The Nutty Professor

(Tom Shadyac, USA, 1996)

Some film lovers get very upset when they hear that a beloved classic – whether it’s An Affair to Remember (1957) or Wings of Desire (1987) – is undergoing a remake. Normally, I try to remain open to the possibility that a remake – any remake – could be an interesting proposition. After all, every day in popular cinema films remake other films without explicitly saying so; that’s the game of genre, not to mention a fact of business.

But even I – non-purist that I strive to be – felt a pain in my heart when I heard that one of the great masterworks of the 1960s had been remodelled for Eddie Murphy. I am referring to The Nutty Professor (1963), written, directed by and starring Jerry Lewis.

Let me make my position on Lewis perfectly clear. I adore his work as a performer, and I revere his films as a director – especially that amazing string of movies he made between The Bellboy (1960) and The Big Mouth (1967). And I hate every lazy journalist the world over who instantly uses Lewis as the butt of easy jokes, in particular that old slur: "Look how weird the French are, they worship Jerry Lewis as a great artist!” (These days, that joke has been slightly modified: look how weird the French are, they worship Jerry Lewis and Clint Eastwood as great artists!)

I was overjoyed by a delightful episode of The Larry Sanders Show (1992-1998) in which Larry (Garry Shandling) tried to explain to a young kid (who had just busted into his apartment) his high estimation of Lewis. “It’s maybe hard for you to understand”, he solemnly spoke, “but to my generation, The Nutty Professor was really a key film”.

Larry’s generation also included, of course, Martin Scorsese who, 20 years after The Nutty Professor, cast Lewis opposite Robert De Niro in the extraordinary The King of Comedy (1982). So, Larry, Marty, The French and I all agree that Jerry Lewis is indeed a formidable artist.

As recently as 1994 – in Paris, in fact – Lewis was still announcing his fervent plan to direct The Nutty Professor 2. That’s the sequel some cinephiles (me included) been waiting for all these years. Well, something happened between ‘94 and ‘96; Lewis is only billed as executive producer on a project that has obviously been completely shaped as a vehicle for Murphy.

So, I have to get the obvious question out of the way first: is Murphy’s version of The Nutty Professor a patch on Jerry Lewis’ masterpiece? The answer to that is: nope. The gags aren’t nearly as clever, it isn’t half as well constructed or directed, and it doesn’t have those same flights of pastel-coloured pop surrealism that make the original so indelible.

But now I must try to put aside this specific comparison because, if I don’t, I’ll never be able to see this new Nutty Professor clearly, on its own terms. And I have to admit: I really did enjoy it, for various reasons, and on several levels. And the main reason I enjoyed it is because it’s a proudly vulgar movie.

Very simply, for anyone who doesn’t know this already, The Nutty Professor is a comic variant on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde story. Murphy is nerdy professor Sherman Klump until he takes an amazing new potion and becomes the gorgeous Buddy Love. There’s a Mary Reilly (1996) element in this brew, too, since a woman (Jada Pinkett as Carla Purty) bounces between the good-but-shy Sherman and the attractive-but-infuriating Buddy.

There are vast differences between the new and the original Nutty Professors, but also a few commonalities. Murphy and his creative collaborators are true to the most vulgar, excessive and grotesque elements of Lewis’ art – elements that are sometimes beyond the pale even for some of the master’s fans.

I was particularly struck by the dinner scenes set in the Klump family home. The main joke here is that Murphy plays almost every character around the table: young and old, male and female. The scenes have a show-off, virtuosic, preening quality; you’re supposed to admire both Murphy’s dexterity as a chameleon performer, and the technical wizardry of the special effects processes.

I was more riveted by the actual content of these scenes, which is quite extreme: an endless procession of gags about eating, choking, spewing and (especially) farting, mixed in with grating vocal mannerisms and loose, dirty, sex talk. Alright!

When the first of these set-pieces in the film started up, I immediately thought: how far away from Lewis’ original can this remake possibly get? But then I remembered a particular quote from the vast scholarly literature on Jerry, to the effect that one thing which marks the “profound Jewishness” of Lewis’ work is his depiction of food, and particularly his depiction of gross eating disorders.

I then also remembered a dazzling, hallucinatory dinner scene from a film that Lewis starred in: Arizona Dream (1993) by Emir Kusturica, maker of the masterpiece Underground (1995). That scene, which would seem to be Kusturica’s delirious homage to Lewis, shows a large, mad family going wildly dysfunctional over their nightly meal; everyone screams and cracks up and goes flying in and out of the frame, regressing to some monstrously infantile state. (There is a delicious rumour out there that Lewis himself directed this part of Arizona Dream.)

Well, Murphy’s The Nutty Professor is not about Jewishness, and nor is it a surreal flight of fancy à la Kusturica. What this remake does take from the Lewisian legacy, amplifying and exaggerating it to an almost unbearable degree, is an obsession with the human body and its gross disorders. I have publicly speculated on the odd anal imagery to be found in the sci-fi blockbuster Independence Day (1996); there’s a lot of stuff about asses in The Nutty Professor, too, but this film manages to go full-tour around the body-monstrous many times over.

Obviously, the Jekyll and Hyde story has to be about the body – the male body, in this case, transformed from lowly abjection to impossibly idealised beauty. A totally externalised story of the male ego, as made visible in a mirror (and mirror scenes play an important role in both Nutty Professors). In both Lewis’ and Murphy’s versions, the ideal, glamorous guy is named Buddy Love (that name stays, while Sherman Klump replaces Julius Kelp). In each case, this character is indescribably vain and narcissistic, a very successful seducer of women – and, ultimately, dangerous, reckless and out of control.

I found Murphy-Love even scarier than Lewis-Love, because it seems that we, the audience, have been plunged into some bizarre, egoistic fantasy which Murphy entertains about himself. With Lewis, it was already an ego-fantasy, but something else, too: namely, a rather bitter reflection on his one-time partnership with Dean Martin.

Murphy’s Love has a beautiful, sleek male body; in one hilarious scene, he squeezes himself into skin-tight spandex so that he can admire his own perfect contours. Unfortunately, Murphy doesn’t get to sing “That Old Black Magic” like Lewis did, although there’s one tiny, marvellous, musical gag in the film.

It’s in the conception of the other central figure – Klump/Kelp – that the films strikingly diverge. Lewis’s Kelp was a shy, bespectacled nerd, a clumsy, bookish, repressed intellectual with a high, strangled voice. Now, that’s not nearly physical or external enough for Murphy: his Klump is fat – hideously, grotesquely obese. There are a million and one fat-jokes in the film: Klump knocking over everything, trying to fit through a tight squeeze in a restaurant, trying to get into a chair, etc.

But far more striking than such jokes is the strange sexual aura that attaches itself to this character. The strange part is not that the character is explicitly made a virgin – that goes with the shy-guy stereotype. The strange thing is that, for all intents and purposes, Sherman is … well, he’s basically a woman.

Eddie Murphy and the representation of women: now there’s a topic that can send many sensitive viewers (I don’t exclude myself) into a right old rage. His film-vehicles are regularly referred to as sexist and misogynist, as well as homophobic, and a bunch of other sins. That’s all true, really; sometimes his films are woman-hating, or woman-baiting at least, in simply a nasty, dreary way (Beverly Hills Cop II, 1987). Then, at other times, there’s a decided comic energy that comes with all the male-centred sexist abuse, invective and low humour – as was the case in Murphy’s amazing concert film, Eddie Murphy Raw (1988).

In recent years, Murphy has wisely tried to cut down on the amount of outright dissin’ on women in his work. The women who star in them (like, here, Pinkett) are allowed a modicum of dignity these days, spared the most outrageous humiliations meted out by Eddie during his earlier days in showbiz.

In The Nutty Professor, however, Murphy has found a new and novel way of working out his gender-related anxieties and energies: he becomes all body-types, and both genders, in himself. This, too, isn’t just some quick-change, show-off trick of mimicry; it’s something deeply embedded in the art of the master Lewis. As the influential critic Serge Daney once noted, the very act of putting himself before a camera, as a spectacle for our hungry eyes, seems to plunge Lewis into a delicious fantasy-cum-nightmare of becoming-woman, forever tempted to speak and sing, walk and dress like a gal.

What do I really mean when I say that The Nutty Professor makes Klump into a woman? There are many references to the fat man’s “titties”, and another character, comparing Klump to Carla, even says something as bald as: “Who sucks on whose titties in that relationship?” Dear me – I never heard such things in a Jerry Lewis movie! There are also many rude references to Sherman’s “crack” – strictly speaking, that’s the crack in his ultra-wide ass, but after a while, the line sounds weirdly suggestive.

Most strikingly of all, there’s the big transformation moment when Klump becomes Love for the first time. He begins by looking inside his shirt to confirm that he no longer has titties – that he’s a flat-chested male, at last. Then, after a beat, he looks inside his pants, and he exclaims: “I can see my dick!” So there you have the true horror of being an obese male: his own sex is hidden from him, invisible, obscured by layers and folds of his own flesh. Hmmm ...

On a more general woman-related plane, I think there’s an inevitable Alice in Wonderland aspect to any story about a person whose body keeps changing on them uncontrollably – and boy, the bodily mutations that happen to Klump and Love are truly grotesque, far more so than in Lewis’ comparatively discreet transformation scenes.

There’s another comparison that made this Nutty Professor interesting for me, beyond the simple fact that I enjoyed its vigorously crude humour. I speak of the comparison between Murphy and another contemporaneous superstar, Jim Carrey. This movie is a successor, in my mind, to Carrey’s The Cable Guy (Ben Stiller, 1996). Both Murphy and Carrey obviously have a penchant for horror cinema. The Cable Guy is full of nightmarish thrill-kill stuff in the tradition of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980); while The Nutty Professor is brimming with references to Godzilla, Freddy Krueger, King Kong and the like.

Not long before this film, Murphy appeared in an even more daring horror-comedy hybrid, Wes Craven’s Vampire in Brooklyn (1995). Both of these remarkable performers, Murphy and Carrey, dance between the genres of comedy and horror in way that is both virtuosic and yet nervous, insecure.

It’s a masculine thing again: the spectacle of these larger-than-life, star-celebrity-egos spinning on the very brink between an image of their own glamour that is mad and dangerous; and, on the other hand, an image of conventional ordinariness, “just a normal guy” – an image that’s reassuring but banal.

I once came across a wonderful statement by the American critic Kathleen Murphy, who suggested that “one of the better definitions of a hero” in fiction is this: someone “who comes to be comfortable” in his or her own skin. What I am fascinated by in the movies of Murphy and Carrey is precisely that their skin – everything they can do with their bodies – is plastered all over the screen at all times; but they never, ever come to be comfortable in it, so wildly does it change and mutate on them.

Getting to be a hero in these comic-horror stories is hard enough. Staying a hero is a complete impossibility.

MORE sequel: Nutty Professor II: The Klumps

MORE Murphy: The Distinguished Gentleman, I Spy, Bowfinger, Voir, Mulan

MORE Shadyac: Patch Adams, Liar Liar

© Adrian Martin September 1996