Richard Lewis, an acclaimed comedian identified for checking out his neuroses in frantic, stream-of-consciousness diatribes though dressed in all-black, main to his nickname “The Prince of Ache,” has died. He was 76.
Lewis, who revealed he experienced been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2023, died at his dwelling in Los Angeles on Tuesday night just after struggling a coronary heart assault, according to his publicist Jeff Abraham.
A normal performer in golf equipment and on late-night time Tv set for decades, Lewis also played Marty Gold, the passionate co-guide reverse Jamie Lee Curtis, in the ABC sequence “Anything But Love” and the reliably neurotic Prince John in “Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Guys In Tights.” He re-launched himself to a new generation opposite Larry David in HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” kvetching on a regular basis.
“I’m paranoid about all the things in my life. Even at household. On my stationary bicycle, I have a rear-check out mirror, which I am not thrilled about,” he when joked onstage. To Jimmy Kimmel he said: “This early morning, I tried using to go to mattress. I couldn’t sleep. I counted sheep but I only had 6 of them and they all experienced hip replacements.”
Comedy Central named Lewis one particular of the top rated 50 stand-up comedians of all time and he acquired a berth in GQ magazine’s listing of the “20th Century’s Most Influential Humorists.” He lent his humor for charity results in, which include Comic Relief and Comedy Presents Again.
“Watching his stand-up is like sitting in on a incredibly funny and frequently dark treatment session,” the Los Angeles Times said in 2014. The Philadelphia’s Town Paper identified as him “the Jimi Hendrix of monologists.” Mel Brooks the moment stated he “might just be the Franz Kafka of present day-day comedy.”
Adhering to his graduation from The Ohio Condition University in 1969, the New York-born Lewis began a stand-up job, honing his craft on the circuit with other contemporaries also just starting up out like Jay Leno, Freddie Prinze and Billy Crystal.
He recalled Rodney Dangerfield choosing him for $75 to fill in at his New York club, Dangerfield’s. “I had a lot of fantastic good friends early on who considered in me, and I satisfied pretty legendary persons who truly helped me, advised me to retain doing work on my materials. And I never appeared back,” he explained to The Gazette of Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2010.
Contrary to modern day Robin Williams, Lewis permitted audiences into his planet and melancholy, pouring his torment and suffering onto the phase. Lovers favorably compared him to the ground-breaking comedian Lenny Bruce.
“I take wonderful pains not to be necessarily mean-spirited,” Lewis instructed The Palm Beach front Article in 2007. “I never like to consider actual handicaps that people have to overcome with no hope in sight. I steer clear of that. That is not funny to me. Tragedy is funny to other humorists, but it is not to me, except you can make a level that’s useful.”
Singer Billy Joel has claimed he was referring to Lewis when he sang in “My Life” of an outdated mate who “bought a ticket to the West Coast/Now he provides them a stand-up schedule in L.A.”
In 1989 at Carnegie Hall, he appeared with six toes of yellow lawful sheets loaded with material and taped alongside one another for a 2½-hour set that led to two standing ovations. The night time was “the emphasize of my occupation,” he explained to The Washington Put up in 2020.
Lewis explained to GQ his signature glimpse arrived incidentally, stating his obsession with dressing in black arrived from watching the television Western “Have Gun – Will Journey,” with a cowboy in all-black, when he was a kid. He also popularized the phrase “from hell” — as in “the day from hell” or “the occupation from hell.”
“That just came out of my mind just one working day and I held repeating it a great deal for some rationale. Exact same thing with the black clothes. I just felt genuinely comfortable from the early ’80s on and I hardly ever wore nearly anything else. I by no means seemed back again.”
Following finding sober from medications and alcoholic beverages in 1994, Lewis put out his 2008 memoir, “The Other Excellent Depression” — a selection of fearless, essay type riffs on his existence — and “Reflections from Hell.”
Lewis was the youngest of 3 siblings — his brother was more mature than him by six yrs, and his sister by nine. His father died young and his mom had emotional difficulties. “She didn’t get me at all. I owe my occupation to my mother. I need to have supplied her my agent’s commission,” he told The Washington Publish in 2020.
“Looking back on it now, as a comprehensive-blown, middle-aged, operating anxiousness collector, I can acknowledge devoid of cringing that my dad and mom had their good share of remarkable qualities, yet, being human much of the day, had additional than just a handful of flaws as well,” he wrote in his memoir.
Lewis rapidly uncovered a new relatives executing at New York’s Improv. “I was 23, and all kinds of folks had been coming in and out and seeing me, like Steve Allen and Bette Midler. David Brenner unquestionably took me under his wing. To push residence to my tiny dump in New Jersey usually knowing that Steve Allen claimed, ‘You got it,’ that validation retained me going in a huge, large way.”
He had a cameo in “Leaving Las Vegas,” which led to his very first significant extraordinary function as Jimmy Epstein, an addict combating for his lifestyle in the indie film, “Drunks.” He performed Don Rickles’ son on one particular time of “Daddy Dearest” and a rabbi on “7th Heaven.”
Lewis’s recurring function on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” can be credited instantly to his friendship with fellow comic, producer and collection star Larry David. Both of those indigenous Brooklynites — born in the exact same Brooklyn clinic — they to start with met and turned friends as rivals whilst attending the same summer months camp at age 13. He was solid from the commencing, bickering with David on unpaid bills and typical courtesies.
He is survived by his spouse, Joyce Lapinsky.
