Richard Lewis’ career has, in some ways, always been defined by his proximity to darkness. As a stand-up comedian, he laid bare his personal struggles with drug addiction and alcoholism, pacing across the stage in his trademark all-black uniform, wringing his hands while he recounted how deeply he hated himself. (The title of his 1985 standup special? “I’m In Pain.”) And on Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which he played himself in perhaps his best known role, his health struggles became fodder for the show, with a 2005 kidney transplant inspiring a whole season arc. Even one of his most famous quotations, “the ‘blank’ from hell” — which he famously fought to include in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (and was also incorporated into a Curb episode) — contains a touch of darkness.
So it is perhaps apropos that Lewis made one of his final appearances on Curb discussing his impending death — specifically, his plans to put Larry David, the show’s star, co-creator, and his real-life best friend since childhood, into his will. When David demurs, saying he won’t take a penny, Lewis characteristically presses the issue. “You’re hurting me. I’m giving it to you anyway pal,” he says. David later deduces that it’s all a ploy so David will leave Lewis in his own will, prompting him to vow to outlive him out of sheer spite. (Lewis retaliates by spoiling the answer to that day’s Wordle.)
David’s vow was short-lived. After experiencing numerous health struggles — including a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis in the spring of 2023 — Lewis died of a heart attack on Wednesday at the age of 76, leaving behind a body of work that serves as a testament to the ability to alchemize vulnerability and suffering into neuroses-laden gold.
The youngest of three children in Teaneck, New Jersey, Lewis started out his life believing that it had been, as he told The Wall Street Journal, a “mistake.” His older siblings had moved out of the house when he was a young child, leaving him alone with his mother, with whom he developed a fraught relationship. “We became a Neil Simon play without the jokes. The slightest things would upset her and we got on each other’s nerves,” he told WSJ in 2014.
In the 1970s, Lewis became a stand-up comic in Greenwich Village, making the late-night talk show circuit, and becoming well-known for his mordant stage presence and frenetically self-deprecating humor. “I know what my sweet spot is,” he told LA Weekly in 2017. “It’s personal stuff, dysfunction, fear of intimacy, family stuff, psychology stuff. I eviscerate myself onstage.”
He cycled through a string of younger girlfriends (including the actress Debra Winger) and addictions, entering rehab in the early 1990s after a cocaine overdose. He documented his substance abuse struggles and his road to sobriety in the 2000 memoir The Other Great Depression, writing, “One day I’m going to die. I’m about as sure of that as I am that I’ll never learn how to record a show in advance on my VCR… but until that occurs, as flawed, ungrateful and self-centered as I can be from time to time, and as full of tears and obsessions as I am, the one thing I’m most proud of is that I am no longer ruled by alcohol.”
Though Lewis was a fairly well-known stand-up comedian and actor in the 1990s, appearing in a sitcom with Jamie Lee Curtis called Anything But Love and popping up as Prince John in Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men In Tights (he also, for what it’s worth, played a rabbi on the WB weepy 7th Heaven), his arguably most iconic role was as himself in Curb, playing a self-absorbed, womanizing, pretentious, petty, overly emotional foil to David’s perpetually indignant curmudgeon. The two were born in the same hospital three days apart and went to camp together as pre-teens, reconnecting on the stand-up circuit in the 1970s, and their lifelong bond was palpable onscreen, even as they bickered over outgoing voice machine messages, yogic mantras, and whether or not his signed Mickey Mantle ball was hidden in his nurse’s cavernous vagina.
It has often been said of Curb that David represents the inner monologue of the audience, articulating the minor petty grievances that go unsaid in polite society. If David is the brain of Curb, however, Lewis was the raw, bleeding heart, the perpetually aggrieved best friend who takes offense at even the most minor slights and breaches, who can’t help but constantly be taken aback by his friend’s emotional limitations.
In a Season Nine episode, when David fails to sufficiently mourn his pet parakeet via text, Lewis reacts as if he has done nothing less than reach into his black tunic and stab him in the chest. “This is a tragedy and you treated it like it was nothing to me. How dare you?” he says, retorting when David responds that he would have been sadder had it been a parrot or a macaw: “I don’t live in a Cuban dance hall.” Lewis devoted his career to documenting the myriad tragedies of life, aghast at a world that failed to acknowledge their enormity, and no self-described “prince of pain” has ever been funnier.
