Contributor: How Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis forever changed comedy

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Set us as preferred Eighty years ago, though the Arsenal of Democracy had vanquished the Axis and weathered a withering Depression, the recovering American people found themselves rich in bills but short on laughs.Enter Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who debuted together on July 25, 1946.Unlike Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, or Hope and Crosby, who relied on tightly scripted setups, this disparate yet kindred duo captured America’s heart by being viscerally, uproariously and unpredictably wild.Martin and Lewis were the founding fathers of an anarchic, side-splitting brand of comedy that combined pratfalls, ad-libbed wordplay and a sustained demolition of the fourth floor.

Orson Welles observed that the duo’s combustible zaniness was so hilarious that it made you wet your pants.The boys cavorted about the stage, kibitzing with bandleaders and the audience alike.In between trading impromptu quips, Martin and Lewis overturned tables, cut ties, sheared suits and spritzed seltzer on one and all.The suave, dashingly handsome Italian crooner clowning around with his gawky, rubbery Jewish buddy brought the house down every time.

It was nonstop, jocular pandemonium: Commedia dell’arte 2.0.“Saturday Night Live,” Second City, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld and Adam Sandler all owe a debt to the artists who started life as Dino Crocetti and Joseph Levitch.Martin and Lewis created a novus ordo seclorum, in its way innovating like America’s founders, spawning a new comedic order of the ages.Their alchemy was as ineffable as it was infectious.Variety’s first review of the act noted, “All they do cannot be detailed, but virtually every bit of it is good for solid laughs.” Carl Reiner similarly declared: “I saw what I thought was the funniest ad-libbed thing I had ever seen.

It was a riot, and we never stopped laug...