As I wrote in Wednesday's Morning Briefing, the 1980s were a glorious boom time for stand-up comedy. I am eternally grateful that I got my start back then. Before I started, I'd been watching comics like Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling, who got the Great Comedy Boom rolling in the late '70s.
Another early fave of mine was the perpetually frenetic and neurotic Richard Lewis, who died on Tuesday.
Richard Lewis, the stand-up comedian who also starred alongside Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died Tuesday night at his Los Angeles home due to a heart attack, Variety has confirmed. He was 76.
Lewis announced last April he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and was retiring from stand-up comedy. He most recently appeared in Season 12 of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” currently airing on HBO.
In 2021, Lewis announced he would not appear in Season 11 of “Curb” in order to recover from three surgeries. He surprised viewers by returning to set for one Season 11 episode, telling Variety at the time, “When I walked in and they applauded, I felt like a million bucks. Larry doesn’t like to hug, and he hugged me and told me how happy he was after we shot our scene.”
While I tend to not like what I call East Coast Neurotic shtick, I watched Richard Lewis whenever he was on television, either doing stand-up or just guesting on a talk show.
His rapid-fire delivery was so all over the place that it was like an ongoing cry for Ritalin. He would often machine gun several sentences without offering up any laugh lines, but when he got to one, the journey was well worth it. One didn't get much time to savor the moment because Lewis sometimes seemed to never take a breath and would immediately move onto the next idea. It was an odd combination of him obviously always trying to get a laugh, but not worrying about how much he had to throw against the wall before a joke stuck.
It was always fun to watch Lewis on Carson or Letterman because he would meander even more than he did on stage. He was popular frequent guest, probably because it was as if Johnny or Dave could just put the segment on autopilot and let Lewis ramble in that peculiarly entertaining way of his.
Father Time always wins and, sadly, we have reached a point where so many of the comics I watched and admired from the very early boom days are dying. The past couple of years have been rough. Stand-up lost Bob Saget, Gilbert Gottfried, and Louie Anderson in 2022. Even though most people remember him as a television actor, I vividly recall watching Richard Belzer do stand-up in my very early days. He passed away last year.
I had to look up a quick fact about Robin Williams last week and was stunned to be reminded that it will be 10 years in August since he died. Garry Shandling — one of my personal favorites — will have been gone eight years next month. Like Bob Saget's death, Shandling's was so unexpected that it's still weird to think he's dead even after this much time.
Richard Lewis was a fun one.
RIP.
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