The Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon: A Comedy History

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Featured: Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Ed McMahon, Don Rickles, Sammy Davis Jr., Ralphie May

What’s in This Episode

• Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon history and legacy
• 1976 Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis reunion on live telethon
• Telethon’s move from New York to Las Vegas in 1973
• Jerry Lewis’s film career and French critical reception
• Don Rickles’s relationship with the telethon across decades
• 44-year run of the telethon from 1966 to 2010

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

On Saturdays, I’ve been doing deep dives into single topics. Today, we will talk about the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon. I don’t know how well this episode is going to do. I’m doing this one for me for reasons I’ll explain after the break. But let’s dive in and start with the number that’s almost impossible to process in 2026.

In 1976, guess how many people tuned in to watch at least part of the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day telethon? That number? 85 million. That’s more than the Super Bowl was doing back in those days. Now that’s 1976. It’s 50 years ago at that point, but that’s when I first got into the telethon.

We’ll get into that later. 85 million Americans tuned in to watch part of Jerry Lewis hosting a 21 and a half hour live TV event from Las Vegas, surrounded by a rotating cast of celebrities, raising money for kids with muscular dystrophy, smoking, visibly deteriorating in real time as the hours wore on, and occasionally doing something weird that it burned itself into the memory of everyone who saw it. The Jerry Lewis Telethon ran from 1966 to 2010. 44 years. Boy, it’s been gone that long already. I still miss it every year. I’ll talk about it after the break.

Almost every significant comedian of that era, 1966 to 2010, performed on it at some point. Some performed before anyone knew who they were. Some at the height of their fame. All of it was live. Some performed at three in the morning.

Like I talked a couple weeks ago about Ralphie May. I saw him in the middle of the night. To a casino audience that had nothing else to do. All of this was live. None of it was repeatable, and as a comedy document, the telethon captures something about four decades of American stand-up that no other archive can match.

All right, I gotta jump in a little. If you never saw this thing, it would come on at nine o’clock on Sunday night of Labor Day weekend, and it would go until six-something the next day. It never seemed to end at a regular time. In the 6 p.m. Hour, it would kind of Rap.

Jerry looked wrecked, destroyed. He’d been up for most of the 21 hours.

And then Tony Orlando here in New York would finish it up and maybe they’d ro…

But it would it would end at like six something. And over the years. So I got into this kid. Here’s why I was going to do this after the break. But let me do now.

So my dad was a bartender and my dad worked nights and my dad loved TV. But when he would get home in those days, remember TV signed off? If you were up at like midnight, one in the morning, they’d play the national anthem and TV would go off. There wasn’t younglings. There was no TV to watch.

If you put on channel two at three in the morning, there was static. There weren’t things to watch. One of the reasons younglings like me even knew about Johnny Carson was because your choices at midnight might be the second half of Carson, an old black and white movie, and nothing. The channels actually played the national anthem and signed off. Channel 2, New York.

So my dad, who loved TV, but was working when TV was on, would get home and there was nothing on. So he didn’t get to watch TV except Labor Day because this thing went 24 hours. So he loved the Labor Day telethon, which is why I’m doing this today. I’m indulging myself. He’d make himself a bowl of like fruit and he would sit there and smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes and probably drink a Rheingold or a Schaefer and watch this thing.

And there was a time when the guest would be the ilk of Frank Sinatra. But by the time this thing was wrapping down in 2010 and my father was long gone, this was a relic. I mean, I would watch this thing and have the memories of being a kid and be like, oh, even though I’m a kid, I understand that Frank Sinatra is a major star. And by like the 2000s, it was like, who are these people on this show? It just had become such a relic that I couldn’t stop watching it because it was amazing.

Jerry Lewis was born Joseph Levitch in Newark in 1926 into a vaudeville family where show business was the household language. He developed a comedy act by 12, miming to phonograph records. One would say he was the Sarah Cooper of his day, founding the physical vocabulary that would define everything that came later. He met Dean Martin in 1946. They paired up.

Dean as the suave, effortlessly cool singer. Jerry Lewis as the manic, rubber-faced kid who couldn’t hold himself together. They were enormously successful, and then in 1956, they split up, and they barely spoke for 20 years. Jerry went into films, The Bellboy, The Ladies’ Man, The Nutty Professor, movies where he functioned as his own director, in ways that French critics took seriously while American critics were dismissing him as a clown. Yeah, remember that whole thing that the French loved Jerry Lewis?

He received the Legion of Honor in France in 1983. The telethon began in 1966, broadcasting from a single New York station, Channel 5 here in New York, at least. I’m not 100% sure about it, 1966, but by the 70s, it was definitely on Channel 5, raising over a million dollars in its first year. By 1973, the telethon had moved to Las Vegas, which was the decision that made everything more entertaining and more revealing. Vegas in the 70s and 80s was still Rat Pack territory.

Entertainers staying up all night was recent mythology, and the telethon fit naturally into an ecosystem built around performers doing things at 3 in the morning that wouldn’t happen anywhere else. And again, remember, I’m watching in New York, so if Ralphie Mays popping on at 3 in the morning Eastern, it’s only midnight in Vegas. Not absurd, right? The show moved to LA for a little bit, then back to Las Vegas. The co-host, Ed McMahon, co-hosted 38 times.

So that gave it a little weight, right? Because he had Carson’s sidekick there with Jerry Lewis, so it made it feel more legit. Frank Sinatra would come on. Sammy Davis Jr. Appeared.

Now, by 1966, the Rat Pack wasn’t really a thing anymore. That era was becoming mythology, but the people were still around, and Jerry Lewis was genuinely of that world and genuinely friends with those people, and the telethon was where those friendships could be visible without it feeling like promotion. Then there was the 1976 event. I feel like I saw this live. I feel like I was watching this.

I feel like they did this on Monday afternoon. I might be making all this up. Frank Sinatra walks out and surprises Jerry Lewis.

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And then behind Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin.

It was the first time Lewis and Martin had been seen together in public in more than 20 years. Cameras running, live TV, no script. I have a friend who loves what you do every year. And who just wanted to come out. Would you send my friend out, please?

Where is he? Would you send him out here? Come here. Break it. Up.

What is this here? Break it up. I think it’s about time, don’t you? Thank you. I think it’s about time.

Thank you. I don’t know. How you been? You know, it seems like we haven’t seen each other for 20 years. Well, you know, there was all those rumors about our breaking up, and then when I started the show and you weren’t.

Here, I believed it. Don Rickles is the comedian whose relationship with the telethon deserves its own look. Don did enough appearances across the decades that the MDA later compiled a dedicated episode of just Don Rickles on the telethon for their highlight reel series on streaming. Both Don and Jerry came out of the same entertainment ecosystem. Las Vegas showrooms, the Rat Pack, Orbit, the world where insult comedy and Jewish comedy and Italian-American showmanship existed in close proximity and fed each other for decades.

Don Rickles insulting Jerry Lewis on live TV in front of a Las Vegas midnight audience was two people from the same world doing the thing the world did. Jerry, it’s such a treat for me to get up early, to be here for this wonderful, wonderful occasion. I mean, I know the children, and I know the problem, but I say from my heart, really, I’m so annoyed with you. I really am. I was never a fan of yours.

You know that. And yet, you’ve asked me to come, and it was very sweet of you to ask me. Ed wanted me to come, but he thought I had a bottle of booze in my hip pocket. But you I’ve never liked. You know that.

But, and look at you today. You’re the same age as me, only on you it shows. Everybody’s Sammy. They all told you you look handsome. You look wonderful.

Look at your neck. You can tell your age right away. The neck hangs a little bit. You know what I mean? In a year, you’re going to be on a fence going, ah, ah.

Ah, ah, ah. The insults were real enough to be funny and safe enough to be affectionate, which is Don Rickles exactly. It worked because everybody in the room, the audience, the TV audience, Jerry, understood the difference between an insult that draws blood and an insult that says, I know you well enough to do this. Don Rickles was at his best not doing material. He was best at responding.

At a telethon at three in the morning with a depleted casino audience and a host had been awake for 16 hours was a great canvas for that approach. Don Rickles didn’t need a good room. He needed a real situation. Now you might be like, Johnny Mac, all right, enough with the 1960s. Well.

Fast forward to 1995. You know who did the show? Jerry Seinfeld. The telethon was still kind of operating at the high end and could get Jerry Seinfeld, an A-lister, appearing not to promote himself, He already had the top sitcom, but because the telethon was significant enough that people came. Let me tell you how you can improve your show.

You know what the trouble is? I got to tell you, Jerry, it’s very important that you understand that with comedy and You have to be the rooting interest. Yes. Right. You stand too damn tall.

Too tall. Yes. You should crouch a little like this. That’s good. Okay.

Good. How does it feel? Is it comfortable? It feels shorter. Yes.

You could make a fortune from this. They would know you in every country in the world. Really? All around the world? Yes.

I mean, right now you’re just local, but you could be very good. I would love to go statewide. During the 80s, Billy Crystal, big star, appeared regularly. Crystal was what the telethon needed during prime hours, skilled enough to read the room, warm enough to fit the charity, funny enough to justify the airtime. In earlier days, Jackie Gleason would come on.

Then in 1997, Jimmy Fallon performed stand-up on the telethon. He was 22 years old. This is a year before Jimmy Fallon joined Saturday Night Live. He was taking classes at the Groundlings, hadn’t landed anything. Somehow, he got a slot on the telethon.

That’s what this show was, especially as we got into the later years. Who’s this James Fallon kid? Who is he? Why is he on? Hello, my name is Jimmy Fallon, and welcome to the auditions for Troll Productions Incorporated.

Remember, we’re looking for a star or celebrity to sponsor our new line of Troll Dolls and our new series of commercials. So let’s start the auditions. Thanks for coming. First up, Mr. John Travolta.

She’s like, thanks a lot, I mean, I swear to God, this news is so weird over here, right? I mean, like, who does his hair? Like, his hair’s so frizzy, I mean, like, you know, like, you guys probably get some, like, anti-freeze shampoo or something to freeze. Him, right? We talked a few weeks ago about Ralphie May showing up.

Seeing Ralphie May in a casino showroom at two in the morning before people knew his name was a specific memory that people like me hold on to clearly, and I played the clip. I won’t do it again. Go back and listen to, it’s like three weeks ago now. The Ralphie May episode. I played the clip there.

And you can hear the audience not knowing how to deal with this guy and Ralphie winning the room. The telethon put comedians in conditions that revealed something about them that normal contacts don’t. Midnight to six in the morning on a Jerry Lewis telethon was its own ecosystem operating by different rules than the primetime portion of the show. The big guests were gone. The network affiliates were running reduced staffs.

Jerry Lewis had been doing this thing for eight or ten hours, smoking continuously, running on whatever combination of adrenaline and who knows what else got him through the night. And into that context came comedians whose agents had gotten on the slot because exposure is exposure. You were doing material at four in the morning to an audience that had arrived at a casino and stumbled into a free show. Right after a video about a child in a wheelchair and right before another desperate phone appeal for money. The whiplash was the entire experience.

A comedian doing tight, constructed stand-up material right after a tear-jerker video segment. You had to reset the room in your first 30 seconds. If you can’t do that, the next five minutes, long, awkward. By hour 15 or 16, Jerry Lewis was no longer performing in any controlled or calculated sense. He was on camera, exhausted, wired, smoking, completely invested.

He would cry. He made jokes that didn’t work. He didn’t care. He moved on. He argued with the production team in front of the camera.

Again, this is all live. Did I mention he smoked? In 2007, he said a gay slur on camera. Live TV. He apologized.

In another era, that might have been handled quietly, but by 2007, the show was in decline. Donations were falling. Affiliates were dropping the show or only airing part of it. Couldn’t draw the celebrities anymore. A lot of the people he had been friends with were gone by then.

And in 2011.. The MDA informed Jerry Lewis he had completed his run. He was 85 years old and had raised $ 2. 5 billion for them. Let’s remember it like this. It’s hour 18, and there’s a guy in a tuxedo who hasn’t slept.

He’s standing in front of a tote board in Las Vegas, smoking and doing whatever he needs to keep the thing moving for another hour. For charity. That’s your comedy news for today.

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