title: The Joker is Wild: The Story of Joe E. Lewis
author: Art Cohn
description: This funny book: "The Joker Is Wild": is the biography of Joe E. Lewis, the funniest man who ever lived. A star performer whose impish parodies have made millions laugh. He was the biggest name in Chicago show business, one of the few entertainers who could make Al Capone laugh.
zlib_text: ![The Jokers cover](Images/cover00109.jpeg)
  
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  ![Logo](Images/image00110.jpeg)
  
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  ALBERT COSSERY (1913–2008) was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and
  Greek Orthodox Syrian descent who settled in Paris at the end of the Second
  World War and lived there for the rest of his life. The son of an illiterate
  mother and a newspaper-reading father with a private income from inherited
  property, Cossery was educated from a young age in French schools, where he
  received his baccalauréat and developed a love of classical literature. At age
  seventeen he made a trip to the French capital with the intention of
  continuing his studies there. Instead he joined the Egyptian merchant marine,
  eventually serving as chief steward on the Port Said–New York line. When he
  was twenty-seven his first book, _Men God Forgot_ , was published in Cairo
  and, with the help of Henry Miller, in the United States. In 1945 he returned
  to Paris to write and live alongside some of the most influential writers and
  ar