The Creator of ‘The Nutty Professor’ Had One Big Complaint About Eddie Murphy’s Remake
· Vice
By now, it’s pretty common knowledge that Eddie Murphy’s 1996 hit The Nutty Professor was a remake of the 1963 Jerry Lewis comedy of the same name. It should come as no surprise, then, that Lewis served as an executive producer on both the ‘96 version and its sequel, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, released in 2000.
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Murphy and Lewis first met more than a decade earlier, and Murphy even imitated Lewis to his face during a 1983 Saturday Night Live segment with Joe Piscopo. You can check out the clip in question right here:
Murphy also introduced Lewis at the 81st Annual Academy Awards in 2009. “Jerry has had a huge influence on my career, and the career of just about every other comic who’s working in movies today,” said Murphy before bringing Lewis on stage that evening.
“For all that he has given back, from one Nutty Professor to another, it is my pleasure and honor to present the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Mr. Jerry Lewis,” he continued:
17 Years Ago, Jerry Lewis Said One Scene Ruined Eddie Murphy’s ‘The Nutty Professor’
All things considered, you’d think Lewis would’ve had nothing but good things to say about Murphy as well, though that wasn’t entirely the case. Just one month prior to accepting the Hersholt award from Murphy, Lewis spoke to Entertainment Weekly about his involvement with the 1996 remake of The Nutty Professor.
And although he started off by calling Murphy “one of the five funniest men in the world,” Lewis went on to say that he wasn’t too happy with the way Murphy’s version of the movie turned out. In particular, Lewis took issue with this classic scene:
“When he had to do fart jokes, he lost me,” Lewis explained. In fact, Lewis actually went as far as to tell Murphy’s editor to get rid of the entire sequence if he wanted any more creative input from him, which, of course, didn’t happen. In the end, Lewis felt that what he did back in 1963 was “perfect,” and that letting somebody else try and do it over only served to diminish that perfection.
Despite having lent his voice to an animated Nutty Professor sequel the previous year, Lewis insisted in that same interview that he’d never put himself through something like that ever again—and he kept his word.
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