Dean & Me (A Love Story)

The people were laughing. Hard. Christ, what a sweet sound! More intoxicating than any booze. "Someone told me you had your nose fixed," I said in my 9-year-old voice.

"Yeah," Dean (Martin) said, pointing to his cheek. "It used to be here."

This got a roar of laughter. And I blinked. Something had happened in that instant, something only I had seen, and it was giving me goose bumps. Dean's ad lib had not just been fast but instantaneous. I'd already been in the business long enough to know how incredibly rare that was. Over the next sixty years, I would come to understand it better and better. The vast majority of comedians with good rhythm use beats—small hesitations, often with some comic business or other—to set up their jokes. Dean didn't use beats.

I was in the presence of magic.

I can't tell you what this looks like to somebody whose life is predicated on rhythm. Once we became a team, after we'd been together four or five years, there would be shows where I'd look at Dean and go, "Holy fuck." It was like being in a lab, watching this magnificent experiment come to life.

— Jerry Lewis

Dean & Me (A Love Story) / by Jerry Lewis / Copyright 2005 / page 42