Cracking Up started out as Smorgasbord which is actually the more fitting title. The movie is a collection of skits, thinly held together as flashbacks and stories in the life of psychiatric patient Warren Nefron, played by Lewis who, naturally, plays several other parts as well. As such, it's a lot easier to simply talk about the best skits rather than attempt a plot synopsis as it would be the rough equivalent of providing a plot synopsis to an episode of The Carol Burnett Show.
The opening credit sequence alone provides one of Lewis' best physical comedy bits ever, as he walks, or tries to, into a doctor's office so polished, so shiny, so utterly and completely waxed, that even the chairs are impossible to sit on without promptly sliding off. The always reliable Herb Edelman plays the psychiatrist and gets the most of his scenes with Jerry by simply giving sardonic looks to the camera.
There's the restaurant scene where Jerry plays straight man to Zane Buzby as a waitress who not only lists every possible menu option after every question (every type of drink, salad, salad dressing, steak, steak temperature, etc) but does so in a voice so grating that Lewis eventually decides leaving would be a better idea than eating. That is, until he arrives outside and Buzby is there again, this time as the valet.
Then there's the scene with Foster Brooks playing the drunken pilot of an airplane so cheaply made it's run by men turning the propellers with oars. A moment now to reflect upon Foster Brooks, probably the most famous performer of a drunk routine in history. No doubt a "drunk routine" is crude and offensive on many levels but Brooks truly mastered that crudity with a perfection that no one has ever equaled. It's a brief part but Lewis let's Brooks take the whole scene (Lewis was a lot more generous than most people give him credit for) and, honestly, it may be the funniest moment in the whole movie.
Cracking Up isn't sophisticated comedy and it isn't a masterful comedic character study like The Nutty Professor and Lewis knew that. He wasn't looking to reinvent himself, just make a movie that audiences would enjoy and find funny. The problem with that ended up being a distribution deal that went so sour, audiences didn't get a chance to see it at all.
The film completed filming in 1982 but before Lewis could do all the important post-production work, he had to undergo a triple bypass heart operation. Once he recovered, and finished up the work on Cracking Up, still under its original title, Smorgasbord, he managed to get a limited release in a few European countries, including France, where the release was so limited that only a few theaters in the entire country ran it and only for a short time. In the United States, Warner Brothers, not confident the time was still right for this kind of thing (Airplane 2 had just tanked with the critics and the box office and Lewis' Hardly Working was now three years old), pulled the plug on a theatrical release, retitled it, and sent it straight to cable and video. A couple of years later, it received a few showings at revival houses and festivals and then disappeared completely until Warners made it available in 2010 as a part of its DVD on demand program.
Jerry Lewis never directed another feature and his experience with the distribution of and renaming of Cracking Up leaves little question as to why. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy making the movie, he did. He got to work with old friends, like Milton Berle and Sammy Davis, Jr, both showing up in small bits, and do a classic skit comedy writ large. But the hassles of dealing with studio distribution was no longer worth it. He would continue to work as a performer on stage, television, and film but left the director's chair for good. It's a shame, too. He still had a lot of ideas, a lot of energy, and more than enough talent. Cracking Up doesn't match his best work but as it turns out, it's a pretty good swan song after all.
By Greg Ferrara
