It’s always fun to dive into something that clearly influenced something you love. The Nutty Professor is very clearly the inspiration for Professor Frink on The Simpsons; in retrospect, the gag where Frink drank Grampa’s sex drug and suddenly talked like a New York wise guy is clarified for me. But I also see influence on the show’s sense of humour. The Nutty Professor is not a very good movie, and it’s bad in the way most American comedy films from the Sixties are; it’s mostly plotless, scenes drag on long past their point being made, and the dialogue isn’t so much a witty back-and-forth and escalation of punchlines as it is the vague idea of a thing having happened. It’s also bad in the sense that there are about a half-dozen actors but maybe two and a half characters in the whole film; this is almost neurotically focused on Julian Kelp and his alter-ego Buddy Love, and neither character is particularly interesting. I’ll cruelly suggest that the paucity of ideas driving this film come from Jerry Lewis having a complete lack of interest in the world at that time.

And yet, I can see how The Simpsons took ideas and potential from this and refined it into something better. There are moments where The Nutty Professor seems to come alive and spark into something funny; despite it going on too long, I enjoy the POV sequence of Buddy walking into the Purple Room before cutting to him – admittedly, partly because of the unintentional comedy of all that build-up leading to just some guy in a loud suit. The central notion of a shy guy bringing out his suppressed instincts is a compelling one – it is, after all, a riff on The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde – and Lewis’s performance is great, not just creating two entirely different caricatures but subtly shifting between them. I feel as if the whole movie got crushed into a few jokes on shows I like better.