New biography of Jerry Lewis look-alike Sammy Petrillo, with a Drew Friedman cover
Drew says, "I've read it, it's incredible." The book, by Dave Abramson with a foreword by screenwriter Scott Alexander, is the first full biography of Petrillo. According to the publisher, it tells his story alongside Lewis's, drawing on original interviews with both men, their families, and show-business insiders, and covers the making of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and Petrillo's complicated relationship with Lewis. It comes with blurbs from Quentin Tarantino ("If he was starring in The Jerry Lewis Story, he would deserve an Academy Award.
- ▪Drew says, "I've read it, it's incredible." The book, by Dave Abramson with a foreword by screenwriter Scott Alexander, is the first full biography of Petrillo.
- ▪According to the publisher, it tells his story alongside Lewis's, drawing on original interviews with both men, their families, and show-business insiders, and covers the making of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and Petrillo's complic
- ▪It comes with blurbs from Quentin Tarantino ("If he was starring in The Jerry Lewis Story, he would deserve an Academy Award.
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| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/09/22/sammy-petrillo-your-time-is-now.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:28:34 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-22T20:53:57.337Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-22T20:53:57.337Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | yWTGOy-gScSC · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
New biography of Jerry Lewis look-alike Sammy Petrillo, with a Drew Friedman cover Mark Frauenfelder 1:28 pm Tue Sep 22, 2026 Sammy Petrillo biography — Cover art by Drew Friedman My friend, illustrator Drew Friedman, drew the cover art for Your Time Is Now: The Sammy Petrillo Story, a new biography of legendary Jerry Lewis impersonator Sammy Petrillo (star of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla). It came out today. Drew says, "I've read it, it's incredible." The book, by Dave Abramson with a foreword by screenwriter Scott Alexander, is the first full biography of Petrillo.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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