Jerry Lewis has been on the move. He has a new book out about his relationship (professional and personal) with Dean Martin and has been on the talk show circuit to promote it. For a man who used to be one of the world's most popular comedians he is shockingly unfunny.

When interviewed, Lewis is a man who takes comedy very seriously, apparently because he no longer has the chops to make it funny. He waxes rhapsodic about what it means to make people laugh, the grave dangers of falling down for a living, and the kind of man Martin was. On NPR's Fresh Air, Terry Gross managed to set Lewis off on a serious discussion of how horrible it is to be stalked. Gross can encourage even the funniest guests to take themselves very seriously, but she was hardly alone in treating Lewis with a reverence that kept him safely away from anything resembling humor. One and all, those men and women assigned to do a story on Lewis essentially hailed him as a great former-comedian. So great in fact, that he is now to be taken very seriously and not laughed at at all.

The few times Lewis cracked out his trademark buffoonery for Gross, she chuckled politely and moved swiftly along. His act is tired and pathetically dated. Even leaving aside the very real question of whether his antics were ever funny, it is clear that now they are not. If Lewis is to appear on news and entertainment programs, it must be as a sort of living legend, an excellent exhibit from Madame Tussaud's, the most expert talking head on the subject of himself. He is recast as an over-earnest Jerry Lewis historian, no longer a funny man.

This is what happens to old comedians. The great ones get shuffled into a category reserved for successful people whose highest highs of popularity are behind them. The exact nature of their achievement becomes less important than that they were successful. The scope and breadth of that success gives programmers and interviewers something else to talk about. Lewis and his contemporaries are moving into that category of people who provide the bulk of the fodder for Biography, AFI top 100 specials, VH1 programming, and specials across sweeps months.

A love of nostalgia, top ten lists, and legends brushes aside the question of humor to get at the success, the greatness, the wonder. Tweedy-looking historians and frowning talk show hosts can intone things like, "At the peak of his popularity, Jerry Lewis was the funniest man in the world" with very straight faces. Nothing funny about it. We're talking about a legend.

Shows that traffic in sincerity and sentimentality, shows like Oprah and the news magazines, revel in getting funny people to be serious. If comedians were always funny how would the viewers at home know when they weren't being put on? How would they learn what comedians are "really like"? Comedies only win best picture Golden Globes because they have their own category, and listening to someone tell jokes is not enough for Katie Couric's audience to truly get to know him. People like Lewis make this transition from comedian interview to soul search easy. He's eager to be brought in on the act. He seems to relish this new role, finally taken seriously after so many years of playing the clown.

Comedy is about the unexpected and the new. Mr. Lewis and many old comedians are very much neither. They chose not to reinvent or reinvigorate themselves, perhaps cannot even find the space to do so in an entertainment industry that prizes the guaranteed financial return of formula. In short, they are out of the joke telling business. Still, it is bizarre to suddenly wax so philosophical about men and women whose job was to make us laugh. To take them so seriously, even if they have craved it all these years, seems a disservice. If we want to convey how funny these people once were why must we go about it in such an earnest, Bob-Costas kind of way? Couldn't we simply show an old Martin and Lewis act or film? Isn't the best way to really appreciate Johnny Carson to watch an old episode of the Tonight Show, rather than listen to the current crop of hosts wind on about how important he was? Instead of hearing how profoundly important Robert Klein was, let's see an old act of his. Instead of watching interviews with Bill Cosby opining about how it feels to be funny, put on one of his old records and listen to him be funny.

Canonization is not the only way to honor men and women who were funny and now have decided to spend their dotage off the edge of the unexpected. Dean Martin would know exactly what to do if he were still alive. He would roast Jerry Lewis within an inch of his life. Comedy Central has made a run at keeping the roast alive with its occasional airing of Friars Club events but when Pam Anderson is getting roasted one gets the sense they're taking the format in a different direction than Dino did. Nonetheless, laughing about, with, and at old comedians offers a more organic way of understanding and discussing people whose job is humor. Or at least, it allows us to acknowledge how influential Lewis was and still ridicule him for being a nattering simp.

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