"He who shall, so shall he who."

A young Jerry Lewis.

Detestable as Jerry Lewis is, he did some funny and even interesting things when he was young. The title of my post is something he once said when making fun of pious blowhards. He had his moments. So here's a blast from Jerry's past.

I think he did this on the Dick Cavett Show. Lewis said he was going to give Dick a memory test. He asked Cavett to repeat everything he said. He would say a line, wait for Cavett to repeat it, and then he'd say the first line again and add a second line to it. If you could repeat the two lines, he'd move on to the third. And so on. You'd have to repeat the whole thing back to him each time, and this went on for ten lines. These are the ten things he asked Cavett to repeat:

• One hen.
• Two ducks.
• Three squawking geese.
• Four limerick oysters.
• Five corpulent porpoises.
• Six pairs of Darnell Varizo's tweezers.
• Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array.
• Eight brass monkeys from the ancient, sacred crypts of Egypt.
• Nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity toward procrastination and sloth.
• Ten lyrical, spherical, diabolical denizens of the deep who haul stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the quivy, all at the same time.

I didn't remember the whole thing during the show. Nor could Dick or his guests say all ten things back to Jerry. But the next morning as a friend drove me to high school, we reassembled the ten items from our joint recollections of the show. I was probably about 14 then and I thought it was great fun. Just think -- now you can memorize it and try it on your friends. You know you want to.

This has always stayed with me. It's strange how some things burn their way into your brain, while others don't. Anyone else remember this?