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88  Wheelchairs and One-Liners Televising Need in the CharityTelethon It is hour fourteen in the 1976 twenty-four-hour Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon, broadcast from Las Vegas, Nevada, the glittering city turned perpetual slot machine and bastion to late capitalism. For the past thirteen hours telethon host comedian Jerry Lewis has sung, danced, and performed all his best comic bits and characters. He has also played best-guy pal to a slew of America’s celebrity royalty, including Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., in the name of raising money to help people with muscular dystrophy .“Jerry’s Kids” are the people with muscular dystrophy whom Lewis aims to save, a goal he incessantly parrots throughout the telethon’s punishing broadcast. Cruising into hour fourteen, however, Lewis is anything but his comically elastic, ebullient self. To state it bluntly: Jerry Lewis is pissed. He paces in front of the camera, edging up to a rant.“I have a lot of work to do,” he grouses.“We really have to get cooking now; we’ve had fun and some of you have been a little lazy.” He pauses briefly to fix the camera with an accusing stare as if to say, yes, you, Mrs. Goldberg from Queens, I’m talking to you. He begins again:“You’ve had time to check us out and I’ve been placating for too long, been too passive. You have to go to the phone.” His breathing becomes labored; he is feeling his righteous indignation all the way down to his gills.“If you can just sit there and have all this stuff coming to you for free, can still sit there and do nothing—I feel really sorry for you. We have given an awful lot of stuff free; we’ve given emotion,love,feelings for humanity .” Lewis breaks off in midscold. He shakes his head as if seized by a magnificent idea: Why wait for Mrs. Goldberg from Queens to put down her knitting and her bowl of Farina to go to the phone and call in a donation? Why not go right to the source? Under Lewis’s calculating gaze, the studio audience morphs into a cartoon field of dollar signs and spinning gold coins. Wheelchairs and One-Liners 89 Less agitated and more energized, Lewis mutters that he “should have thought of this hours ago.” He approaches one of the many stage managers standing in the shadows and asks him for a bucket.Who is this union-bound stage manager to refuse Lewis, especially when he has worked himself into this frenzy rife with a combustible amalgamation of ego and pathos? Similarly , who is this audience, held transfixed in the spectacle unfolding before them, to deny Lewis’s unabashed and more than a little frightening rendition of passing around the collection plate at a Sunday church service? With his bucket glistening a shiny fire-alarm red in the stage lights, he rushes into the audience.“You’ve been sitting here all night having a helluva time, dig it out. Put it in there! We can get a lot of money, stick it in there.” Lewis instructs others on his crew to grab buckets and follow his lead. He stalks the aisles while people nervously fish around in their pockets and bags to the tune of his semipornographic exhortations: “Yeah! That’s it baby! Stick it in there! Get it up!” The band starts to play, providing a festive aural backdrop for this overt and ecstatic display of raw capital solicitation. Lewis, with his bucket nearly full, winds up on the studio floor, dancing around in his money-fueled climax, yelling to no one in particular,“Yeah! Yeah! It stimulates them!”A camera cut-away to a local“Love Network” station raising money in its own community mercifully interrupts Lewis’s monetary coitus, releasing the studio and home audiences from this perversely engaging telethon moment.1 Lewis’s involvement with the MDA and his seemingly unabashed performances , like the one executed on the 1976 annual charity telethon, are legendary. He is a critical and polarizing figure for the MDA, drawing both admirers of his selfless benevolence and fierce detractors of what many characterize as offensive and lewd behaviors that perpetuate negative perceptions of disabled individuals. Despite the distaste or accolades Lewis merits, he is practically enshrined as an icon who redefined the relationship between the celebrity body and the charity industry. The NFIP’s incorporation of many different entertainers...

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