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Richard Lewis, the darkly funny, perennially black-clad comedian known for playing a semi-fictionalized version of himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died Feb. 27 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.
His publicist, Jeff Abraham, said Mr. Lewis died after a heart attack. Mr. Lewis announced in April that he was retiring from stand-up after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2021 and dealing with four “back-to-back-to-back-to-back” surgeries for his back, shoulder and hip.
A self-deprecating performer who delighted in mining his guilt, anxiety and neuroses for comic effect, Mr. Lewis appeared regularly at comedy clubs in addition to acting on-screen, co-starring with Jamie Lee Curtis in the ABC sitcom “Anything But Love,” which premiered in 1989 and ran for four seasons, and playing the comically greedy Prince John in Mel Brooks’s parody film “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” (1993).
Mr. Lewis was a morose mainstay of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the heavily improvised sitcom starring and created by his childhood friend Larry David, the co-creator of “Seinfeld.” In art as in life, the two were constantly kvetching, arguing and riffing. Episodes of the show, which is now in its 12th and final season, feature Mr. Lewis’s character enduring the indignity of being carjacked by a New York Jets fan; convincing 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 at a dinner party.
“L.D.,” 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, N.Y. (Their fellow campers included a young Donald Trump. “I pray I didn’t sleep in his bunk,” Mr. Lewis said.)
Interviewed by The Washington Post in 2020, Mr. Lewis recalled of David that “we hated each other. He was an annoying, lanky, obnoxious basketball player. I was a better shooter.” But the duo reconnected through comedy in the early 1970s, when Mr. Lewis was performing some of his first stand-up sets, going to open-mic nights in Greenwich Village while keeping his day job as a copywriter for an advertising agency.
The comedian David Brenner caught his act — all neurosis, all the time — and helped him get slots at comedy clubs in Los Angeles.
By the mid-’70s, Mr. Lewis had made his debut on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” 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. In comedy specials such as “I’m in Pain” (1985) and “I’m Exhausted” (1988), he came across as someone who was utterly baffled by life but doing his best to navigate it anyway.
“My problems aren’t superficial,” he told the Philadelphia Daily News in 1990. “They just pour out of me. My act is therapy for other people. They can all go away feeling they’re better off than me.”
Richard Lewis, the darkly funny, perennially black-clad comedian known for playing a semi-fictionalized version of himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died Feb. 27 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.
His publicist, Jeff Abraham, said Mr. Lewis died after a heart attack. Mr. Lewis announced in April that he was retiring from stand-up after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2021 and dealing with four “back-to-back-to-back-to-back” surgeries for his back, shoulder and hip.
A self-deprecating performer who delighted in mining his guilt, anxiety and neuroses for comic effect, Mr. Lewis appeared regularly at comedy clubs in addition to acting on-screen, co-starring with Jamie Lee Curtis in the ABC sitcom “Anything But Love,” which premiered in 1989 and ran for four seasons, and playing the comically greedy Prince John in Mel Brooks’s parody film “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” (1993).
Mr. Lewis was a morose mainstay of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the heavily improvised sitcom starring and created by his childhood friend Larry David, the co-creator of “Seinfeld.” In art as in life, the two were constantly kvetching, arguing and riffing. Episodes of the show, which is now in its 12th and final season, feature Mr. Lewis’s character enduring the indignity of being carjacked by a New York Jets fan; convincing 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 at a dinner party.
“L.D.,” 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, N.Y. (Their fellow campers included a young Donald Trump. “I pray I didn’t sleep in his bunk,” Mr. Lewis said.)
Interviewed by The Washington Post in 2020, Mr. Lewis recalled of David that “we hated each other. He was an annoying, lanky, obnoxious basketball player. I was a better shooter.” But the duo reconnected through comedy in the early 1970s, when Mr. Lewis was performing some of his first stand-up sets, going to open-mic nights in Greenwich Village while keeping his day job as a copywriter for an advertising agency.
The comedian David Brenner caught his act — all neurosis, all the time — and helped him get slots at comedy clubs in Los Angeles.
By the mid-’70s, Mr. Lewis had made his debut on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” 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. In comedy specials such as “I’m in Pain” (1985) and “I’m Exhausted” (1988), he came across as someone who was utterly baffled by life but doing his best to navigate it anyway.
“My problems aren’t superficial,” he told the Philadelphia Daily News in 1990. “They just pour out of me. My act is therapy for other people. They can all go away feeling they’re better off than me.”
