Hardly Working (1980)

 

Director: Jerry Lewis

Screenplay: Jerry Lewis and Michael Janover

Cast: Jerry Lewis as Bo Hooper; Susan Oliver as Claire Trent; Roger C. Carmel as Robert Trent; Deanna Lund as Millie; Harold J. Stone as Frank Loucazi; Steve Franken as Steve Torres; Buddy Lester as Claude Reed; Leonard Stone as Ted Mitchell

Ephemeral Waves

 

Don't call me a clown. I'm not a clown. Not anymore.

For full context, this film was first seen with very little knowledge of Jerry Lewis. Lewis, an American comic who first began in popularity as a duo with actor/singer Dean Martin, developed a career as a filmmaker as well as onscreen in his own films, eventually developing the clichéd reputation that the French were the ones who liked his films. That is not that exaggerated, as even Jean-Luc Godard (and the legendary French film magazine Cahier du Cinema he wrote for) liked his films and took inspiration. Lewis was also an actual innovator in that, to be able to look at his own work to direct, he helped pioneer the video assist technology.  The context for the following film, excluding seeing The Nutty Professor (1963), could be lost for me, but a lot can be immediately gathered however if you know the historical context.

Namely - Hardly Working is the first film Lewis directed after a seven year absence from behind the film camera. The last film he helmed beforehand is the one, ironically, which has become one of his most well known alongside The Nutty Professor (likely due to the 1996 remake) and The King of Comedy (1982) (a Martin Scorsese film he has a prominent role in), being The Day The Clown Cried (1972). Clown was never released, which adds a perverse irony to it being one of his most well known films as said movie is one few have ever seen. It became a source of speculation of a drama-comedy about a clown sent to a Nazi concentration camp, where his attempt to tackle the Holocaust would have been a challenge, alongside additional issues like the funding disappearing and forcing him to use his own money. It was never seen, and has had up to June 2024 (7 years after Lewis' passing in 2017) a rule stating that the film could never been seen in public form in whatever form actually exists, even in mind to that only being accessible through the Library of Congress¹. With only second hand testimony from comedian/actor Harry Shearer who saw the film as what most think of the film, namely a complete and utterly tasteless disaster², it has become an albatross that many of us (myself also a guilty member) are morbidly curious of even if we were all to go over to the Library of Congress to see. I admit to at least wanting to learn of Jerry Lewis as more than that film, as a filmmaker and actor, even his stint with Dean Martin or his reputation in humanitarian work, as a result of seeing something like Hardly Working. Many however will probably think of him only for The Day The Clown Cried if not The King of Comedy, someone else's work after the clown film.

Whatever the truth behind this infamous crypto-cinematic entity, whose existence and mystery have likely subsumed Lewis' long career in many eyes rather than his own successes, Hardly Working is Jerry Lewis trying to pick himself up after that incident to make a new comedy. It is also a film of a man entirely alien to the new world around him, even if Hardly Working was more financially successful than Charlie Chaplin's A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), another film of an acclaimed older comedian lost out of time back the late sixties. Fraught with its own financial issues, Hardly Working's aspirations to even have a sequel called Hardly Working Attacks Star Wars announced in 1979 were kicked in the teeth by budget problems and a protracted completion³, only to get a release in Europe in 1980 and only in Lewis' homeland in 1981 through 20th Century Fox³. This was neither the last Lewis made, but taking a year or two to be gestating, it feels like an alien entity despite Lewis having done so well as an auteur to direct a string of films through the sixties beforehand. It feels funereal, or at least to throw back to his own past as a real man behind the character, with an opening montage of hits and gags from older films as set up for this new story of Lewis himself as the icon and his new character. It then introduces Lewis faintly veiled as said new character, as Bo Hooper, a professional clown whose circus has had to shut down leaving him jobless.

Bo is cursed to be a comedy character, a natural klutz in a world where everything will fall off a shelf, petrol pump cables are too short and mailboxes will fall over to spite him. He himself is a miscreant, given the chance to live with his sister (much to her disapproving husband) until he can get on his feet again. The film, in truth, is not quite funny enough to be good but is strangely compelling to the point it is still a good film in spite of itself. This is a rare case of a film that I come to pity, and said pity comes (with moments of a great craftsman's skill) to appreciate as with virtue. The first act, where he blunders through a series of jobs, is a mixed bag entirely. On one hand, you see the complete skill of a man who will even with a low budget here use it for perfection, unlike comedies I grew with during the 2000s and 2010s where the visual form was rudimentary as a concern in Hollywood films. One gag about Bo's ill fated work at a glass factory does not even show the disaster of these two meeting, only the aftermath, the noise and him being told to leave with the smash cut in editing to the joke perfect. As someone who also struggled through countless job interviews in my twenties, let alone actual jobs, this segment does ring true in its bitter sense of humour.

This however also has Lewis, taking a job in a Japanese restaurant, do yellowface, which even in the late seventies is a tasteless thing to have, worse as this is returned to in the end credits and the original American poster. Yet it is telling, if indefensible even in this context, Bo's character having decided to act like this in his new work, with fake buck teeth and even producing a fan for Asiatic mist effects, ends up offending his white clientele so much they proceed to beat the shit out of him off camera. Again, the scene should not be here, a nadir, yet apt for Hardly Working's curious and disquieting themes, even the film itself is self critical of a joke from a decade or so before, when Mickey Rooney could get away from a Japanese stereotype in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and punishes the lead for playing this as a joke as part of the final punch line for the sequence.

Even once you get to the core of the narrative, Bo's attempts to succeed in the postal service, the film is funny at points but undercuts itself. Part of it is obvious, a film with the tone of humour in this era wilting, but as much of it is that it is far more compelling as a melancholic tale of a man who simply cannot adjust to the world around him than if it was a comedy gem. Not only is Bo struggles to be someone within this world, but for all the moments of colour, the world's starkness (by accident of a low budget and the production being shot in Florida) alienates even Jerry Lewis, the man behind the character of his past now as a middle aged man, further. Even if the issue of Hardly Working being difficult to see has posed a barrier, likely to be seen by many through a VHS rip haze, the world of palm trees and stark suburbia makes Bo even more of a miscreant. The narrative trajectory, a mild pleasant one about him trying to win over his post office boss, to keep the job, and having accidentally developed a romance with said boss' daughter, which is felt the same from her side, is subdued and antiquated, feeling of a sixties film but now trapped in a time period and production aesthetic a long way from that idealised past.

Adding to this is that, in this world, strange and surreal things happen for punch lines which gain power from the starkness, a world which is utterly at odds with Lewis' act let alone his character, like giant menus being handed out in a restaurant or that answering machine voices can not only talk back but can be strangled if you twirl the phone cord at your end. Even when he predates Adam Sandler by acting as a female character interacting with himself, a heavy set caricature with a curious European accent, it is disquieting rather than a cheap joke, an abrupt tangent that disquiets. Even Lewis' own physical comedy, such as a famous trick of sticking a glass of water between his lips and suspending it in his mouth, feels not childish but a goonish innocence at odds to the subdued world the film is set in and made in real life within.

Truthfully, not in terms of a wider Lewis canon but by itself, Hardly Working's title is tragically apt for itself, but it also as a result becomes a fascinating piece to stab at as most comedies do not suddenly force one to feel melancholia this way. Most comedy for me, especially in the "modern day" (i.e. not from 1980, when I was not even born), was never interest personally as a genre, whilst a film like this many would not like if far more compelling. Made originally in the late seventies, having Bo imagine himself as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (1977), shimming on a dance floor, was a topical joke back when that film was a success and disco was still alive. In context, when the illusion of Bo as the white suited lothario and centre of attention is deflated, and the reality is a middle aged putz shimmying by himself, told to quietly leave, the joke has a greater sense of sad sack humour.

So much is this tone there, radiating the picture of someone out of step for all the moments which are legitimately funny, that it means that I do not feel it requires a spoiler warning to tell how the film ends. Eventually, in a quiet presentation rather than a climatic happy conclusion built up to, Bo becomes good at his job. Barring annoying his boss by being obsessed with his Dunkin Doughnuts, and the tension of dating his divorced daughter, Bo succeeds but it was almost abrupt for myself, baffled by the creative decision by Lewis, when Bo decides to burn his bridges and reject his success by becoming the clown again, mass of rabbits coming out of the post van to a confused helicopter reporter and police. In hindsight, the point is obvious, above spoiler warnings, that suddenly the clown realises after gaining normalcy and acceptance it means not being himself, rejecting it, and driving off into the sunset a better man. Hardly Working is an awkward film, difficult at times of dated jokes, one really offensive one that was never funny, and at times too much uncomfortably real melancholia, where Bo's comments like “There is no place for clowns in this world[...]” really feel too close to Lewis himself being an odd man out in a time. Post New Hollywood and into the blockbuster era of the eighties, even if this film did well in the day it feels a relic from an alternative era of that time, a resulting mess that is still a compelling result, far worthier to exist than a generic slapstick comedy in the flawed humanity that exists within it.

 

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1) As talked of HERE.

2) The original Spy magazine article which deals with the film and includes his testimony can be found HERE.

3) As referred to in the film's history HERE.