At some point in his long career, the comedian Jerry Lewis slipped from delivering punchlines to becoming one. He had been chic for a time in the late forties, according to the filmmaker Orson Welles, when his act with Dean Martin had left audiences gasping, but it was downhill after that. By the time Lewis was profiled in The New Yorker, in 2000, he was on the upswing. Eddie Murphy’s recent remake of his film “The Nutty Professor” had been a smash (even if Lewis disapproved of certain changes), and Lewis’s annual charity telethon, widely mocked for at least a generation, was arguably “becoming respectable again.”

Lewis would have turned a hundred next week; in the New Yorker piece, he performs for a centenarian and remarks that he, too, would “settle for a hundred.” (He was ninety-one when he died, in 2017.) Sixty-eight at the time, Lewis remained famously egotistical, divisive, and (to some) hilarious—and he was ready to talk candidly, with the writer James Kaplan, about the extreme ups and downs that his life had taken. There was the notorious breakup of his partnership with Martin, who had told him, “You’re nothing to me but a fucking dollar sign”; the son he’d disowned after an embarrassing tabloid exposé (“He’s in Forest Lawn. I buried him”); the admission that he hadn’t remembered his emotional reunion with Martin, which took place on live TV, because he’d been high on Percodan. But there was also a renewed respect from his peers. A few months earlier, Martin Scorsese had presented Lewis with an award at the Venice Film Festival, and one of Lewis’s technical innovations as a filmmaker was in nearly universal use on sets. Lewis had survived a double-bypass surgery, and he still had the strength to express fury over performing in front of an audience he considered too small. And his famous self-regard soldiered on. “I don’t give a shit if people think I have a fantastic ego,” Lewis told Kaplan. “I’m as good as they get.”