THE MAN IN BLACK
Standup who rose to fame in '80s mined his neuroses for dark comedy
Richard Lewis, the black-clad 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-to-back-to-back-toback” 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: Episodes of the show, which debuted in 2000 and is now in its 12th and final season, feature Lewis's character enduring the indignity of being carjacked by a New York Jets fan; persuading a deli owner to change the name of a sandwich from the Larry David to the Richard Lewis; and complaining about the unfiltered tap water served at a dinner party.
“L.D.,” he tells David, “goldfish would commit suicide in this water.”
The two comics met when they were 12, at a summer camp in Cornwall-on-hudson, N.Y., and “hated each other,” Lewis told The Washington Post in 2020. “He was an annoying, lanky, obnoxious basketball player. I was a better shooter.” But they reconnected through comedy in the early 1970s, when Lewis was performing some of his first standup sets, going to openmic nights in Greenwich Village.
With help from comedian David Brenner, he found a wider audience at L.A. comedy clubs and performed with Sonny and Cher. He was introduced to George Schultz, a comedy club owner who was said to have given Rodney Dangerfield the “no respect” line, according to the Record newspaper in New Jersey, and who encouraged Lewis to alter the tenor of his standup by incorporating the psychological torment motivating his comedy.
“Truly, the reason I went onstage is to have people listen to me talk about my feelings without someone saying, `Pass the meat loaf,'” Lewis quipped.