Everybody loves a clown, '60s sensation Gary Lewis once sang, but his father, Jerry Lewis, knew firsthand how heartbreakingly questionable that statement could be. As if to prove this point, in Hardly Working Lewis plays a circus clown who, in the opening sequence, thrills a Florida crowd that includes his sister (Susan Oliver) and her two young children. But a day of children's laughter turns into one of clowns' tears when the circus' owner announces that financial difficulties require him to break up the show. "He's a clown. I will not have him staying in my house," Oliver's husband, no lover of clowns, declares. But he soon finds himself playing host to his unemployed brother-in-law, as Lewis bounces from job to job. His clown work having long sheltered him from the real world, Lewis finds it filled with shtick-inducing peril. Though a disastrous stint as a gas-station attendant, ending with the near-destruction of a customer's car, would lead many to seek employment with less potential for accidents, Lewis' choices take him to both a glass-and-mirror factory and an antique store, with less than accident-free results. Stints in a disco, a strip club, and a Japanese restaurant (which, as a puzzling job requirement, forces Lewis to adopt the buck teeth, accent, and demeanor of a WWII-era Japanese stereotype) prove equally unsuccessful. But just as all hope appears lost, Lewis lands a job at the post office, which, though not devoid of opportunities for awkwardly choreographed slapstick, both suits him better and allows him to pursue postmaster Harold Stone's pretty single-mom daughter (Deanna Lund). But a clown can only hide his true nature for so long. Once Lewis begins to deliver the mail in full costume and makeup, he prompts a citywide incident, attracts a crowd led by an enthusiastic young man in a Boston T-shirt, and stretches the patience of the U.S. Postal Service to its breaking point. A postman no more, Lewis hits the road for Sarasota's Ringling Bros. Clown College. Lund joins him, proving that while not everyone loves a clown, some do so with enough fervor to abandon friends and family in pursuit of their passion.
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