Recalling the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon

Happy Labor Day, for those who celebrate. Does anyone? Labor Day is one of our most peculiar non-holiday holidays. Ostensibly it’s the official day to celebrate the workers, but everyone knows the real day to celebrate the workers is May Day. That’s the day that capture one’s imagination. The September date was chosen precisely to uncouple celebration of workers from association with organized labor. Thus it has no resonance, no poetry, no inspiration. But there’s a picnic! So, in the end, it really amounts to being a holiday to celebrate the end of summer, with the highlight being the season’s last picnic. The only time labor is actually spoken of is when people mention that they have the day off (unless they don’t). It, very frankly, isn’t very special.

For nearly 50 years there was also another Labor Day ritual for people to enjoy, and its nature as a televised event made it similar in some ways to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball Drop. It had nothing to do with labor, but it did add a little glamor and excitement to the day, interspersed with long stretches of tedium. I refer of course to the annual Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon. MDA of course refers to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the producer of the program and recipient of the charity. Lewis began hosting the telethon starting in 1966. A truly interesting choice, given Lewis’s long history of playing characters whose muscles didn’t work very well.

From Lewis’s perspective, it presented the comedian an opportunity to assert to the world that he had a heart. And to bring the point home he would spend the 21 or so hours of the telethon not so subtly pointing out what a saint and martyr he was, untying his bow-tie and mopping the sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief. The camera doesn’t lie though, especially when Lewis would do things like present a child with muscular dystrophy to the audience, proclaiming, “Look at this: God goofed. And it’s up to us to correct his mistakes.” Lewis took a lot of heat for that. But on the flip side, he raised millions of dollars for the charity. So he was able to join the ranks of the great charity comedians, like Eddie Cantor, who founded the March of Dimes, and Danny Thomas, who founded the St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. The term “telethon” had been coined in response to Milton Berle’s 16 hour performance to raise money for the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. As long as the phones kept ringing and the numbers on the tote board kept increasing, it was hard to fault Jerry for the occasional gaffe.

I watched the show every year when I was a kid (the 1970s), and so I saw such historic moments as Dean Martin showing up to surprise Jerry in 1976, their very first reunion since they had broken up 20 years earlier. But I must say most of the entertainment was not calculated to appeal to kids. Most of it was pretty Vegassy, and during its peak years Jerry presented the main part of the show from various venues in Las Vegas. The kind of performers you saw the most were acts like Norm Crosby, Charo,Sammy Davis Jr, Wayne Newton, and Jack Jones. Ed McMahon was the announcer. These were not performers all the kids were crazy about. My favorite singers and musicians from the radio were conspicuously absent. The telethon definitely seemed to be taking place in a parallel show biz universe. Yet one watched every year. And people wrote checks. Those who wrote the bigger checks got their names mentioned on television.

By the 2010s things had changed considerably. Lewis was well into his ’80s, and the kinds of acts he was able to book tended to be even less prestigious than Wayne Newton or Jack Jones. Lewis was then “retired” against his will, and the event was reduced in scale to where it was no longer of marathon length. Eventually the whole event was quietly retired. They still haven’t found a cure for MD, though.

For more on show business history,please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous; and keep an eye out for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.