The Nutty Professor lives eternal. The famous Jerry Lewis comedy movie is a Jekyll-and-Hyde story about nice, nerdy, awkward professor Julius Kelp and his alter-ego, the arrogantly charismatic swinger and singer Buddy Love, who emerges to help Kelp woo a hot student (Stella Stevens) and charm the student body any time Kelp drinks a secret formula. At a recent event at the Friars Club in New York City honoring the 50th anniversary of the landmark film — out now in a deluxe Blu-ray box with loads of bonus features and collectible items including storyboards, a 40-page excerpt of the shooting script, and the CD collection Phony Phone Calls — 88-year-old star/director/producer/co-writer Jerry Lewis delved into the creation of his seminal comedy. Here's what we gleaned from his and others' words.

The story has had five different incarnations. Beyond its original 1963 release, The Nutty Professor was remade and sequelized by Eddie Murphy in 1996 and 2000. An animated sequel to the original with voicework by Lewis arrived in 2008, and a musical performed in Nashville two years ago is headed for Broadway this November.

The forthcoming Broadway musical will not be a modern take on the tale. Due to hit the Great White Way in November, The Nutty Professor will stay rooted in the sixties. With a book by Rupert Holmes and score by the late Marvin Hamlisch, it will not be a contemporary updating, nor will the character be changed. "You can't fool with it," Lewis says. "If you're going to do it in another form, you have to respect what you did in the first place. They're not coming to you to do it in another form because they didn't like it. They must've liked it, so you leave it alone."

Buddy Love was sexy. You know what? A girl always falls for confidence, always and forever." —Comedian Carrie Keagan

Over the decades, women have swooned over Julius Kelp's jerky alter-ego Buddy Love. "The mail we got from women amazed me," Lewis says. "They loved Buddy Love. I wanted to write them back: 'Why do you love him? He's a bastard. He's a nasty, ill-mannered, rude, discourteous bastard.'" Why does Lewis think they liked him? "Because he's a rude, discourteous bastard. There's something wonderful about someone that's ugly, mean, and ill-mannered, something wonderful about looking at them because you're being reminded you're not like that. So you're enjoying seeing that they're like that. There's a lot of psychological nonsense that goes on when you're dealing in love/hate relationships, and there's a lot of stuff that goes on that needs to be touched upon, needs to be featured importantly." Comedian Carrie Keagan adores the character of Buddy Love, and when asked why women fall for an arrogant guy like that, she answers honestly, "Because he was sexy. You know what? A girl always falls for confidence, always and forever."

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I made a fortune, I'm happy to say." —Jerry Lewis

The movie was bankrolled with some of the Lewis's own money, and made him plenty back. The film was budgeted back then at $4.7 million (about $37 million today), which was big for the time, and was made using some of Lewis's personal money. He happily remarks that he has made it back "about 100 times." When asked about his thoughts on the highly successful remake, he quips, "I made a fortune, I'm happy to say. It was very, very good. Eddie [Murphy] did a second one and is talking to me now about a third. I said, 'Jesus Christ, Eddie, why would you do a third one?' He said, 'So I can fill up your bank account.' I said, 'Go for it.'"

It took nearly 20 years for the story to gestate. Lewis was enthralled by Spencer Tracy's film rendition of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when he was 12 or 13 years old, and the idea of a musical comedy version slowly evolved in his brain over nearly two decades. "I just always had a strong feeling that any classic could be utilized in comedy," the star recalls. "Well, that's not the case. You don't want to do Medea and do comedy. But this worked for me. I didn't know what would work until I started on it, and as I worked and as I wrote I kept getting much more confident that I had a winner, but it took a long time." When Lewis finally sat down to write it in the late fifties, he created seven drafts over the next five years, then joined co-writer (and future three-time Emmy winner) Bill Richmond, who worked on two more drafts before they went back to the original and tweaked it as they could not top that first version.

Lewis wrote a book for the cast and crew to boost morale. Included in the new box set is a 96-page book by Lewis called Being a Person that juxtaposes positive sayings and black-and-white illustrations. "You know, I had some questions about including that because I wrote it specifically for a couple of hundred people," says Lewis of the rarely seen document. "On the first page is a disclaimer, why I wrote it. I wrote it one night because I saw a couple of guys on the crew looking at their watch not having a great time. I only saw one or two of them, but they can become contagious. I didn't want my crew to pick up on that."

There were no boundaries with Jerry Lewis." —Russell Simmons

Jerry Lewis influenced Def Comedy Jam. Russell Simmons grew up with the movies of Jerry Lewis and his late comedy partner Dean Martin. Simmons was influenced by "his freedom because he was a person who went anywhere. There were no boundaries with him. He had a character that he played in many of his movies, this character that had so much freedom you didn't know where he was going. With most comedians, you kind of get their humor. Again, his was without boundaries and he could do anything at any time. That was the thing about him, that he was able to do so much broad comedy. It inspired me with Def Comedy Jam." The media mogul would later go on to co-produce the 1996 remake starring Eddie Murphy.

Julius Kelp had a real-life counterpart. In the bonus feature The Nutty Professor: Perfecting the Formula in the new box set, Lewis explains that in 1955, he and Dean Martin made a fan on the train from Chicago to New York, and he had a voice similar to the one Lewis utilized in portraying the Nutty Professor. "Lewis as an actor was fascinated by the mannerisms and the voice, and he was really this guy as he's talking to him," says Lewis historian James Neibaur in the documentary. "And I guess he talked to him for hours."

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Jerry Lewis being honored at the Friars Club.

Julius Kelp is the ancestor of Professor Frink. The bumbling, brilliant, nutty professor of The Simpsons fame, with his oddball mannerisms and vocal tics, is descended from Kelp's kookiness. Legend has it that when actor Hank Azaria first ad-libbed his voice for the animated character, he mimicked Lewis's portrayal of Kelp. Everyone liked it so much that they altered the look of Frink to be closer to the buck-toothed persona of his live-action inspiration. Lewis later did the voice of Frink's dad in the 2003 episode of the show's annual "Treehouse of Horror" anthology.

The Nutty Professor is Detective Munch's uncle. Okay, we're stretching things a bit. But Lewis and actor/comedian Richard Belzer have been friends over the last 15 years, which probably led to Lewis playing Detective John Munch's uncle on an episode of Law & Order: SVU in 2006. "As early as I can remember, people called me Jerry Lewis because I looked like him when I was a little kid," says Belzer, who introduced Lewis to Friars Club members as "Jerry Fucking Lewis." "I saw him when I was five years old in 1949, and because I looked like him I would imitate him. Everybody called me Jerry Lewis all through high school. Then I met him in the early '80s. Over the last 15 years, we've been very tight. It's a thrill for me to hang out with my idol, literally."

Anybody that is not a fan of Jerry Lewis has no taste." —Ed Norton

The film's influence is even greater than you realize. "Anybody that is not a fan of Jerry Lewis has no taste," proclaimed actor Ed Norton at the Friars Club. "Any chance to celebrate someone like Jerry Lewis you should come out for because he's really one of the godfathers of the modern industry. Half of what you see in modern goofball comedy today comes from The Nutty Professor."

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