It must have been absolutely strange, thirty years after releasing a mostly-ignored record on Rough Trade, to find themselves playing a packed basement in Los Angeles for an audience made up mostly of people who weren’t even around then. But here they were, with personalities beaming! Ana carried herself like a wisened journeywoman, arching over her guitar and occasionally staring coldly into the crowd, her wrinkled face looking like it came off the cover of a Johnny Cash record. Gina, on the other hand, was all ebullient joy as she buzzed through not only the set but between-song banter about her Ebay obsession and other cute idosyncracies.

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By three the next afternoon, I was slumped exhausted in the back row of the Silent Movie Theater, as the last night of L.A.’s first-ever Jerry Lewis retrospective flickered to giddy life. The three hours of clips shown before the main feature were like a curated tour through a vast and quirky comic universe roughly the scope of those of James Joyce or Flann O’Brien, and (in America at least), about as little understood. The last living heir to the great line of Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel, Lewis remains problematic to American critics and I think I know why.

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