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“The Jerk” is a hilarious comedy starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. The film is a showcase of Martin’s off-the-wall comedy characteristic of his early films and comedy routines. “The Jerk” tells the story of Navin R. Johnson (Martin), who was born “a poor black child”, being raised in a little shack on a farm in Mississippi. He doesn’t learn that he’s not their natural son until his 35th birthday. The next morning, after hearing an easy listening music broadcast on his radio, he decides to get out in the world and be somebody. He heads toward St. Louis, which is where the radio broadcast was coming from. The original stop on his journeying is to a gas station, where he works as an attendant for $1.10 an hour, which is a fortune to him. He narrowly escapes being killed by a lunatic madman after hiding out in a carnival, which becomes his next job. At the carnival he meets a tough biker woman who teaches him his special aim in life through sex. Later he meets and falls in love with Marie (Peters), a much nicer woman, who’s looking for someone with a particular purpose. The kinship lasts for a month, but she ends up leaving him. Navin wanders to Los Angeles with his dog Shithead, where he strikes it rich with the invention of Optigrab, a nose handle on eyeglasses to keep them from slipping off. He marries Marie and buys a mansion in Beverly Hills. Shortly afterward, however, he ends up getting sued because his invention makes persons cross-eyed. He loses all his money, leaves his wife and wanders into the ghetto. In the end, however, his family from Mississippi find him and pick him up along with Marie, and they end up moving back to Mississippi.
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caveat emptor (buyer beware)
Sondheim and Bernadette Peters – what could be better?