In the immediate wake of the latest Children in Need extravaganza (the ethics of which have led to some decidely heated debate on the Ouch! Talk messageboard), now seems as good a time as any to report on what happened when a group of disability activists in Chicago heckled American comedian Jerry Lewis on his tour to promote his book, Dean and Me - a love story.

Jerry Lewis is a veteran presenter of telethons to raise money for the American Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). But comments such as, "Pity? [If] you don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair, stay in ya house!" - quoted here - have not exactly endeared him to disabled people in the US.

Lewis wrote a magazine article in 1990, entitled "What If I Had Muscular Dystrophy?", in which he described a wheelchair as: "that chair, that steel imprisonment that long has been deemed the dystrophic child's plight". The content of this article was deemed so offensive by many of the people whom the MDA supports that they formed a protest group, calling themselves Jerry's Orphans.

Members of Jerry's Orphans were amongst the group of disability activists who turned up at the lecture in the Harold Washington Library, Chicago, last week, and accused Lewis of demeaning them with pity during his telethons. It seems that Lewis's response to this heckling was, erm, somewhat heated. CBS News describes what happened next as "the legendary comedian's apparent meltdown".

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