It would have to be pretty bad to embarrass Jerry Lewis. Never heard of this, but it does have entries in IMDB and Wikipedia:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068451/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Clown_Cried
Helmut Doork, a once great and famous clown, is fired from the circus. Getting drunk at a local bar, he pokes fun at Hitler in front of some Gestapo agents, who arrest and send him to a prison camp. Helmut angers his fellow prisoners by refusing to perform for them, wanting to preserve his legend. As times passes, Jews are brought into the camp, with fraternizing between them and the other prisoners strictly prohibited. Eventually, Helmut is forced by the others to perform or be beaten. His act bombs and he leaves the barracks depressed, trying the routine out again alone in the prison yard. He hears laughter and sees a group of Jewish children watching him through a fence. Happy to be appreciated again, he makes a makeshift clown suit and begins to regularly perform. His audience grows, but a new prison Commandant orders Helmut to stop. When he refuses and continues to perform, he’s beaten and thrown in solitary confinement. But the Nazis soon come up with a use for Helmut, keeping the children quiet as they are loaded into a boxcar to be sent to another camp. Helmut complies, but is accidentally locked in with the children and arrives the next day at Auschwitz.
This was the notorious, unreleased Jerry Lewis film.
Has this ever appeared on network t.v.? For some reason I recall a movie with Jerry Lewis in a clown outfit in a prison-type setting on t.v. in the late 1970s/early 1980s.
Jerry Lewis once allowed Harry Shearer to watch the film, and he wrote an article about it. It might be online somewhere. It’s probably a very bad film, but hardly anyone has actually seen it, so its horrible reputation is based entirely on the premise of putting a goofy comic into a concentration camp and mixing humor with Nazi atrocities. Years later came “Life Is Beautiful,” a film that was beloved and racked up Oscars. Not to imply that Jerry’s film was anywhere on that level of quality, but remember, he wasn’t savaged by people who saw the film, just by people who were outraged at the idea.