Jerry Lewis: 'Women doing comedy bothers me'

Jerry Lewis says he doesn't like women comics (Getty Images)

Ladies? Don't make Jerry Lewis laugh.

Asked who his favourite female comics were at a Cannes Film Festival press conference, the American entertainer replied Cary Grant and Burt Reynolds. He then added: "I don't have any."

In 1998, Lewis famously said that watching women do comedy "sets me back a bit" and that he has trouble with the notion of would-be mothers as comedians.

Asked if he had changed his mind at all because of performers like Melissa McCarthy and Sarah Silverman, the 87-year-old Lewis said of women performing broad comedy: "I can't see women doing that. It bothers me."

"I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator," he said. "I just can't do that."

Lewis was in Cannes for the premiere of Max Rose, a drama directed by Daniel Noah in which Lewis stars as an aging jazz musician.

In her 2011 memoir, Bossypants, Tina Fey alluded to Lewis' attitudes about female comedians: "Whenever someone says to me, 'Jerry Lewis says women aren't funny,' or 'Christopher Hitchens says women aren't funny,' ... Do you have anything to say to that?'

"Yes," writes Fey. "We don't f***ing care if you like it."

AP