Buddy Lester was the man Jerry Lewis's clown needed to annoy: a heavy with a scarred mouth who took each indignity slowly and let it build. The parts were small; in The Ladies Man the slow burn is the funniest sustained thing in the film.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the hat. In The Ladies Man (1961) Jerry Lewis's Herbert ruins it in stages, and Buddy Lester, as Willard C. Gainsborough, does not explode. He takes each new insult in, lets it settle in the face, and waits. Lewis built that film around a boarding house with no front wall, and the house is the star, but Lester's slow burn is the funniest sustained thing in it. We laughed harder each time the hat came back, because each return was worse than the last and his face always had further to fall.
He came out of Chicago variety, performing as a child in the 1920s with his brother Jerry Lester, and after Navy service in the war he worked the nightclubs as a stand-up and the radio as a host. Films came late. His screen debut was in 1959, playing himself in The Gene Krupa Story. In the 1960s he turned up in the Rat Pack pictures, Ocean's Eleven (1960) as Vince Massler and Sergeants 3, and in a run of Jerry Lewis comedies: The Nutty Professor (1963) as a bartender, The Patsy (1964) as the MC at the Copa Café. Seven Lewis films in all, across two decades, and a regular place on The New Phil Silvers Show. Then television through the 1970s, police series and sitcoms, with a recurring bookie on Barney Miller. The stand-up never stopped.
What he did was play the heavy. The scar to the right of his mouth let him play menace, and he played it with a wink: bartenders, bookies, drunks, MCs, the men who stand behind the star and are not amused. He said of himself, "I was no thespian. I did the drunk thing on screen - stuff like that." That undersells it. The drunk thing is hard, and the straight man's thing is harder. Lewis needed someone whose stillness made his flailing read, and Lester supplied a stillness with a threat in it. The hat gag only works because of whose hat it is.
The parts were small, and some films did nothing with them. Hardly Working (1980), Lewis's return to directing, casts him as Claude Reed, a post-office floor manager, and we found no reason to mention him in our review; the film is slack and shapeless and wastes most of what it has. The Party (1968), for Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers, is there for anyone who wants him outside the Lewis orbit, though we have not reviewed it.
Start with The Ladies Man, and watch the man whose hat it is rather than the man ruining it.
Biography
Buddy Lester was an American actor and comedian. He appeared in character roles in numerous films and television series from the late 1950s to the 1980s, and was also known for his work as a stand-up comedian on the nightclub circuit.
Lester's film credits include Ocean's Eleven (1960), The Ladies Man (1961), The Nutty Professor (1963), The Patsy (1964), The Party (1968) and several other Jerry Lewis comedies. On television he guest-starred in series such as Barney Miller, Starsky & Hutch, Kojak and The Odd Couple.
