Plot
Professor Julius Kelp (Jerry Lewis), is a nerdy, unkempt, buck-toothed, introverted, accident prone, socially inept university professor whose experiments in the classroom laboratory are less than successful...and hilariously destructive. When a football-playing bully humiliates and assaults him, Kelp decides to "beef up" by joining a local gym. Kelp's failure to succeed in the gym prompts him to invent a serum that turns him into the handsome, extremely smooth, cool, and obnoxious girl-chasing hipster, Buddy Love.
This new found persona gives him the confidence to pursue one of his students, Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens). Although she despises Love, she finds herself strangely attracted to him. Buddy wows the crowd with his jazzy, breezy musical delivery and cool demeanor at the Purple Pit, a nightclub where the students hang out. The formula wears off at inopportune times, often to Kelp's embarrassment.
Although Kelp knows that his alternate persona is an arrogant person, he cannot prevent himself from continually taking the formula as he enjoys the attention that Love receives. As Buddy performs at the annual student dance the formula starts to wear off. His real identity now revealed, Kelp gives an impassioned speech, admitting his mistakes and seeking forgiveness. Kelp says that the one thing he learned from being someone else is that if you don't like yourself, you can't expect others to like you. Purdy meets Kelp backstage, and confesses that she prefers Kelp over Buddy Love.
Eventually, Kelp's formerly henpecked father chooses to market the formula (a copy of which Kelp had sent to his parent's home for safekeeping), endorsed by the strait-laced president of the university who proclaims, "It's a gasser!" Kelp's father makes a pitch to the chemistry class, and the students all rush forward to buy the new tonic. In the confusion Kelp and Purdy slip out of the class. Armed with a marriage license and two bottles of the formula, they elope.
Read more about this topic: Buddy Love
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—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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