"No film could be more devastating, more bitter in its humor, more brackish, with the richness of the invention constantly aggravated by the poverty of the situations, with the uneasy spectator...ending by roaring with laughter because it isn't funny at all...It is, in other words, an acme of stupidity. " (Jean-Luc Godard on Artists and Models). Dean Martin is the artist, a designer of horror comics; Jerry Lewis, the Greenwich Village-idiot who exists in a comic of his own subconscious creation. Meanwhile, Shirley MacLaine, the model for Bat Lady, lives with roommate Dorothy Malone in a world straight out of fifties glamor photography. Tashlin, a former cartoonist himself, retains something of the cartoon surface, speed and iconoclastic inanity in his comedies; his influence on Godard is manifest in films like A Woman Is a Woman. And like the IG artist-critics, as well, Tashlin depicts the almost total immersion of the individual into media-cured illusion-advertising, the movie star cult, and fashion.