American comedian who mined life and neuroses for dark comedy
b June 29, 1947 d February 27,, 2024
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-fictionalised version of himself on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, died on February 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 in the aftermath of “backto-back-to-back-to-back” surgeries for his shoulder, hip and back.
A self-deprecating comic 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 (1989-1992) and playing Prince John, a comically greedy ruler endowed with a migrating mole that inexplicably travels across his face, in Mel Brooks’ 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’ 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.
“LD,” 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, NY, 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 stand-up sets, going to open-mic nights in Greenwich Village while working a day job as a copywriter for an advertising agency in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey.
With help from comedian David Brenner, an admirer, he found a wider audience at Los Angeles comedy clubs and performed on a tour with Sonny and Cher. He was also introduced to George Schultz, a Brooklyn 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 stand-up by incorporating some of the psychological torment that motivated his comedy.
“Truly, the reason I went onstage is to have people listen to me talk about my feelings without someone saying, ‘Pass the meatloaf,’” Lewis once quipped.
By the mid-1980s, Lewis was a veteran of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show
(“I have dandruff, it’s a bad start,” he confessed to the audience) and was being cited as part of a group of irreverent and often self-reflexive comics that included Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Lily Tomlin.
“His work exemplified and anticipated the deeply personal, raw, introspective and yes, neurotic, tone that has come to colour so much contemporary comedy,” Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center, said in a statement.
By Lewis’ estimation, he stored “about 20,000 pages” of jokes on his computer. Early in his career he scribbled bits on legal pads; performing at Carnegie Hall in 1989, he appeared onstage with six feet of yellow sheets taped together on the floor for reference. He called the two standing ovations he received “the highlight of my career”.
Later that night, Lewis said, he got drunk in the venue’s dressing room and had to ask his sister if the applause even occurred. As he told it, that began his long struggle to curb his drinking, which he chronicled in a 2000 memoir, The Other Great Depression.
The book came out a few years after he got sober, he said, on the heels of a widely reported humiliation in 1999, when he was included on a distinguished alumni page in Ohio State University’s basketball media guide, identified as “Actor, Writer, Comedian, Drunk”.
The episode offered a further test of his sobriety, said Lewis, who found that candour and comedy proved helpful.
“I really did burn many bridges – I mean, I’ve lost a lot [of] friends,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2001. “But once I realised I was an alcoholic, I sort of owed it to myself to come clean. Because the truth is I’ve always been as honest as I could be onstage. But I also was in denial for a lot of that time.”
The youngest of three children, Richard Philip Lewis was born in Brooklyn on June 29, 1947, and was raised (or “lowered,” as he put it) in Englewood, New Jersey. His father, a caterer, was so focused on his business that “he was booked on my bar mitzvah – and I had my party on a Tuesday,” Lewis said.
His mother, who acted in community theatre, didn’t quite understand his interest in comedy. During one set, Lewis recalled, “I joked that my father had 12 heads. My mother stood up and said, ‘That’s a load of crap.’”
She eventually came around to his act, telling GQ in 1990, “Now, if he doesn’t mock me, I feel insulted.” (He once noted her recovery from “major open-guilt surgery”.)
Lewis studied marketing at Ohio State, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1969, and said he began to focus on stand-up only after the death of his father, in 1971. “There was such a void,” he told USA Today, “and, ironically, I thought I had nothing to lose”.
Turning his early stand-up struggles into scripted comedy, he co-wrote and starred in Diary of a Young Comic, a 90-minute TV movie that aired on NBC in 1979 as a fill-in for Saturday Night Live. Lewis played Billy Gondolstein, an upstart comedian from New York who, seeking fame and fortune, changes his last name to Gondola and, like Lewis himself, heads west to Los Angeles.
Within a few years, Lewis had adopted his signature all-black outfit, which he said was inspired by the monochrome attire of Richard Boone’s Paladin character on the TV western Have Gun – Will Travel, a favourite show from his childhood.
On-screen, he starred in the short-lived Fox sitcom Daddy Dearest (1993), playing a psychologist who lives in New York with his insult-slinging father (Don Rickles), and had a cameo as a business associate of Nicolas Cage’s alcoholic screenwriter character in the film drama Leaving Las Vegas (1995).
Long known for his serial dating and phobia of commitment, Lewis met Joyce Lapinsky, who worked in music publishing, at a party for a new Ringo Starr album. They married seven years later – in 2005 – after he took her to his therapist for approval.
By his telling, the therapist screamed at him, “‘This is as good as it gets!’ It shook me to my core.” Survivors include his wife and a brother.
As he aged, Lewis stayed true to his blend of caustic and self-deprecating humour. Interviewed by the Record in 1988, he recalled a conversation with screen actor John Travolta, who went to the same high school in Englewood.
“He was saying that he was sure that they had named a gymnasium named after him,” Lewis said. “I figured that maybe I have a couple of bridge chairs named after me in the faculty lounge. What I should have is a bench in the nurse’s office.
“I don’t want to sound like a big shot,” he continued. “After 16 years of complaining and 45 shows on Letterman I should at least be able to have people sit on me.”