Film

In his first major film role following a successful career in stand-up, Steve Martin plays Navin, an idiotic, rhythmically challenged white man who was adopted as an infant by a family of black sharecroppers. Upon discovering he can follow the beat of a Lawrence Welk song, Navin has a moment of revelation and decides to head to St. Louis, where he comes into his fortune with a new eyewear invention and falls in love with a cosmetologist (Peters, in one of her best screen roles). The Jerk is “such a soaring hymn to stupidity…that only the sanest souls could resist the temptation to join in with the chorus” (Time Out London).