Stupid, long running joke

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Even though they were friends in the 1950's, it occured to me today that on every telethon show of his in the 70's, Jerry Lewis (as well as other dubious comedians) would tell the incredibly, stupid one-liner: "Newsflash, they just found Jimmy Hoffa---inside Orson Welles!". An absolutely, unfunny joke about Welles size. How ironic, that years later, because of chronic back pain, Lewis started taking the steroid, Prednisone, which is known to BLOAT one's body into massive proportions, making Jerry quite big and odd-looking. Would it be in bad taste for a comedian today to say?: "They just found Orson Welles' career---inside Jerry Lewis". (No offense to the JL fans out there)

GA

[Jeff Wilson]

Feel no sympathy for Jerry; he used the opportunity to state "I'm like Orson Welles in heat" or something like that. Classy guy. I'm just glad he only crawls out from under his rock once a year...

[Noel Shane]

That has indeed been a stock line since the Prednisone pumped him up -- that, and that he looks like "a Jewish sumo wrestler." It's interesting how pervasive the Welles image is all these years later. Marlon Brando has probably displaced him in terms of the nightly monologues, but the weight association persists with Welles. One of the ironies with Lewis, made apparent during recent world events, is that he is himself victim to this kind of juvenile American narrowmindedness. Just do a Google search on "Lewis" and "French" sometime and see how many editorials from the last year you turn up.

It's likewise baffling, in reading or watching interviews, how many of the old-guard Hollywood directors and insiders apparently believed and perpetuated the standard version of the story on Welles' career. 'He made one or two good pictures and then he went bad.' You come across it quite a bit.

Incidentally, though both had little to do with its awfulness, Welles and Lewis share credits on one of the worst movies ever devised, SLAPSTICK (OF ANOTHER KIND) -- a would-be adaption of the Kurt Vonnegut novel, released in 1984. Stay away. Stay far, far away.