Is this the worst movie ever made? Dear readers, you will have to tell me, for lo, I haveth not the space on my hard drive, and besides, I’m afraid what all my cool documents will say about me behind my back if I force them to make room for the abomination which is The Day the Clown Cried.

This is proof positive that, no matter how awful a thing may be, how apocalyptically degenerate, how earth-shatteringly horrific, it will, in the fullness of time, get its own fansite.

Where’s mine, bitches?

The site includes not one but TWO scripts for downloading, a first draft and a final, along with comparative analysis (and never has the word “anal” been more apt) and a compendium of articles on this lost meisterstroke (and never has the word “stroke” aw, fergit it).

Lordy, I’m filthy-minded today. Good thing I work for a singles club!

In any case, here is a snippet from the very fine Spy article in which I first learned of the existence of this work of lost…crapitude. And here is the entire article, for those whose lives do not contain enough pain.

JERRY GOES TO DEATH CAMP by Bruce Handy
Illustrations by Drew Friedman
from “Spy Magazine” – May 1992

To artists and intellectuals, the twentieth century has posed no questions more vexing than these:

First, can art make sense of the Holocaust? 

And second, why do the French love Jerry Lewis?

The first question can’t really be answered, at least not in the space allotted here. As for the second, it’s my own opinion that the French have confused sloppy, uneven filmmaking with Godardian anti-formalism.  Regardless, raising these two issues on the same page is not just a pointless exercise in non-sequitur.  Because Jerry Lewis, like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi before him — not to mention the producers of the NBC ministeries Holocaust — has transformed the incomprehendible into art.

He did this two decades ago, in 1972, a year of cultural ferment that also saw a black man, Sammy Davis Jr., snuggle Richard Nixon on national television.  It was Lewis’ 41st film (but his first to deal with the mass destruction of European Jewry), and it turned out to be the most notorious cinematic miscue in history — unfinished, unreleased, said by the few who’ve seen it to be  almost unwatchable.  Oh, there are also Von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly and Welles’ Don Quixote, among other busts.  But no other film, seen or unseen, can boast both Nazi death camps and the auteur responsible for The Nutty Professor.

There is only one The Day the Clown Cried.

It sounds like a punchline in an overheated Hollywood satire:  Jerry Lewis in Auschwitz. Depending on your taste, the prospect may be as offensive or as inttriguing as … well, truly, no metaphor measures up to the particulars.  A synopsis:

An unhappy German circus clown is sent to a concentration camp and forced to become a sort of genocidal Pied-Piper, entertaining Jewish children as he leads them to the gas chambers.

The story is meant to be played as drama.  By all accounts, no one sings “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, and Tony Orlando does not appear.