COMEDY REVIEW : ‘Jerry Lewis’: Corny, Outdated Slapshtick : The legendary comedian’s gifted intelligence and razor-keen instinct are missing from his 2 1/2-hour multimedia show.

The “Jerry Lewis . . . Unlimited” show, whose national tour has come to the Southland this weekend, plays nearly 2 1/2 hours without intermission, which is symptomatic of Lewis’ comedy career: No second act.

There’s no doubt that Lewis has had a spectacular show-biz life (if there is, read his program notes), and that his rubber-boned, cross-eyed, slack-jawed geek was one of the funniest characters ever to bound through the lead-booted world of ‘50s and early ‘60s movies.

“Jerry Lewis . . . Unlimited” makes liberal use of film clips from “The Errand Boy,” “The Nutty Professor” and “The Bellboy”--which still hold up. And in fact the multimedia show plays as a picture album on Lewis’ professional life, with highlights like his staged reunion with Dean Martin after years of estrangement (with Frank Sinatra as onstage interlocutor) and some of the nuttiest segments from his Muscular Dystrophy Assn. telethons that may have been missed by the ingrates among us who didn’t sit up for those entire marathons.

In the meantime, Jerry tells jokes (about Poles, Mexicans, old people and sex). Jerry sings. Jerry dances. Jerry does magic tricks. Jerry conducts the 17-piece Jerry Lewis orchestra, and turns to remind us that Gershwin is very difficult (which we can see).

Jerry, who at 67 looks in terrific shape, occasionally appears to tire and pauses to give us the skinny about show business, like how those lights lining the edge of the stage floor are called footlights. Or that what some people call question-and-answer periods, he calls rap sessions and has been conducting them since before Carol Burnett got her nose job.

House lights up. Folks get to talk to Jerry, in this case at Citrus College in Azusa Thursday night (the show moves to the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts this weekend). A nervous young couple gets up with a garbled question, and he tells them they “look like two perfect schmucks.” A somewhat chubby woman in black velour dress with a delicate white collar rises to say that she’s waited 42 years to meet him and that he’s the second most meaningful man in her life besides her father.

“Hear that?” Lewis yells to the band. “That’s the broad I been telling you about! There’s enough for everyone!”

“Jerry Lewis . . . Unlimited” feels more like a Las Vegas revue than a theatrical summing up. There are corny bits, the jokes no one tells anymore, the post-Catskills Jewish spritzing, the playing to the band--and the later disclaimer “I don’t want it to seem like I’m playing inside humor. It’s just that these are all such great guys.”

Jerry Lewis is far from tired. Would that were true of his act. Listening to him explain too much, carry his routines too far, and pound the comic buoyancy out of everything he tries, you wonder where he’s left the gifted intelligence that makes him such a superb straight actor (as in “The King of Comedy”), or the razor-keen instinct with which he sliced up Billy Crystal in “Mr. Saturday Night.”

The rap on Lewis by his knowledgeable peers is that he was never able to metamorphose his Idiot persona beyond post-adolescence, and you can see here how he shored up his incapacity for change by taking refuge, like so many other stalled performers, in Las Vegas, where time never registers. Seeing him live, you realize that he hasn’t caught on to American comedy’s metamorphosis from slapstick to satire.

More critically, he doesn’t have a nose for what’s in the air, an indispensable item in any comedian’s survival kit. Regardless of the tyranny of political correctness, Lewis does not bring a sensitive act, which severs every link to his audience except that of nostalgia. Maybe that’s because he’s lived all his life in show business, without real-world references. He sings for his 18-month-old daughter at show’s end; his love for her is undeniable. But it feels like just another part of the act.

* At the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts tonight and Sunday, 8 p.m. , 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. (800) 300-4345.