Jerry Lewis remains one of Hollywood’s most influential comedy stars of all time – but the actor and director was also well known for his explosive personality away from the cameras.
Lewis was never afraid to speak his mind when he was unhappy, whether he was beefing with comedy rivals like Joan Rivers or complaining about being snubbed by the Academy Awards. While the comedian was widely recognized as a humanitarian for his work with the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA), his partnership with the charity eventually soured as well near the end of his life. Lewis even managed to hold a grudge from beyond the grave, as he notoriously disinherited his sons and grandchildren from his first marriage to Patti Lewis.
On what would have been Lewis’ 99th birthday on March 16, keep scrolling for a look back at some of the comedy legend’s most notorious public feuds:
Dean Martin
Lewis’s personal and professional life was defined by his on-stage partnership with Martin. The pair became one of the world’s most successful comedy duos after World War II, starring in 16 movies and selling out live venues across the globe.
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Lewis wrote in his 2005 book Dean and Me that the pair started to butt heads at the height of their success over Martin’s reluctance to follow his partner’s creative guidance. Martin was anxious to pursue solo projects, while Lewis was insistent that they were most successful when working together.
The two stopped speaking around the time of their final live performance at the Copacabana on July 25, 1956 – 10 years to the day after their first-ever performance – and would not reconcile for another 20 years.
Lewis told People in 2002 that he “broke up the act,” which he said “hurt [Dean] desperately.” The pair’s mutual friend Frank Sinatra famously organized a surprise reunion for Martin and Lewis on the 1976 MDA Telethon. The old friends briefly appeared together on stage to raise money for Muscular Dystrophy but didn’t reprise any of their old routines.
In the biography King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis, author Shawn Levy wrote that Lewis made “a few overtures” towards reconnecting with Martin after their TV reunion but was ignored. The pair wouldn’t speak regularly again until Martin’s son, Dean Paul Martin, died in a botched military training flight for the California Air National Guard in 1987.
Joan Rivers
The comedy icons took plenty of light-hearted jabs at one another throughout their careers, but it turned serious when Rivers publicly criticized Lewis’ charity work with MDA. During an appearance on Sirius XM Radio in 2014, Rivers vowed to never perform on the MDA telethon after observing Lewis openly discussing death in front of the children he was raising money for.
“You don’t say in front of a little boy who’s going to die, ‘This child is going to die,’” Rivers angrily declared. “Who are you? You unfunny, lucky, stupid a–hole? So, he took umbrage!”
Rivers was perhaps underestimating Lewis’ reaction, because he accused her of “setting the Jews back 1,000 years.” In his own Sirius XM interview that same year, Lewis said he would “always feel bad when someone passes away except for Joan Rivers.”
“She went to Israel and uprooted two trees in my name,” he joked during an interview with Maria Menounos.
Lewis objected to Rivers’s claim that the MDA telethon benefited his sagging career, adding: “I wrote her a note that night. I said: ‘Dear Ms. Rivers, we never met and I’m looking forward to keeping it that way.’”
The pair reportedly never reconciled before Rivers died as a result of complications from a throat procedure in September 2014.
Eddie Murphy
One of Lewis’s most iconic movie performances was his dual roles playing neurotic professor Julius Kelp and sinister playboy Buddy Love in 1963’s The Nutty Professor. Because Lewis cowrote and produced the comedy classic, Murphy had to get his permission to remake The Nutty Professor in 1996.
Lewis consented to Murphy’s remake, though he was disappointed by the film. Murphy spoke in press interviews around the time of The Nutty Professor‘s release about why he only loosely adapted Lewis’s original movie.
“The Nutty Professor is the skeleton of the script, and we stripped down the story to its bare bones and built it up to this whole different thing,” Murphy told the Los Angeles Times.
Despite Murphy describing his version of The Nutty Professor as “an homage to Jerry and how brilliant he was,” Lewis told Entertainment Weekly in 2009 that he regretted his involvement in the remake.
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“I have such respect for Eddie but I shouldn’t have done it,” Lewis insisted. “What I did was perfect the first time around and all you’re going to do is diminish that perfection by letting someone else do it. When he had to do fart jokes, he lost me.”
Lewis’ reservations aside, The Nutty Professor remake ushered in a career renaissance for Murphy and made a staggering $273 million at the worldwide box office.
Bing Crosby
In the early 1950s, two comedy duos ruled the roost in Hollywood – Martin and Lewis, and their predecessors Crosby and Bob Hope. All four men came together for a 1952 U.S. Olympics telethon, hosted by Hope and Crosby, where bad blood between the duos came to the surface live on air.
After being introduced, Lewis rushed to the stage and jumped on Hope, kissing him and hugging him in the trademark style of his energetic alter-ego “The Little Boy.” Crosby wanted no part of Lewis’s act and immediately left the stage. Lewis and Martin repeatedly called for Crosby to come back so they could continue their planned routine, but the cohost flatly refused.
“He’s hiding and I don’t blame him,” Hope joked to viewers.
Crosby never explained his live TV walk off, but there was speculation that he was afraid Lewis would pull off his toupee. In a TV interview decades later, Lewis confirmed that he “never spoke to Crosby” again after their telethon debacle.
“That he didn’t know me well enough to know I would never do such a thing [as pull off his toupee],” Lewis insisted. “I was so offended by it that, that was ’52, in the next eight years, I never talked to Crosby and our dressing rooms were right adjacent to one another.”
MDA
Lewis was the public face of the Muscular Dystrophy Association for more than 40 years and host of its annual Labor Day weekend telethon. The charity leaned into its association with the Hollywood superstar by referring to Muscular Dystrophy patients as “Jerry’s Kids.”
Throughout their decades of association, Lewis and MDA were criticised by some for using a “pity approach” to generate donations. Disability activists – including a group calling itself Jerry’s Orphans – complained about MDA’s fundraising tactic, saying it took away the agency of people living with Muscular Dystrophy to depict them as pitiable.
By the 2010s, the professional partnership between Lewis and MDA soured. Lewis famously had to apologize for using a homophobic slur in a joke on the telethon. He also had a history of making controversial statements during the annual show, such as the time he encouraged drug-traffickers in Miami to donate their earnings to MDA in order to absolve their guilty consciences.
In 2011, MDA announced that Lewis was abruptly stepping down from his role within the organization, though neither side offered any explanation as to why. Negotiations took place about Lewis saying goodbye to viewers on that year’s telethon, but terms were never reached. MDA declined to mention its long association with Lewis at all in all of the press materials for its telethon in 2012.
Lewis initially stayed silent about his split from MDA, but ultimately made it clear to Time magazine that he was unhappy about the way his departure was handled.
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“That’s not a place I want to go. Because if I go there, you’ll never get me back,” he warned in 2012. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it. But I have already ingested all that I want from that whole f—ing adventure.”
MDA rebranded its yearly televised fundraising drive as its Show of Strength, rather than calling it a telethon, following Lewis’s departure. In more recent years, Kevin Hart has become a spokesperson for the group in a role similar to the one Lewis once held.
The Lewis Children
Lewis had an acrimonious split from first wife Patti in 1980, with a legal war between the former couple carrying on for three years until they finally reached a divorce settlement in 1983. Jerry allegedly had a child with Lynn Dixon Kleinman outside of his marriage in 1952.
Following his divorce, the comic reportedly had a rocky relationship with his and Patti’s six sons, especially after he married second wife SanDee Pitnick in 1983. Jerry and SanDee’s daughter Danielle was born in 1992 and frequently appeared with her father on his annual MDA telethon.
In 2009, Jerry’s youngest son, Joseph Lewis, died by suicide after struggling with addiction throughout his life. Jerry reacted to his son’s death five years later by telling The Hollywood Reporter that the tragedy was “unfair.”
“To this day I don’t understand it because it’s unfair — not unfair to me, but unfair to him,” Lewis said . “That he went that way made the unfairness stupidity. But he was my son and he’s gone, and there’s not a lot I can do about that. I beat myself a thousand times. Sam will come to me and say, ‘Are we beating ourselves again?’ I will say, ‘A little bit.’ [She’ll say]: ‘You had nothing to do with that. You sent him out into the world when he was 25. You sent what you thought was a perfect human being. What he did with his time away from you is what the end result showed.’ But I’ll tell you this: You don’t get over that.”
Jerry died from heart failure at age 91 in 2017. It was later reported that Jerry’s will specifically stated that his sons and their children “shall receive no benefits” from his fortune.
Jerry’s son Gary Lewis – a musician who had a Billboard No. 1 hit with “This Diamond Ring” in February 1965 – was quoted saying his father was “never loving and caring” towards his children. However, Jerry and Patti’s son Christopher Lewis offered a more positive portrait of life with the comedian in a 2025 interview with Closer.
“I can’t tell you how many dinners I sat at that I couldn’t eat because I was laughing so hard,” Christopher recalled. “My mom would be so mad at him. She’s like, ‘Would you stop and let them eat?’ Which would inspire him more to make us laugh.”
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