In the 1950s, American culture suddenly blew up. Cinemascope doubled the size of movie screens, televisions burst into living rooms everywhere, comic books were a four-colored geyser drowning the newsstand under hundreds of titles, rock ‘n’ roll came screaming out of nowhere to own the airwaves, and Hollywood went crazy for epics: Biblical epics, Western epics, musical epics. What motion pictures needed was a plus-sized director who could stand up to this mushroom cloud of pop culture; what they got was animator-turned-gagman Frank Tashlin.

Film historians like to say that Tashlin, who will be remembered with a week-long retrospective beginning tonight at Film Forum, directed his cartoons like live action and his live action like cartoons. It’s hard to argue when confronted with his characters, who spurt steam out of their ears, address the camera like a best friend, and break the laws of physics like pretzel sticks.

Tashlin, a native of Weehawken, N.J., got his start animating “Looney Tunes” in the early 1940s before becoming the go-to guy for comedy as one of the few directors to successfully make the transition from animation to live-action, shaping star vehicles for one outsized celeb after another: Bob Hope, Jayne Mansfield and, most famously, Jerry Lewis. But it was the way he depicted the modern world — in the broad, dynamic strokes of a cartoonist — that made him the quintessential director of the 1950s. Let other men dabble with wordplay, double entendre, and irony. Tashlin was in it for the sight gag, the prop comedy, and the wolf whistle.

Nowhere is his love of scale more obvious than in his best movie, “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” (1957), which kicks off with the 20th Century Fox logo looming ominously over the audience as Tony Randall performs the studio’s theme tune in a frenetic one-man-band down in a corner of the screen.

Ad man Rockwell Hunter (Randall) lusts for the key to the executive washroom, but the Stay-Put lipstick account is leaving and everyone at his firm is facing the axe. In a fit of desperation he forges a deal with the devil: Movie queen Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield) will endorse Stay-Put if he pretends to be her unlikely loverboy; the publicity will be good for her and her endorsement will keep Stay-Put put. The moral of the movie, not quite as cheery as the sight gags, is that success is the source of all human misery. It was the first film to reveal the dirty little secret behind modern day show biz: Content is what comes between commercials. Crammed with fabulous ’50s furniture, featuring Mansfield squeaking and whinnying like a deflating helium balloon, and overflowing with a roaring, red-blooded sexuality, “Will Success” shades its Technicolor surfaces with the grim futility of human folly.This from the same man who wrote a children’s book (his last of four, not surprisingly) suggesting that a nuclear holocaust was an appropriate solution for the problems of society.

In his day, one of Tashlin’s biggest problems was his close association with Mr. Lewis, who is the chemotherapy of comedy; taken in small doses he’s all right, but prolonged exposure can kill you. When Mr. Lewis remarked that Tashlin taught him everything he knew about comedy it was a mixed endorsement at best. As Mr. Lewis became more famous, his pictures became clogged with syrupy sentiment, until finally they ground to a halt with the unreleased monstrosity, “The Day the Clown Cried,” in which he played a clown leading Jewish children to concentration camp gas chambers (it was described by one of the few people unlucky enough to have seen it as “…a black velvet painting of Auschwitz.”)

Tashlin joined the Martin and Lewis juggernaut earlier, just as the wildly successful duo was starting to show strain. Their first feature together is generally considered one of the their best, “Artists and Models” (1955), a pulp-colored tumble through the world of violent comic books which hit theaters just after the infamous Senate hearings on violence in comic books.

Tashlin returned a few years later for the last Martin and Lewis picture, “Hollywood or Bust” (1956), generally considered one of their worst outings. To a modern viewer, however, the two movies are almost identical: simpleminded, long-winded, but nicely upholstered.

Once Martin and Lewis split, Tashlin’s solo Lewis movies were usually crippled by the star’s taste for the sweet stuff, such as the gag-inducing inspirational note written to an attempted suicide in “The Disorderly Orderly” (1964), which reads, “You said you couldn’t live without love. But I love you.”

“It’$ Only Money” (1962) is one of the few that works. Shoehorned into a noir scenario about an unscrupulous gigolo scheming to hijack a will, Mr. Lewis plays the deceased’s long-lost son, pushing his moronic lonely guy persona to cosmically weird heights. If Mr. Lewis ever sues Jim Carrey for stealing his act this picture will be Exhibit A.

Onscreen, Mr. Lewis was uninterested in sex, a major handicap for Tashlin, who never met a dirty joke he didn’t like. Fortunately, Bob Hope movies were on hand as a safety vent for his hyperactive hormones. “Son of Paleface” (1952) draws a love quadrangle between Hope, Roy Rogers, Jane Russell, and Trigger the Wonder Horse. It may be Russell who causes Hope’s pipe to rise to full attention, but it’s Trigger with whom he beds down and fights over the blankets.

Frank Tashlin couldn’t be accused of making great cinema, but he did supersize comedy, and his fizzy, candy-colored treats go down smooth. You sway out of the theater feeling bloated, but half an hour later your nerves are buzzing, desperate for their next 35 mm sugar fix.

Through September 7 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).