Disability rights advocates have announced plans to protest the decision by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scientists to grant its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to comedian Jerry Lewis this weekend for his telethon work raising funds for muscular dystrophy.

They say that Lewis has stoked pity and prejudice toward people with disabilities, as well as women and gay people. Protests are planned in Hollywood for Friday, Saturday and Sunday by “The Trouble with Jerry,” a coalition supported by thirty-three advocacy organizations.

Patrick Goldstein, writing in the Los Angeles Times “Big Picture” blog, recaps some of Lewis’ more offensive public utterances over the years.

As any veteran Lewis watcher knows, when he says what he really feels, all hell often breaks loose. In 1990, he wrote a first-person essay for Parade magazine characterizing people with muscular dystrophy as “being half a person.” In 2000, being honored by the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, he said he had no interest in female comics, saying it “sets me back a bit. As a viewer, I have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.” In 2007, during his Labor Day telethon, he jokingly referred to one of his cameramen’s sons as “the illiterate fag.” He apologized, but last October, on Australian TV, he called cricket “a fag game.”

Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune says the humanitarian award amounts to “the wrong statuette for the right guy.” He says Lewis should have gotten an Oscar in 1964 for his work on “The Nutty Professor.”

The Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, defended the selection of Lewis for the award. In a letter responding to disability rights advocates,   Davis said Lewis had “long ago” stopped making ill-considered public statements. An excerpt:

Heroes are rarely perfect in every respect, and none of us has an obligation to pretend that we see only their heroic qualities. At the same time, our awareness of some scratches in the paint job shouldn’t lead us to dismiss the virtues of a Lamborghini.

Earlier post here.

(Image from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under celebrities, entertainment, humor, limb loss, NOT2BEMISSED, personal stories, public attitudes, spina bifida. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.