Richard Lewis’s nickname as a stand-up comedian was “the Prince of Pain” and few have ever wrenched more dark humour out of angst, anxiety and neurosis.
To British audiences he was best known for his recurring role in more than 40 episodes of the HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, butting heads with delicious acerbity with the show’s star and creator, Larry David.
He was almost always dressed in black on camera and in real life: what you saw was what you got, and in Curb Your Enthusiasm he played an only thinly veiled semi-autobiographical version of his neurotic self. “I always dug comedians who were the same onstage as they were offstage,” he said. “There wasn’t too much fake stuff going on, they didn’t create a character, they were just who they were.”
Throughout his comedic career he was candid about his battles with drug and alcohol addiction and his struggles with depression. His shows revelled in titles such as I’m in Pain, I’m Doomed and Richard Lewis: The Magical Misery Tour.
Yet he recovered from his addictions and unhappiness and in later years seemed to find a greater equilibrium. “I’m overwhelmed with joy right now,” he said in 2021 upon returning to Curb Your Enthusiasm after various health problems. “I never learnt how to keep joy in my head for more than a minute, but I’m breaking all records for my life.”
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Shortly afterwards he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, although he bore the illness with a brave wit. He joked about his death and making his will in a scene set on a golf course in an episode of Curb that was broadcast a week before his death. Verbally sparring with David as ever — “a ping pong match between two neurotics” Lewis called their relationship — he told him he was tweaking his will to leave him a bequest.
“Thank you, but I don’t want it!” David told him.
“I’m giving it to you anyway, pal!” Lewis responded, which elicited an “Oh my God, f*** you!” from his friend.
The humour could not have been darker but it was evident that Lewis relished the opportunity to mock the fate that he knew would soon befall him. The scene was all the more poignant for the palpable warmth between the bickering pair, who were lifelong friends and had first met at a summer camp when they were 12 years old.
Lewis is survived by his wife Joyce Lapinsky, a music publisher whom he met at a Ringo Starr album launch party in Los Angeles in the 1990s. At the time he lived alone in a sprawling house above Sunset Strip and claimed that he was allergic to long-term relationships. They dated for several years before marrying in 2006. Lewis claimed that he did so on the advice of his psychiatrist who, upon meeting Lapinsky, told him, “This is as good as it gets.”
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Richard Philip Lewis was born in 1947, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Englewood, New Jersey. His father, Bill, ran a kosher catering business. His mother, Blanche (née Goldberg), was an amateur actress.
He recalled a troubled upbringing — which, of course, he used as source material in his comedy routines. His father was always working and his brother and sister had moved out “so my mother and I were the only ones home”. He suspected his arrival in the world years after his older siblings had been an accident and that his mother rather resented him. “We became a Neil Simon play without the jokes,” he recalled. “The slightest things would upset her and we got on each other’s nerves.”
He later claimed that he owed his career to the neurosis their squabbling induced. “I should have given her my agent’s commission,” he told The Washington Post.
At school he was noted as the class clown but never imagined one could make a living by being funny and so took a degree in marketing at Ohio State University. Back in New Jersey he worked as a copywriter in an advertising agency, writing jokes on the side.
By the early 1970s he was trying his hand doing stand-up routines at open-mic nights in Greenwich Village and within a few years he had made his TV debut on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and solo comedy shows followed. He was a particular favourite with David Letterman, on whose Late Show with… he appeared almost 50 times.
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A starring role opposite Jamie Lee Curtis in the TV sitcom Anything but Love in the early Nineties seemed to promise Hollywood stardom and he had a prominent role in Mel Brooks’s 1993 comedy Robin Hood: Men in Tights. There were other minor film parts, but when bigger roles failed to materialise he returned to stand-up.
After overcoming his addictions in the mid-1990s he wrote about his experience in a much-acclaimed memoir, 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.
“I’ve had such an amazing life. I’m a lucky man,” he said in his final interview with Vanity Fair, published only last week. It was as if the pain on which he had built his career had finally melted away.
Richard Lewis, comedian, was born on June 29, 1947. He died of complications from Parkinson’s on February 27, 2024, aged 76