quite get all the elements of her story-a

sister, a kid with cerebral palsy and a trip from Russia 22 years ago-together

coherently. "I cannot believe I am talking

to you," was all she could get out.

" O.K. !" Mr. Lewis

said.

She tried again, and couldn't manage to make sense.

"Lady," Jerry Lewis said, in the voice. She pressed on. " Laa-aady! Laa-aady! " he was shrieking, motioning for the Learning Annex's Mr.

Schragis to take away the mike. There was a smattering of applause, but the

woman sat down, looking like she'd just been sucker-punched.

Jerry Lewis told the audience to return to their seats so he

could finish up. They did. He finished 10 minutes ahead of schedule.

The people over at Comedy Central have something excellent lined up and ready to take over the comedy waves, which is a lucky thing because the last funny sketch show, The Kids in the Hall , is 10 years old, not to mention Canadian. The new hot property, the Upright Citizens Brigade , follows South Park , but what it really does is kick its ass. It's the typical sketch-comedy spiel, but the skits relate to each other (the same way the three plots on Seinfeld do), and they go easy on caricatures. No fat ladies from the South. No fast-talking Hispanics. Sometimes you can't even tell where the character's from, like Tim Conway's Mr. Tudball in the Carol Burnett Show .…

Matt Besser, Matt Walsh, Amy Poehler and Ian Roberts moved to New York from Chicago three years ago to do a pilot for Fox which never got made. They stuck around, started performing live and now regularly have to turn people away from Sunday-night improv performances at Solo Arts Group, 36 West 17th Street. But HBO's got egg on its face. Why? This show is brilliant! This show is the Funniest Thing on Television! NYTV spoke to Matt Besser and Amy Poehler. We asked, How do you work if you're not feeling funny?…

Matt: "I get high and drunk so I wake up and feel funny again."…

And, What's the best thing about being a comedian?…

Matt: "It feeds my ego, and I don't know, but I'd say a lot of comedians develop their skills as a defense mechanism or as a way to be heard among your peers. You can't get beyond the feeling of getting a bunch of laughs."…

Getting … a … bunch of laughs … and … How soon will you sell out for movies?…

Matt: "I would like to stay together in the same way that the Wu Tang Clan stays together, or Monty Python. We plan to have five to seven seasons together."…

Five … to … seven. O.K. What if a network tries to buy you? …

Matt: "I hate money; we're with Comedy Central for at least three years."…

Amy? Do you feel like there are enough lady comedians? …

Amy: "I don't think comedy should be equal opportunity. I know tons of hilarious women. There was a long time when sketch groups didn't have women, but I think that's slowly changing."…

I missed that. Did you say it should or shouldn't be equal opportunity? …

Amy: "The first time I ever got people to laugh at me, it was such a tremendous feeling. I was like, Ah, I'd like to have that feeling again. And when you're in a group, you share that feeling."…

Oh! How is UCB different than your average sketch troupe? …

Amy: "We're not into parody. Our comedy is very premise-based and character-based. Our ideas may be crazy, but we play them as realistic. I think audiences appreciate when you don't have to scream. I hope that we would always overestimate our audience's intelligence." [Comedy Central, 45, 10:30 P.M.]

Thursday, Aug. 20

Unlike his predecessor, Eugene Maleska (who died in 1993 when he was 76), Will Shortz thinks the New York Times crossword puzzle should reflect everything in life. "Television is a big part of modern life," he said. "It should be covered in the crossword." When Mr. Shortz, who sold his first puzzle at 14 and received a degree in enigmatology (read: games) from the University of Indiana, took over the Times crossword, he broadened the subjects and added popular culture, which is why the Simpsons keep showing up as clues.…

"Just about everyone on The Simpsons is a crossword-friendly name," said Mr. Shortz. "Lisa, Homer, Bart, Marge, Apu. Some are very valuable. They just have good names for crosswords. We just love those short names, full of vowels. It doesn't matter what order as long as there are a lot of vowels. Especially ones that end and begin in vowels. The English language is short on words that start and end in vowels." Are there other crossword-friendly shows? "Star Trek and Deep Space Nine ," said Mr. Shortz. There's Odo the Changeling on Deep Space Nine , which would normally be too obscure; Deanna Troy the counselor on Next Generation ; and Sulu and Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek . All the names on Cheers were good: Ted, Sam Malone, Diane, Carla. It makes me wonder, when they pick the names for the characters, do they purposefully choose names because they know they will appear in crosswords?…

"From classic TV there is Ness from the Untouchables .' At least half the time you'll see 'Loch ____ monster,' sometimes you'll see 'Robert Stack role,' or 'Kevin Costner role.' I try to vary it as much as I can."…

Do you watch a lot of TV? "I watched every Seinfeld ; I don't know what I'm going to do in the fall." Upcoming crossword gimme: The Simpsons ' Ms. Krabappel equals Edna. Tonight on Seinfeld : Elaine longs for a 212 area code. [WNBC, 4, 9 P.M.]

Friday, Aug. 21

Chris Rock makes TV history: His talk show gets brought back for a third season, which means he's outlasted a trio of African-American talk-show hosts (Magic, Keenan, Vibe) who were all canceled after two seasons or less. Tonight, Mr. Rock takes a detour through the low road (Johnnie Cochran) but salvages the show with good jokes and musical guest, British trip-hopper Tricky. (Martin Lawrence, of The Martin Show , would have made a fine talk-show host, too, but after he was found naked and waving a gun in the middle of a freeway, his chances for a big network deal–if not elective office–were somewhat diminished.) [HBO, 28, 11:30 P.M.]

Saturday, Aug. 22

Five years ago next week, David Letterman brought The Late Show to CBS. Now, significantly, the Tiffany network meets Fartman (now there's the name of a talk show) in the long-awaited premiere of its competitor to Saturday Night Live , The Howard Stern Radio Show . [WCBS, 2, 11:30 P.M.]

Sunday, Aug. 23

% This season's brainchild from Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner ( The Cosby Show, Roseanne ), Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner ( Third Rock From the Sun ) is a retro-hip sitcom called That 70's Show . Oh, boy … They said this would be one of the new season's finest–but it turns out this lifeless half-hour feels like a conspiracy to bore us to death. Just like the 70's! NYTV prediction for the season's finest? Friends . Ladies and gentlemen …This is their year. [WNYW, 5, 8:30 P.M.]

Monday, Aug. 24

NYTV's correspondent Terry Golway reports that CBS's Before Your Eyes special, Don't Take My Daddy , probably should have been called "Don't Take My Husband," for the most sympathetic characters are three American women married to Irish immigrants with a past. In their younger days, Gabriel Megahey, Matt Morrison and Noel Gaynor were active and unapologetic members of the Irish Republican Army. They are now settled in America (Gabriel and Patricia Megahey live in the Bronx) with young families, coaching soccer, celebrating birthdays, attending to the kind of chores you don't associate with hardened terrorists.…

The U.S. Government, however, has not been impressed with these scenes of domestic bliss. The three former I.R.A. men have been fighting Washington's attempts to deport them back to Northern Ireland, where they would face an uncertain fate. For the last three years, their wives have attended rallies, met politicians, testified before Congress to keep their husbands in America. In producer-writer Mary Murphy's splendid piece, CBS Reports brings this very human and controversial story to a wider (and perhaps not as sympathetic) audience. Host Roma Downey, star of Touched by an Angel , was born and reared in Northern Ireland. She poses the dilemma: How you view the plight of these men and their families depends on how you view their past. Mr. Gaynor was a lookout during an I.R.A. ambush that killed a police officer nearly two decades ago; Mr. Morrison tried unsuccessfully to shoot a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary; Mr. Megahey, was caught in the early 1980's in an F.B.I. sting in New York, trying to buy surface-to-air missiles for shipment to the I.R.A. (The program includes secret footage of Mr. Megahey in the St. Regis Hotel, offering his price for the missiles.) Like the others, he served his time and settled down, and now speaks on behalf of the peace accord in Northern Ireland.…

Congress cracked down on immigrants and aliens with terrorist pasts after the Oklahoma City bombing. That left Mr. Morrison, Mr. Megahey and Mr. Gaynor vulnerable to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. For two and a half years, the filmmakers watched them as they fought their return. Thanks to the determination of their wives, the men eventually got good news when the I.R.A. put aside its weapons–although the U.S. Government has suspended, not ended, its deportation proceedings.…

In the documentary's final sequence, Mr. Megahey says his life in the Bronx could come to an end if another bomb were to go off in Northern Ireland. [WCBS, 2, 10 P.M.]

Tuesday, Aug. 25

If Christina Ricci made a movie today called That Darn Cat (1997), it would be rated NC-17. (But Disney could make a PG-13 version of The Opposite of Sex with Dean Jones.) [Disney Channel, 33, 8 P.M.]

Peter Bogdanovich 's Movie of the Week

Orson Welles said that high among the funniest things he'd ever seen was the team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis when they performed in nightclubs, which is how the act first became popular between 1945 and 1949, when they played in their first movie. "You have no idea how funny they were!" Orson said. "You'd pee your pants." Jerry and Dean–in terms of the brains behind the act, that would have been the billing–broke up the places, like New York's Copacabana, where they were a sellout smash every time they were there. When Martin tried to sing, Lewis disrupted, erupted, they fought, did falls, ran into the audience, took customers' steaks, cut men's ties, and the people screamed and couldn't get enough. Savvy, sexy, both agile, young, attractive and 6 feet tall: Dean the witty, crooner-mocking singer, Jerry the most savagely belly-laugh-funny comedian of the last 50 years.

Of course, all those live performances–later, their stage appearances at the old Paramount became legendary–are only there in the memories of those who were lucky enough to have seen them. Second best are those absolutely live, no-tape-ahead television shows Martin and Lewis did between 1949 and their breakup in 1955. Recently I saw a bunch of their old Colgate Comedy Hour s, and many of them were still fall-down-on-the-floor hilarious. Third best are their movies, two supporting-role appearances, and 14 starring-role musical comedies that were way up there among the biggest money-makers of the 50's. There are fun moments in most of them, but only two hold together as movies, both directed by Frank Tashlin. Their best: 1955's Artists and Models [Monday, Aug. 24, American Movie Classics, 54, 10 A.M.] and their last, 1956's Hollywood or Bust [Tuesday, Aug. 25, AMC, 54, noon] .

Tashlin–a cartoonist, cartoon-director at Warner Brothers, successful comedy screenwriter, French New Wave cult director (one of Jean-Luc Godard's favorites)–was the perfect filmmaker for Martin and Lewis, exploiting their often cartoonish, musical-comedy personalities in a satirical context, first with kid's horror comic books as the butt of it, then with Hollywood fans, short for fanatics. Artists and Models is especially cutting and still as relevant in its garish look at the world of bloody children's-horror comics. Tashlin's colors were often outrageous, but that was the point: It was like an only slightly exaggerated mirror image of the audience's taste. (Tashlin would eventually direct six of Lewis' most successful solo pictures, and encouraged the comedian's own directing career; Jerry always called him "my teacher.")

Also, Tashlin was the first to notice what he used to call Dean Martin's "Cary Grantish abilities" and created numbers around him that were extremely flattering, and which Martin pulls off awfully well. He gave Jerry formidable female competition, too, in a young dancer-singer from New York named Shirley MacLaine in only her second movie and first success; in one amazing musical number on a flight of stairs, she and Lewis try to outdo each other to the death. Dean's vis-à-vis is an overtly Vegas-glamorous Dorothy Malone. The boys have a charming sentimental number together, "Pretend," and there's a rousing finale at the Artists and Models ball. You can tell that one of Tashlin's favorite films was Howard Hawks' gaudy musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , made just two years before.

On the entire shoot of Hollywood or Bust , Tashlin would tell me, Lewis and Martin did not speak to each other except in their scenes together. "It was a bitch," Tashlin said. You can't really tell in the movie, though obviously it doesn't have the freshness of the earlier film. One of Tashlin's other favorite directors was Ernst Lubitsch, and there's a likable musical sequence, "A Day in the Country," that is an homage to Lubitsch's famous "Beyond the Blue Horizon" romantic-satiric sequence in Monte Carlo (1930), where all the farmers and country people wave to the passing train; here, it's all Vegas showgirls dressed in scanty rural outfits, waving to a passing convertible. Tashlin wanted to preface the sequence with a shot of the car going by a county sign that read, "You Are Now Entering Lubitsch," but the studio took that out. I first saw these movies in my mid-teens, of course, when I was an abject fan of Martin and Lewis, so I do admit to nostalgic attachments.