Standup rose to fame in '80s

Richard Lewis, the blackclad standup comic who mined guilt, anxiety and neurosis for laughs — naming some of his cable specials I'm in Pain, I'm Exhausted and I'm Doomed — and played a semi-fictionalized version of himself on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, died Feb. 27 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.

His publicist, Jeff Abraham, said Lewis died after a heart attack. Lewis announced in April that he was retiring from standup, revealing that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2021 and had been struggling after “back-toback-to-back-to-back” surgeries for his shoulder, hip and back.

A self-deprecating comedian with a head of thick, dark hair that he often ran his hands through nervously, Lewis rose to national prominence through his 1980s television specials, telling stories about his failed romances and tumultuous childhood while reminding audiences that “life isn't supposed to be great all the time.”

He won acting roles, as well, starring with Jamie Lee Curtis as a Chicago magazine columnist in the ABC sitcom Anything But Love (1989-92) and playing Prince John, a comically greedy ruler endowed with a mole that inexplicably travels across his face, in Mel Brooks's parody film Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993).

To younger viewers, he was probably best known as a morose mainstay of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the heavily improvised sitcom starring and created by his childhood friend Larry David, a co-creator of Seinfeld. In art as in life, the two were constantly kvetching, arguing and riffing.

Richard Lewis