He also starred with Jamie Lee Curtis on Anything but Love, with Don Rickles in ‘Daddy Dearest’ and as Prince John in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
Richard Lewis, the master of self-deprecating comedy in stand-up TV specials, a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall and turns on Anything but Love and Curb Your Enthusiasm, has died. He was 76.
Lewis died peacefully Tuesday night in Los Angeles after suffering a heart attack, his publicist said. The actor and comic revealed in April that he had Parkinson’s and was retiring from stand-up.
“For the last three-and-a-half years, I’ve had sort of a rocky time,” he said on social media when sharing his health woes publicly after wrapping Curb‘s 12th season, which would eventually be announced as the last for the Larry David HBO comedy. Lewis had stepped away in 2021, appearing on only one season 11 episode, and returned for the now-airing final season.
When discussing last week’s episode, which featured Lewis, Schaffer said he was “doing fantastic right now, I’m very happy to report. Having seen him for press and everything, he’s doing amazing.”
Descartes of Anxiety
It was hard to name a neurosis that Lewis couldn’t mine for laughs.
“I’m a major hypochondriac. I won’t even masturbate anymore. I’m afraid I might give myself something,” he once said, probably joking. He also called himself the “Descartes of Anxiety; I panic, therefore I am.” Appropriately, he almost always dressed in black.
Lewis paced nervously during his stand-up act, running his fingers through his hair and waving his arms with exasperation. He had a long problem with substance abuse, and he confessed to being high the night he performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1989.
He had trouble remembering the standing ovations he received or anything else that happened during the 2 1/2-hour show, which he considered the apex of his career.
In 1991, after mixing alcohol and drugs, he was rushed to the hospital, and the experience shocked him into sobriety.
He would chronicle his recovery in his 2002 autobiography, The Other Great Depression: How I’m Overcoming, on a Daily Basis, at Least a Million Addictions and Dysfunctions and Finding a Spiritual (Sometimes) Life.
Lewis, however, was at his best as a fictional version of himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He and David played transplanted New York stand-ups now living in Los Angeles on the HBO comedy.
“We are heartbroken,” an HBO spokesperson shared in a statement. “His comedic brilliance, wit and talent were unmatched. Richard will always be a cherished member of the HBO and Curb Your Enthusiasm families. Our heartfelt condolences go out to his family, friends and all the fans who could count on Richard to brighten their days with laughter.”
David shared his own statement following the news of Lewis’ death, writing: “Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital and for most of my life he’s been like a brother to me. He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob, and for that I’ll never forgive him.”
Running gags included making fun of Lewis’ past problems with substance abuse and his tendency to date beautiful women in search of “the one,” only to have David inadvertently destroy any chance of a relationship. (In real life, Lewis married in 2005.)
In “The End,” the final episode of Curb‘s fifth season, Lewis needs a kidney transplant, and both David and manager Jeff Greene turn out to be a match. The two argue that the other should donate. After life-changing moment, David decides he’ll make the sacrifice, but the surgery doesn’t go well, and David suffers life-threatening complications.
“I hated him. We became friendly years later as young comics in New York, but I noticed something one night. ‘There’s something about you I hate,’ I told him. ‘Wait, you’re that Larry David from summer camp.’ And he said, ‘You’re that Richard Lewis.’ We nearly came to blows.”
Richard Philip Lewis was born in Brooklyn on June 29, 1947. He was raised in Englewood, New Jersey, where his father worked as a caterer. His mother performed in regional theater.
He didn’t look back on his childhood fondly. “It was pretty bad. I didn’t see my father much,” he said. “My dad was such a successful caterer that he was booked on my bar mitzvah — and I had my party on a Tuesday. Talk about low self-esteem. My father died young and my sister and brother moved out by the time I was in junior high. So it was me and my mother, and we didn’t get along too well. She didn’t get me.”
After graduating from Dwight Morrow High School in 1965, Lewis earned a degree in marketing and communications from Ohio State University, then went to work writing ad copy for an agency located above a pizza parlor in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey.
The Prince of Pain made it to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in 1974 and gained traction with Diary of a Young Comic, a 1979 NBC telefilm produced by Lorne Michaels in which he played a Jewish comic who leaves New York to make a name for himself in Hollywood. When he doesn’t meet Lorne Greene right away, he orders a bacon, lettuce and calcium sandwich from a health food store.
In 1982, Lewis appeared for the first time on Late Night With David Letterman, and the host said he could stop by anytime he wanted.
“The reason that was so important to me … it wasn’t the material, it was my physicality,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2018. “I was too much for the camera. I was moving all over the joint … [Letterman] sort of turned me into a younger version of Oscar Levant on [Jack Paar’s The Tonight Show], just sitting there, twitching away and just screaming for help in front of him.”
His TV specials included 1985’s ‘I’m in Pain’ Concert, 1988’s The I’m Exhausted Concert and 1990’s Richard Lewis: I’m Doomed.
“I’m such a madman — I’m so obsessed about the show, but that’s who I am,” he said in 2007 interview with the New York Observer. “I’m just so wired by my time onstage, my head is filled with images. It’s terrifying, but it’s also exhilarating. I’ll never not work like this.”
On the big screen, he teamed with stand-ups Louis Anderson, Richard Belzer, Franklin Ajaye and Tim Thomerson in The Wrong Guys (1988).
He then took on a co-starring role in 1989 on the ABC romantic sitcom Anything but Love.
Set in the offices of a Chicago magazine, Lewis played a vet columnist who found himself matching wits with a teacher turned writer (Jamie Lee Curtis). Though they try to keep their relationship professional, they can’t help but be attracted to each other.
“I had been a stand-up for a long time, but to get that big network primetime thing, that was great,” Lewis said in a 2007 interview with TV Guide. “All of a sudden I was on a promo in the middle of Roseanne, and before the end of the day, millions of people knew my face. It was just a whole other ballgame. So it was very important to me to have this series last.”
Anything but Love, never a ratings juggernaut, made it through four seasons before it was yanked in 1992. “It was historic actually, because we were canceled by our own studio [20th Century Fox, instead of the network],” Lewis told TV Guide. “It was a shocker. Jamie Lee and I drove up to the soundstage, ready for a Monday morning read-through of a new script, totally unaware that some higher-ups had decided we were done.”
