Nerding Day: The Day the Clown Cried

Decades before Bill Murray got Lost in Translation or Robin Williams shocked us all with his impeccable dramatic turns in Jakob the Liar and Bicentennial Man, another once-in-a-generation comedian was busy reinventing himself as a serious actor. Jerry Lewis, now primarily known for his telethon and being the inspiration for Dr. Frink on The Simpsons, was on top of the world in 1972. He was already famous as the nutty professor, beloved by the entire nation of France for some reason, and being compared to greats like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Point is, dude was a comedy legend, and a pioneer in many regards. His latest movie, The Family Jewels, was a broad, zany comedy Lewis wrote, directed, and starred in as seven different characters, each one klumpier than the last.

So, naturally, after that film was hugely profitable, Lewis decided to follow it up with a bleak drama about a sad clown in a concentration camp. The movie was so terrible he spent the rest of his life doing everything he could to ensure it was never released, which I have to point out is pretty “concentration camp” behavior. Jerry buried The Day the Clown Cried, stipulating in his will that it couldn’t be viewed by the public until the far-flung future date of June 1st, 2024. Only then, like a cursed sarcophagus, could the tapes be opened and dusted off, and this nightmare be once more wrought upon the living. Which sounded like a good topic for a column to me!

There was only one problem - the movie can only be viewed in person at the Library of Congress, as it makes forty percent of viewers violently shit themselves in shock and they’re equipped for that sort of thing. As such, I was forced to suffer every web writer’s last resort: research. After much dicking about online, I finally cobbled together enough leaked clips, script excerpts and, yes, re-enactments to make sense of the whole plot. Here, then, I present to you 1972’s The Day the Clown Cried, painstakingly reconstructed into the most complete version you will ever encounter (unless you go to the Library of Congress).

The film begins with a simple poem about the power of a child’s innocence and the goodness that God bestows upon our lives. Which is a good reminder, because both of those things are about to be ripped away from you like a blanket of scabs, leaving your psyche nothing but open wounds. We cut to a failing circus, little more attended than a Trump rally, unable to draw a crowd despite the promise of fantastical family fun promised by the fanciful names we give to our citadels of joy, those ziggurats of delight: Ringling, Jumbo, Soleil - Schmidt.

After being announced by the ringmaster, resident clown Gustave the Great graces us with his august presence. Humorously, we are led to believe this character will be played by Mr. Jerry Lewis, only to quickly learn that Jerry instead plays his assistant, who merely walks behind him and holds his tuxedo train. This is the funniest part of the entire movie.

Although we don’t learn Jerry’s clown name, we do learn that he’s a struggling German circus performer named Helmut Doork, which translates roughly to “Helmet Whaale’s Peeniis.” He’s immediately presented as a fish out of water, a rodeo clown with a white frown assisting a posh clown with a black smile. This “opposites” play will be a recurring motif throughout the film, in the sense that it’s the opposite of what a film should be.

Dear sweet Christ. Is that Jerry Lewis’ head or a melting cake?

Helmut trips on a low wall, causing both he and Gustave to topple over and inciting a small ripple of laughter from the audience. He’s immediately fired. It turns out that wasn’t a bit, so that was bad laughter, not good God-fearing circus-grade laughter! Helmut was genuinely tripping, which apparently completely fucked up whatever incredible clown bit Gustave had planned, probably decoupage. Now I’m about to show you a picture of the man who fires him, and I want you to burn the image into your memory. Ready?

If anyone dressed like this is ever in a position superior enough to yours that they control your financial future, walk into the ocean. You’ve lost life in a way that there’s no coming back from.

Yeah, that’s the look. And I mean both “the look of a shattered, fired man” and “the only look Jerry Lewis will serve for this entire movie.” In case it wasn’t clear already, The Day the Clown Cried is what you get when you buy every velvet painting in the world and melt them down in a crucible of bad ideas. There is no sadder clown on Earth, and I’m including Suicido.

I don’t actually have anything to say about the only closeup we get of Gustave the Great, but I felt it was important to include because every person that sees it divests me of part of its evil, as we all together bear its terrible weight.

Far ahead of his time, Jerry Lewis’ sad clown starts at the level of hollowed-out despair Joaquin Phoenix’s couldn’t muster until the last fifteen minutes. Based solely on the look in his eyes, I’m pretty confident that he also shot a talk show host in the face, they just don’t show it. Shattered and declowned, Helmut smears his greasepaint all around his face while he sobs, pioneering a move destined to be emulated and added into the repertoire of many, many other serial killers to come.

Oh fuck! Title card! I mean, kind of. It’s really just some text on black I whipped up in Photoshop and inserted where the title card would be according to the screenplay. I suppose we could have skipped it entirely, but then there wouldn’t have been a refractory period between the last crazy thing and the crazy thing I’m about to tell you. Namely, that sometime in the '90s, a bunch of the original actors from The Day the Clown Cried, now old men, got together on a soundstage and reenacted sequences from the film. No one asked them to do this. Who would? Who could? We must assume they simply awoke one day in a state of full senility and carried out the scenes by rote, ancient muscle memories unearthed in their final flailing moments of existence.

Speaking of the screenplay, we are going to encounter a few moments where I feel the need to include some portions of the script, for plot reasons or because when I read it I laugh-gasped so hard the wheels of my office chair shot out from under me. Take this scene, in which Helmut returns home drunk and tells his wife that he loves clowning but hates laughter, then attempts to crush her.

One can’t blame Helmut for his despair though, being an unemployed circus clown as he is. In Germany in 1944, there was nothing worse.

Then, in another film first, Jerry breaks the fourth wall a la Deadpool and gives a frank encapsulation of his own career straight to the audience.

This is followed by a gentle reminder that Jerry wrote the script himself.

Back at the Schmidt circus, Doork has been replaced, and apparently so has Gustave the Great. It’s never explained where he went, or why we spend eight minutes watching an unrelated clown perform at a circus that we will never revisit. Of his fourteen interminable bits, the first is that he can’t use a trombone.

That’s it, he just can’t use it. He takes it apart and puts it back together wrong, looks flustered, tries to get sound out of it but can’t. And not in a genius way like Harpo Marx, this is just a pitch-perfect mime of a gentleman who hasn’t used a trombone before. Next, he looks at a candle and becomes confused. Those who have studied commedia dell’arte will recognize this as nothing.

In the end, the unnamed clown we will never see again folds a paper airplane and throws it off-frame, where it makes a massive explosion sound.

You may wonder how that bit would even work live. I did, and it made me make a face like a candle was nearby.

Back at the bar, Helmut complains to his bartender, a matching shot of a very old man who surely must have had something better to do with his time than this.

“You’re looking at one,” he seems to reply, crumbling into dust. Lewis makes a joke at Hitler’s expense, which lands him in hot water with the SS. I guess “hot water” is kind of an understatement. “Concentration camp.” Yeah, that sounds right.

Having inadvertently revealed the subconscious truth that motivates his actions under the influence of alcohol, our stalwart ex-clown is led away in handcuffs, passing by a big foregrounded ‘X’ so you know he’s doomed like in The Departed.

We spend a little time getting to know the routine at the camp, which involves a lot of digging and walking in circles. People are understandably less than jazzed.

To make matters even grimmer, the camp’s Kommandant sees Helmut clowning around for some Jewish children through the fence and demands the guards put a stop to it. Twenty-five years later, that same man - the actor, not the character - sits in an easy chair on the phone and tells his friend “yes, I will play a Nazi again to fill in some of the missing sequences of the Jerry Lewis holocaust clown movie. That sounds nice.”

The head guard does as he’s ordered, setting down his screenplay-in-progress, Life is Beautiful, and instead going to see about a holocaust clown. Helmut proves easy enough to put in his place, a cowardice that will surely fester in him until it reaches a boiling point and he finally fights back. Obviously he won’t just stay a coward the whole time, that would be despicable.

As he returns to the barracks, we’re treated to one last shot of the kids, guilt-tripping us as hard as they can. It’s like art from a Magic: The Gathering card called “Wall of Kids.”

“Tap and pay one colorless mana to make me feel like I’m the asshole.”

Using soccer games as a distraction, Helmut’s fellow inmates help him continue to perform for the kids. Here he is sticking toothpicks in his mouth and pretending to be a walrus, which one of the children said, and I quote, “made the holocaust not so bad.” That’s the healing power of laughter!

Unfortunately, Doork is inevitably caught clowning again, and a general brawl breaks out when the guards start to beat him and prisoners join in the fight. Most of them are probably antifa or paid feds doing a psyop, though; so it’s hard to tell how many are actually Nazis.

Amazingly, the old men reenacting their parts in the movie also film themselves playing old man soccer and scuffling around pretending to beat on each other. This makes them feel alive for the first time in fifteen years, and they all go home and rail their old ladies like trains pulling into the station.

The timeless fun of Jerry Lewis doing physical comedy is cut short when another Nazi pops out and executes someone in cold blood. Lewis would, of course, famously end all his standup appearances this way for the rest of his career.

This makes Helmut sad.

Spirit broken, Doork stops clowning around entirely. It’s only months later, when the Kommandant needs someone to keep the kids quiet on the train to the gas chambers, that he’s asked to break out his old bag of tricks and inject a little joy into the unfolding genocide.

Helmut, the has-been clown who loves kids, finds himself alone with a captive audience of miserable children. It’s right where a clown belongs. He knows they’re doomed, but in this moment, for the duration of this train ride, Helmut can be a clown exactly where and when a clown is needed most of all. It’s a stunning display of comedy’s power to banish evil, at least for a little while - and perhaps that’s the best we can hope for in this life. As he delights them with juggling, magic tricks and prat falls, credits softly roll.

Just kidding! He does zero clowning and spends the whole train ride banging on the door, begging to be let out while the kids stare at him in uncomprehending helplessness. Cowardice spews from him in every direction, filling the car with the stench of piss and the poison gas that explodes from a soul when you freeze it in nitrogen and crack it in half. Freunlaven!

When they arrive at their final destination, Helmut is pulled aside and cooly told that his life will be spared…if he does the unthinkable. The kids do trust him, after all. In a Nazi way of thinking, if he leads them into the gas chambers, perhaps they won’t kick up such a fuss. It should be noted that at this point in the film’s initial test screening, a fourth person set themselves on fire and it was decided they couldn’t release the movie. “Three was okay” they said, “four is too many.”

This makes Helmut sad. But instead of executing a daring escape plan or nobly sacrificing himself, he literally immediately agrees. He’s super sad about it to be sure, but he agrees to lead the children into the gas chambers to spare his own life within thirty seconds of being presented with the idea. Then he slaps on his signature clown-face, shitty as it is, and smiles for the first fucking time in the whole fucking movie like no one told him what the fuck is going on in this fucking scene FUCK.

Tenderly, slowly, the clown who hasn’t done a single clown thing since the walrus bit takes an adorable little girl by the hand and looks down into her innocent, trusting eyes.

The somber moment is only slightly undercut by the reenacted version, in which the old man pretending to be Jerry Lewis mimes holding a child’s hand but it totally looks like he’s leading someone away by the penis.

Not that the real version is much better. We get one last “I’m the Joker baby” look back at the camera and the saddest clown who ever did it takes his final bow (but not really, because he sold the kids out so he can live).

All told, Jerry Lewis once again cements his place as an entertainment legend in The Day the Clown Abetted the Holocaust. It’s a fine film with an important moral: not all Germans in World War II were bad! Here’s one that earned the trust of children and personally led them to their deaths, see? SEE!? DO YOU SEE!?

And now, as a wise Nazi I know once said…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Alpha Scientist Javo, who played the Stalinist mime in the 1973 Asylum knock-off, Weekend Atrocity Mime. 

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.