The Day the Clown Cried. Part 1: Are We Sure This Is A Good Idea?

The wait is over!

Don't get too excited.

Sometimes a bad idea transcends simple awfulness and achieves such a baffling level of... wrongness... that it defies explanation.

We found something that perfectly epitomizes this idea.

In 1972 Jerry Lewis, for reasons that only he could possibly fathom, decided to make.... well, a concentration camp comedy. About a clown named Helmut Doork. In a concentration camp. Who entertains children. Children in line for... I wager you can finish the rest of that sentence.

The result was a movie so profoundly wrong that it has, to this day, never been released. Lewis swears to have the only copy, and that it will NEVER be released.

After reading the script, which is available online, I can understand why.

Over the past 42 years there has been one public screening. Harry Shearer was present for a screening of the rough cut in 1979. He described this way
...
With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. "Oh My God!" — that's all you can say.

Well, after finding the script Jim decided that the world needed to know about this.

So, in a special mini-series event, The Film Thugs present the first public performance of the most notorious unreleased film of all time.

Over the course of the next few weeks, join us as we delve into a work that should not exist as we try and figure out how and why this thing happened.

Please note that we are not making light of the subject matter in any way, shape, form, or fashion. To do so would be monstrously wrong.

What we are doing is waging war on the unfettered ego and painfully obvious Oscerbating that is "The Day the Clown Cried."

Please note that this performance is intend as satire and parody, and is presented in a transformational way for both critical and educational purposes.

That being said, we are very sorry. And may God have mercy on our souls.