The art here is commercial, and that's the beauty of it. In Tashlin's cultural geography, Greenwich Village and Madison Avenue are the same neighborhood, and satire is indistinguishable from toon-tinted aesthetic exuberance. While Dean Martin ekes out a living caressing scarlet paint onto enormous billboard lips, Jerry Lewis nurtures an obsession with the Bat Lady of pulp comic books, his idiot imaginings intersecting with reality at odd angles. In the atelier upstairs, comics illustrator Dorothy Malone and Bat Lady model Shirley MacLaine manufacture the fantasies that feed juvenile minds like Lewis's, and Malone's publisher pushes for ever more gore-these books are for kids, after all. Leave it to the French to bring all this back into the territory of capital-A Art: Jean-Luc Godard called the film “an acme of stupidity, but an acme in the same way as (Flaubert's) Bouvard et Pécuchet,” and Jacques Rivette cited it as the inspiration for Céline and Julie Go Boating.
—Juliet Clark