Story highlights Gene Seymour: Jerry Lewis was an imperfect, yet captivating comedian who lived longer than his fiercest critics

Poking around the legacy he leaves behind should keep us busy for another 91 years, give or take, writes Seymour

Gene Seymour is a film critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) Everything, it seemed, was a joke when it came to Jerry Lewis. Even his reputation -- whether as a comedian, actor, entertainer, moviemaker or philanthropist -- was a setup for somebody somewhere to float balloons or pierce them, the louder the "pop," the better.

And, as was the case with many of Lewis' over-the-top displays of brash, noisy, run-amok slapstick as a performer, the jokes at his own expense threatened to overstay their welcome. The insurgent "sick" comedian Lenny Bruce characteristically took a cheeky, sideways shot at Lewis' efforts to combat muscular dystrophy, but that's because he was Lenny Bruce. Other, lesser lights injected waves of wisecracks about Lewis' veneration by French film critics into the comic biosphere, and how long before those jibes stop being original or funny? (This is not a riddle.)

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Here's what's really funny: Lewis, who died Sunday at 91, outlasted most, if not all the jokes at his expense to the point that, perhaps, there are now those who wonder whether the French were onto something after all. Martin Scorsese, who directed Lewis as an arrogant talk show host in the 1982 cult classic, "The King of Comedy," certainly thought so, believing Lewis to be both a pioneer and perfectionist among comedy film directors.

We may still be some time away from wider appreciation of Lewis' movies, though his passing may help set off more earnest reappraisals. But the absence of Lewis as a living presence may take more getting used to than most of us realize, especially those who aren't old enough to fully appreciate the prominence of Jerry Lewis in American pop culture beginning more than 70 years ago.

It was in 1946 that Lewis, a high-school dropout from Newark, New Jersey, teamed up with an Italian-American crooner from Steubenville, Ohio, named Dean Martin to form a nightclub act that transformed them by radio, movies and the fledgling mass medium of television into high-magnitude stars.

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