Here are some highlights from Lewis’s “I have no effs left to give” interview:
“I always feel bad when somebody passes away. Except if it was Joan Rivers. Then I wouldn’t.”
“She set the Jews back 1,000 years. See, she went to Israel and uprooted two trees in my name.”
“Joan attacked me in the press. All she said was, ‘Jerry Lewis has to be thankful that he has the telethon because it helps his career.’ And then she went on and was even a little more salty. So I wrote her a note that night. I said, ‘Dear Ms. Rivers, we’ve never met, and I’m looking forward to keeping it that way. If you find it necessary to discuss me, my career, or my kids ever again, I promise you I will get somebody from Chicago to beat your goddamn head off. Now. P.S. You do know that you’re not allowed to threaten people, so if you go to our group downtown — if you go to Metro — show them this letter, they’ll arrest me. But I want you to never forget what it said.”
We’re talking some serious horse-head-under-the-bed-sheets action. “That was a real threat,” Rivers said, not quite believing that Jerry admitted it on the air. “We hired guards, my husband and I, it was a real serious thing.” Maybe Joan should have fought back? Her take was that when mafia threats are involved, “I’ll shut up. My last words are not gonna be ‘but I was only kidding.’”
By the way, Jerry’s assertion that he’d never met Rivers was untrue. In addition to Joan’s appearance on his telethon, Lewis was a guest on Rivers’ That Show in 1968, an episode in which he bragged about taking it to his kid with a leather belt. DO NOT MESS WITH JERRY LEWIS.
Eerily, Joan Rivers did pass away a few months after she and Lewis aired their dirty laundry on satellite radio. The official (and likely true) story was that Joan went into cardiac arrest during a medical procedure. But that hasn’t stopped online conspiracy theorists from concluding otherwise. Jerry Lewis never forgets.