For those of a certain era, it was never Labor Day without the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon. The show, presented as a benefit for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, was a star-studded endurance test, with celebrities ranging from Sinatra to Charo to Don Rickles to Midori giving their all, the whole while with a toll-free number superimposed at the bottom of the screen.
The show began on Sunday evening and ran through late Monday afternoon. Jerry would emcee in varying degrees of sleep-deprived dishevelment. By the end, the bowtie was undone and the rumpled shirt unbuttoned, as he wrung out the final dollars and maybe even a few tears from a captivated television audience.
The telethon ran for 44 years, from 1966 to 2010, raising billions for MD research. For a good deal of its existence, it was broadcast from Las Vegas, with Ed McMahon serving as cohost. A super infusion of old-school showmanship – a glitzy, schmaltzy, backslapping, in-jokey exercise, turned to the service of a good cause – there really was nothing like it. It had an inexplicable magnetism, easy to make light of, but hard to look away.
Jerry opens the show in 2006 by conducting Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide Overture.”
Charo
Reunion with Dean Martin
Jerry brings it home with “You’ll Never Walk Alone”
There’s a whole channel devoted to this stuff on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/c/MDATelethon
And another one here