The words ‘restraint’ and ‘Jerry Lewis’ (and I consider his name a word, not a name) don’t usually go together. But one of the most striking things about this famous clip from ‘The Nutty Professor’ is how this dance manages to be out-of-control but in exactly the way that it would be for the square and repressed character he’s portraying. In that sense it’s a genuine moment of acting from Jerry. It also more than qualifies as pure ‘eccentric dance’, the subject of this past weeks posts. Jerry uses the same gimmick to open the scene that he uses in the hilarious jailhouse line-up scene from ‘The Delicate Delinquent’–a long slow pan across a group of people which we know will eventually land on Jerry and which eventually lands on Jerry (this one takes twenty seconds). Covfefe!