ONE GRUMPY GUY
Comic Richard Lewis is at his happiest when he’s not
How does Richard Lewis feel? Lousy. As if anyone needs to ask.
The self-anointed Prince of Pain is in physical pain, recovering from two surgeries — back and rotator cuff. Pain is his muse. He branded his tours, through his half century on the comedy circuit, I’m in Pain, I’m Exhausted and — why not? — Magical Misery Tour. His 2008 memoir, a well of angst, is titled The Other Great Depression.
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Samuel Beckett wrote. “It’s the most comical thing in the world.”
Lewis made bank on anguish. He’s the Curb Your Enthusiasm regular who makes creator Larry David appear, by comparison, exultant and balanced. At age 72, three days David’s senior (and born in the same Brooklyn hospital), Lewis is perpetually dialed to doomed, his innards worn on his sleeve. He is Le Misérable.
But he might not be as miserable as he appears.
Lewis and David have known each other since age 12 at a summer camp in Cornwall-on-hudson (on the grounds of New York Military Academy, attended by one Donald Trump. Lewis: “I pray I didn’t sleep in his bunk.”).
At age 23, they met again doing standup in New York and became friends. The 10th season of HBO’S Curb has been exceptionally strong, even attracting Trump’s attention. In the première, David wore a Make America Great Again cap — as he put it, “a great people repellent” in liberal Los Angeles. Trump tweeted, “TOUGH GUYS FOR TRUMP!” with a video clip from the show. Lewis, a staunch Democrat, remains incredulous: “He thought it was praise!”
When he signed on to Curb, Lewis insisted on a story arc of several episodes so he couldn’t be cut from the cast. He plays Richard Lewis, “the friend who really annoys Larry, and I really annoy him. Whenever I hit him with the truth — just straight-faced telling him the truth — he just starts laughing.” Their onscreen friendship, both insist, is a more contentious version of their real one.
“When you know someone that well, what makes it work is you can really say anything you want to a person like that,” David says. “Nothing is off limits. We have so much trust in our friendship.”
A fixture on Letterman (48 times) and Howard Stern, Lewis is a recovering alcoholic (sheepishly, he admits, champagne was his favourite) and addict (cocaine, crystal meth) who has been sober since 1994. He has an eating disorder (body dysmorphia). He didn’t marry until his later years, age 57.
“I was really needy,” he confesses. Every utterance is a confession. “It was all about the road, and I came first.” His comic persona is that of the worst boyfriend you ever had back in your early 20s when you didn’t know better.
The plan was to interview him in person at his Hollywood Hills home. Instead, he will only chat on the phone, because of the pain, which is so very Richard Lewis.
In conversation, he is mellow, gracious, a pussycat. Perhaps it’s age, success, Curb appeal or the din of his emotional pain quieted by physical discomfort. Then he offers, “I’m a very happy man.”
Really? Because there goes your career.
“No, I’m not a very happy man. I’m thrilled to be alive. I’m grateful for who’s in my life. I’ve got great friends, a great wife, a dog, and I have a great career, but ...”
There is always a but.
“But there’s just a part of me that’s always going to be never totally happy,” he says, “and I think that has a lot to do with my childhood.”
Note we are eight minutes into the conversation.
His father: “He was never home. He died before I was a comedian.” And his mother: “She had some emotional problems. She didn’t get me at all. I owe my career to my mother. I should have given her my agent’s commission.”
Five therapists treated Lewis. “Some of them died,” he says. Lewis brought then-girlfriend Joyce Lapinsky to meet the last shrink, the one who lasted 18 years. The therapist’s suggestion: “This is as good as it gets.”
So, the marriage proposal in 2004. Lewis, in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, not looking at Lapinsky, who is reading: “I guess we have to.” Lapinsky: “Yeah, OK.”
On set, co-star Susie Essman says, “everyone loves Lewis. There’s never a harsh word. He’s so generous.” He has friends, fans, sobriety, enough money that he doesn’t have to tour constantly. He stopped therapy seven years ago.
Curb launched in 2000, 10 seasons over two decades, produced on Larry Time, because, when you’re the co-creator of Seinfeld, you can do as you please. The show has no script, merely outlines, “the most ideal thing,” Lewis says. It’s helped attract new, younger fans and freed him from touring. He adores this season “because it got back to where it started, with real simple stuff.” Lewis is in most of the 10 episodes.
Lewis’s greatest role, his Hamlet, has been himself. He’s one of comedy’s great gesticulators, a master of the shrug. Since the 1980s, the only changes to his look are due to time and gravity. Lewis is the original hair comedian, a waterfall of Farrah waves, and baggy black clothes to match the mood. “I bet his underwear is black,” says J.B. Smoove, who plays David’s housemate, Leon Black. (Lewis: It is.)
The long-glabrous David, Lewis claims, intentionally included a close-up of his nascent bald spot on a recent episode. “He was ecstatic,” says Lewis, who dubbed him “Larry the hog,” as he’s the centre of every shot, unwilling to allow Lewis to share a meaty scene with Smoove and Essman.
Lewis stores “about 20,000 pages” of jokes on his computer. Early in his career, he scribbled bits on legal pads, subjects such as “birthdays,” “sex,” “intimacy” and, naturally, “my mother.” In 1989 at Carnegie Hall, he appeared with six feet of yellow sheets taped together, 2 1/2 hours, two standing ovations. The night was “the highlight of my career.”
But afterward, he got plastered in the dressing room “and made a complete jackass of myself.” Lewis had to ask his sister if the ovations actually occurred. “And still it took me five years to get sober.”
Episodes from his life seep into Curb. Fighting over the cheque (episode 3 this season) is a constant in the Lewis-david friendship. “I always get there early and give the restaurant my credit card,” Lewis says. “We placed our order. Been there just five or six minutes, and Larry realizes he has a poker game at Steve Martin’s and leaves. And I’m eating alone, stuck with a $400 cheque.”