He wore black and had a biting sense of humor. Comedian Richard Lewis has died, he was 76

He rose to fame as a stand-up comedian with a dark sense of humor in the 1970s and 1980s, before becoming a TV star in the new millennium thanks to the TV series Larry. American actor and comedian Richard Lewis died at the age of 76. He died at home in Los Angeles after suffering a cardiac arrest, according to his agent.

The AP agency reported on the death. She reminds that doctors diagnosed the actor with Parkinson’s disease last year.

In the early 1970s, Lewis began performing in comedy clubs around New York’s Greenwich Village, just like peers Jay Leno, Richard Belzer or Billy Crystal. Compared to them, he was characterized by caustic humor, bitterness, sarcasm and irony, with which he openly commented on his unhappy childhood, failures in his love life and constant self-doubt. “When he went on stage, he didn’t create a persona. He was there for himself,” Billy Crystal said of him.

Lewis soon became a sought-after guest on late-night television talk shows, such as Late Night With David Letterman discovered almost fifty times describing the New York Times. According to him, Lewis spearheaded the stand-up comedy boom that was fueled by the spread of cable television into American households in the late 1980s.

Among his most famous stand-ups was the one in New York’s Carnegie Hall, where in 1989 he spoke for more than two and a half hours with a stack of notes written on many sheets of yellow paper. He received two standing ovations. “It was the pinnacle of my career,” he told the Washington Post in 2020, regretting that no one filmed this performance.

At the same time, Lewis drew attention to himself with the role of unconventional journalist Marty Gold in the sitcom Anything But Love, where his character fell in love with Hanna, played by the later Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis. On the screen together were discovering from 1989 to 1992, which opened the door to Hollywood for Lewis.

Richard Lewis (pictured in 2017) had a dark sense of humor. | Photo: Reuters

Then portrayed the neurotic Prince John in the 1993 Mel Brooks film The Crazy Story of Robin Hood. He called Lewis “perhaps the Franz Kafka of modern comedy”. However, Lewis did not take advantage of several other film and television opportunities, so he had to be content with secondary roles, the New York Times reports, specifically mentioning the one in the movie Leaving Las Vegas from 1995.

The actor’s comeback was started by the comedy tour Richard Lewis: The Magical Misery Tour, which was recorded by HBO. She then gave him an opportunity in a comedy series at the turn of the millennium Larry, shut up, where he played a semi-autobiographical version of himself alongside his lifelong friend Larry David. He appeared in the series more than forty times over the next quarter century. He also appeared in the current final, twelfth series, which will culminate on HBO on April 7.

“Thanks to Larry, I’ve had three generations of people come to my stand-up shows. There’s always a 13-year-old boy in the audience. And there’s always someone in a wheelchair who says, ‘I wanted to see you before I die,'” joked Lewis. Sometimes he continued to play in other series, a supporting role had for example in the sitcom Two and a Half Men.

“Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital. He was like my brother for most of his life,” Larry David responded to the news of his death. Both were born in the New York district of Brooklyn, they met as thirteen-year-old boys at a summer camp. “He had the exceptional quality of being the funniest far and wide, but also the sweetest. But today he made me cry and I’ll never forget that,” he added.

The cable station Comedy Central listed Lewis as one of the fifty best comedians of all time, and GQ magazine listed him as one of the twenty most influential people with a sense of humor. “Watching his stand-up performance is like being in a very funny and very dark therapy session,” wrote the Los Angeles Times in 2014.

Richard Lewis and Larry David in the TV series Larry. | Photo: ČTK / HBO

“I’m absolutely paranoid about everything. Even at home. I even have a rear-view mirror on my exercise bike,” Lewis once joked. “I couldn’t sleep today. I tried to count sheep, but I only counted six and they all had hip replacements,” he joked on comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show.

According to the AP agency, Lewis differed in that, unlike Robin Williams, for example, he shared personal experiences, melancholy and pain with the audience of his stand-ups. He used to be compared to the great personality of American humor To Lenny Bruce. “I really care about not being mean,” Lewis told The Palm Beach Post in 2007. “I don’t want to make fun of real handicaps that people hopelessly struggle with all their lives. I just don’t find someone’s tragedies funny,” he said.

Last but not least, Richard Lewis was known for appearing in public exclusively in black. He told GQ magazine that he got a glimpse of it from the Western series Have Gun – Will Travel, which he watched as a boy, and which featured a cowboy who walked in black. “I realized in the early 1980s that black just suited me and I never wore anything else,” he added.

Lewis recovered from drug and alcohol addiction in 1994. He told his story in 2008 in an autobiography called The Other Great Depression, and in the last decade he also published a book of essays, Reflections from Hell.