As a baby, Navin Johnson was left in front of the hut of an African-American family and raised by them. As a grown up, Navin is naive and stupid, and decides to head off to St. Louis after hearing great music broadcast on the radio. He finds his first job at a gas station, but after an assassin persecutes him, Navin finds another job at a circus, where he loses his virginity with Patty, a daredevil who drives her motorcycle through a ring on fire. He then meets blond Marie and runs away with her, but she runs away from him later on. He accidentally invents an Opti-Grab for glasses, and an entrepreneur shares 50 % of his profits of the invention with him, making Navin a millionaire. However, after Carl Reiner sues him because Opti-Grab causes crossed-eyes, Navin goes broke and lands on the street. He is found by his family and Marie and brought back home.
Steve Martin's debut as a leading actor in a feature length movie, "The Jerk" is one of those cheap populist comedies that think that the masses only laugh at the "Look at how dumb he can be!"-situations, and rarely does something clever come out of this concept of a stupid protagonist. Unlike many other of those "idiot comedies", which are vulgar and dumb, this one is at least only dumb, yet its 'hillbilly jokes' are a hit-or-miss affair: some work, some don't. The story is highly episodic and thus it seems as if there were four films glued into one: characters and events come and disappear as random as they appeared. One example: at the circus, Navin had sex with Patty, a daredevil woman who dominates him and forbids him to see any other women. However, he goes out on a date with the blond Marie. Patty shows up with her motorcycle, claims she is together with Navin, and then Marie punches her. Cut to a scene of Navin and Marie singing on the beach at night (?), without ever mentioning Patty again. Did Marie complain to Navin for seeing another woman? The strangeness of this sudden shift seems to suggest that there was another sequence that was cut from the finished film.
Later on, Marie leaves Navin, and again the motivations of her actions (and that of other characters) are never quite explained. However, it at least leads to one of the best jokes in the film, the one where a naked Navin takes two small dogs to cover his intimate parts, and exit the house to walk on the garden, looking for Marie. The best gag involves director Carl Reiner appearing as himself on TV, suing Navin because his glasses caused him to become cross-eyed, which caused Reiner to yell "Cut!" too late, with a clip showing an actor thus driving a car down a hill. Other jokes, while dumb, at least have a good punchline here and there. One such cartoonish example has Navin attaching a car with three robbers to a nearby church with a rope, but the robbers just drive away with a demolished portion of a church attached to them, anyway, albeit in a slow pace. Navin then describes the criminals to the police on the phone: "No, I didn't get their license number, but you cannot miss them: they are driving a blue Chevy pulling a part of a church". M. Emmet Walsh is sadly wasted in his random, thin role of a sniper assassin. While a solid film, "The Jerk" is still a rather lame comedy that builds its story on humiliating its lead comedian, by showing him in an edition beneath his dignity, instead of the opposite, in an edition with class.
Grade:+
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