Lewis remains the "dark star" everyone finds hard to like Jerry's greatest film, far superior to the Murphy remake. Many audiences find Jerry's persona(s) childishly overbearing, relentlessly needy, narcissistic and inappropriate for comedy. It might be better then, to experience his work as tragic farce. Particularly in this film, the characters have affinities with (Absurd) literary themes of the double and the Idiot in the writings of Gogol and Dostoyevsky: misfits who try too hard to conform or be different and embarrass themselves and everyone else. Even an episode of "Roseanne" found the family "adopted" by such a character, Burt, who was overflowing with the milk of human kindness. Roseanne comments, "how did you get this far in life without someone driving a spike through your head?" Aside from the homage to Jerry on "The Simpsons", Krusty the Klown, only Robin Williams can match the overtones of helpless desperation in his work. For example, his "Patch Adams" and "Jakob the Liar" have shades of a Lewis film considered too extreme to release, "The Day the Clown Cried", about a clown who led children into the gas chambers of a concentration camp. Robin Williams remains, if not the missing link between Lewis, Polanski's "The Tenant", and Fassbinder's "In A Year Of Thirteen Moons", the black hole at the end of the continuum....