The black-and-white glossy taken by a club photographer at Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s opening night at the Copacabana, in April of 1948, shows a sweaty, ecstatic Lewis, mouth wide open, tux tie undone, his right arm thrown around his partner’s shoulder. His left arm is around Frank Sinatra, who had never met Martin and Lewis before that night and had just told the Copacabana audience that the comedy team was headed straight for the top. A few details jump out of the dark background: Lewis’s tarnished-looking wedding band, and the brilliant pinkie ring on his right hand; his as yet unfixed teeth; Sinatra’s receding hairline; the remote expression on Dean Martin’s face, and his unfocussed eyes, blearily gazing into some middle distance.

Lewis saw Martin for the first time in the spring of 1946, at a New York night club called the Havana-Madrid. Martin, né Dino Crocetti, a former welterweight boxer and blackjack dealer from Steubenville, Ohio, was the headliner—a handsome, not especially ambitious crooner, talented enough to have forged a modestly successful night-club career. The club’s owner, Angel Lopez, had also booked Lewis as a lip-synching act. Lewis, born Jerome Levitch, in Newark, was the only child of show-business parents. He was twenty years old, six feet tall, a hundred and twenty-seven pounds, and possessed of a maniacal energy. “There was this dance team—they did some kind of Afro-Cuban dance, with a pot of fire on the ground,” the comedian Alan King, who also worked the Havana-Madrid that week, told me recently. “And Jerry would come out and interrupt Dean while he was performing. He came out and sat over that pot of fire so his crotch was burning.” Martin laughed, and Lewis was smitten. Martin had an effortless kind of glamour; he also had a seductive remoteness. Onstage and off, he developed the Sicilian air of menefreghismo—literally, not giving a fuck—to a fine degree.

Some months later, Lewis was doing his act at a club in Atlantic City, on a bill with a singer, when the singer fell ill. He persuaded the club’s manager to call Martin, promising that the two could strike some comic sparks. In the dressing room, Lewis conceived the act that would sustain them for ten years. He called it “The Playboy and the Putz”: Martin would come across as a smooth, singing Casanova, and Lewis, dressed in an ill-fitting busboy’s suit, would heckle him from the audience

Lewis was like a chimp on Benzedrine, running across tabletops, flinging customers’ steaks, snipping neckties with scissors, all the while yowling gibes in the voice of an arrested adolescent. Martin was utterly unperturbed, gazing at the crazed Lewis with the fond indulgence of an understanding older brother. The sparse audience in the two-hundred-and-fifty-seat 500 Club wouldn’t let the team get off the stage that night. By the end of the week, there were lines around the block for the 4 A.M. show.

When the act reached the Copacabana, two years later, it had grown more assured—and less inhibited. The Copa was High Church show biz, but Lewis treated the venue, and the clientele, with even less respect than he had given the patrons of the 500 Club. “I have been in the business fifty-five years,” Alan King recalled, “and I have never to this day seen an act get more laughs than Martin and Lewis. They didn’t get laughs—it was pandemonium.” It was also, as Orson Welles once said to the movie director and writer Peter Bogdanovich, the only moment in their career when they were chic; it was all downhill with the tastemakers after that. When the team appeared on a 1952 telethon hosted by Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Lewis simply hijacked the show with his unscripted antics, so unnerving Crosby (who was apparently terrified that Lewis would dislodge his toupee) that he walked off the stage and wouldn’t come back.

Martin and Lewis’s anarchic routines on the “Colgate Comedy Hour” defined the possibilities of early television. Lewis’s TV signature lines (yowled in his Kid voice)—“I like it, I like it,” “La-a-a-dy!,” and “Don’t lick it!” (said of a lollipop)—became national catchphrases. It is difficult today to imagine the power and the precise chemistry that Martin and Lewis had together—and how ready postwar America was for the thrilling chaos of this particular act.

Lewis had a genius for physical comedy, and at first his excesses seemed fresh and subversive; but there was something disturbing about his relentless energy, and his ego. In later years, on his movie sets, he might chase a key grip and tickle him, stick cigarettes in his own nostrils for a laugh, blow a take on purpose. A cadre of gofers and yes-men danced constant attendance. Every object on his shoots, down to a sixty-foot boom crane of Lewis’s invention (known as Jerry’s Toy), was emblazoned with his trademark laughing-boy caricature, like the crest of the Sun King. “There’s a certain kind of show-biz ego that goes beyond the regular kind,” says Bogdanovich, who became friends with Lewis when he profiled him in Esquire, in the early sixties. “It happens with people like Elvis, or Streisand, or Jerry—when you are the business. It’s perfectly understandable. Talking about yourself and talking about the business are one and the same thing.”

After years of being out of fashion, Jerry Lewis has begun to rebound, thanks in part to a renewed interest in physical comedy. The rise of movies as an art form, after all, depended on the skills of the great physical comics—Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd—whose work transcended language and crossed cultural boundaries. By the late sixties, this had become old-fashioned: pratfalls suggested vaudeville and baggy pants. Comedy started heading in a more conceptual and verbal direction, propelled by such standups as Richard Pryor and George Carlin, and continuing through David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld. But, after three decades of ironic, self-referential comedy, the inevitable reaction has set in, led by Jim Carrey, a remarkable physical comedian who names Jerry Lewis as his greatest influence.