photography by Georgia Dorge
60 Watt Kid performing at Women of Crenshaw on July 22, 2009.

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Cutting the set much too short, they wrapped up with their Willy Alexander-esque “American Standard,” an against-type rockabilly tune, wherein Litrow meandered through the audience shouting things at people. They plunked the last few echoey notes, and sadly, the hip-hop CD started its thing once more. As the audience made its way to the lawn, I caught one young man with a Misfits tattoo on his neck tell his girlfriend “These guys were siiiiick!”

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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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