The Biggest Thing in Show Business: Living It Up with Martin & Lewis

One of two types of author photos typically grace scholarly books: either a professional headshot or the nonprofessional snapshot. The first is for “real” authors—that is, those eager to be seen as such—and the second is for those who disdain such vanities. It is not the smallest contribution of Murray Pomerance and Matthew Solomon’s The Biggest Thing in Show Business: Living It Up with Martin & Lewis that the authors have invented a third type: the author photo as screenshot (presumably for those eager to buck convention) that shows Pomerance and Solomon chatting in a Zoom room.The photo clues us in to the circumstances under which this book was created. The time? The lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. The place? The nonplace of virtual communications to which the pandemic acclimated us all. Let it be said straight away, then, that this book is two things. Yes, it offers an analysis of the comic duo Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, covering their nightclub acts, TV shows, and film appearances from 1946 until their breakup a decade later. But it is also, and very explicitly, a work of experimental humanities—a singular symptom of a recent past when scholars of all stripes had to rethink their methods. To paraphrase a famous WWI-era slogan, “Daddy, what did you do during the pandemic?”Pomerance and Solomon’s answer will be the envy of anyone who spent the lockdowns figuring out the unmute button. Whereas most of us adopted Zoom as an extension of business as usual (lectures, doctor’s visits, etc.), Pomerance and Solomon used it as a tool for reimagining collaboration in a spirit of play. “To catch, even a little, Dean & Jerry’s spirit of presence,” they explain, “we made the decision to sidestep a conventional research and writing process for this book.” So they “began ‘meeting’ using FaceTime, and later Zoom,” collaborating synchronously on a shared document “while remaining connected both visually and aurally through a call open in another window” (12–13). Tools of business productivity—shared drives and videoconferencing apps—thus became trampolines for Pomerance and Solomon’s improvisatory creativity: the Zoom room as playroom.It is in the Zoom room as playroom that the book’s experimentality and its subject matter come together because Martin and Lewis similarly transformed the coordinates of postwar American society into a playground for high jinks. Central to the book’s argument is the claim that Martin and Lewis circumvented the partitions that “divide the (children’s) play space from (adult) family space” (52), thereby “convert[ing] any and all spaces they traversed into places specialized for play” (35). Pomerance and Solomon aim to do the same with their scholarship, to make the madness their method. “Our method,” they explain, “has been deliberately nonlinear, deliberately spontaneous, deliberately interruptive, deliberately disregardful of convention” (14).So what are the fruits of this approach? Certainly nothing systematic. In place of a conventional career narrative, Pomerance and Solomon’s book offers a continually turning kaleidoscope in which moments from the duo’s films morph freely into routines from their Colgate Comedy Hour, much as the authors’ prose style veers between free-wheeling informality and precise formal analysis. If there’s a theory of comedy here, it is a broad-strokes release theory, part Freud (Martin and Lewis as the return of a postwar repressed), part Bakhtin (Martin and Lewis as carnivalesque embodiment of Dr. Spock’s injunction to childhood play). And the politics of the duo’s comedy? Sheer anarchy, at least to judge from the book’s conclusion, where Martin and Lewis’s comedic virtues are distilled into “division, disparity, incompatibility, bizarreness, contradiction, incoherence, shock, impoliteness, tension, discord, discontinuity, unpredictability, utter unproductiveness, and ‘battle’” (294).This kind of catastrophizing vocabulary can be quite common in discussions of certain comedians (the Marx Brothers come to mind). It is to the authors’ credit, then, that they don’t let overblown rhetoric substitute for the hard work of close textual reading. Nor, mercifully, do they mystify their comedians. One of the most frustrating aspects of writing on Martin and Lewis (never mind on the Marxes) has to be the tendency to mythologize the live performances, which, in the absence of an archival record, conveniently renders discussion entirely unverifiable. But Pomerance and Solomon do not need to conjure up such absences for their rhetorical effects; instead, their analysis is remarkably present, beautifully attuned to the beat-by-beat process of Martin and Lewis’s comedic interactions, across both physical and verbal levels.There are smart chapters here on the comedians’ mouths (Martin’s “socialized” mouth vs. Lewis’s braying yawps), their eyes (Martin’s “calm postures of observation” in contrast to Lewis’s tendency to close his eyes tightly), and their relation to language (which Martin turns into melody and Lewis into cacophony). There are chapters that locate Martin and Lewis’s hairstyles within the cultural history of postwar America and that explore the duo’s contrasting gaits through historic models of ethnicity and masculinity. Still, the principle underwriting these differences, the authors argue, is less one of difference per se than of difference across mutuality, a matter of fluid “coexistence” where one partner “fills the open space left by the other, but fills it in any number of ways, be it emotionally, verbally, performatively, or visually” (213). This, the authors contend, is the “ampersanded truth” of the Martin and Lewis phenomenon—that the two performers were a mutable system in which each served as the other’s negative space, a yin and yang taking evolving shape from one another: “two inseparable bodies . . . bouncing some substitute for language between them like a pair of conjoined twins playing ping-pong with one another” (154–55).And so we return to our author photo, which “ampersands” Pomerance and Solomon themselves, each glued to the other along the seam of the Zoom room’s split screen. But looking a little closer, Solomon’s slightly forced grin echoes Dean Martin’s cartoonish wince on the front cover, and Pomerance’s open-mouthed smile recalls Al Hirschfeld’s famous sketch of Jerry Lewis. It is not hard to read this book with Solomon in the role of Dean to Pomerance’s Jerry. (You can almost hear Solomon in the background trying to bring Pomerance under control: “Calm down!”) At one point the authors resort to mathematical formulae to discuss Martin and Lewis’s 1956 breakup: “(D + J) – D = J??? (D + J) – J = D???” (284). But what would be the equation that would characterize Pomerance and Solomon’s collaboration? (P + S) + (D + J)? (P + S) x (D + J)? (J x P) / (D x S)?Or perhaps the answer is in the book’s title: Living It Up.