Richard Lewis, Comic and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Star, Dead at 76

Kory Grow
·6 min read
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Richard Lewis, 2012 - Credit: Bobby Bank/WireImage
Richard Lewis, 2012 - Credit: Bobby Bank/WireImage

Richard Lewis, a stand-up comic who achieved fame in the 1980s by turning his neuroses into comedy gold and later experienced a renaissance in recent years thanks to Curb Your Enthusiasm, died on Tuesday at the age of 76. The cause of death was a heart attack, his publicist, Jeff Abraham, confirmed to Rolling Stone.

Last April, Lewis revealed that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. “I’m under a doctor’s care, and everything is cool,” he said at the time. “I love my wife, I love my little puppy dog, and I love all my friends and my fans.” He also revealed at the time that he would be retiring from stand-up comedy to focus on writing and acting.

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Lewis, who often dressed entirely in black and embraced the title “the Prince of Pain,” gained prominence by joking about his family and his own personal foibles. He quipped about his family’s annual inductions into a “Hall of Blame” in the mid-Eighties, according to The New York Times, and joked that at meals, “if you can match any two symptoms, you get seconds.” (On Comic Relief, he told the audience he had a rearview mirror on his stationary bike since he’s so paranoid.) In 2006, The Yale Book of Quotations recognized Lewis as the originator of the phrase, “The ____ from Hell,” filling the blank with whatever struck him in the moment; the idea that he didn’t actually originate the term became the basis of a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, “The Nanny From Hell.”

He was a staple on late-night shows, appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 22 times and on Late Night With David Letterman 44 times (and he would continue to appear on Letterman’s show when he moved to CBS). As an actor, he appeared in comedies like Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) and dramas like Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995). But it was Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he played a fictionalized version of himself — one who was perpetually tired of Larry David’s antics — that solidified his place in the cultural conversation.

“Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital, and for most of my life he’s been like a brother to me,” David said in a statement. “He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob, and for that I’ll never forgive him.”

In a post shared to Instagram, Curb Your Enthusiasm co-star Cheryl Hines remembered how Lewis “would take time to tell the people he loved what they meant to him – especially in recent years.” She wrote, “In between takes on Curb, he would tell me how special I was to him and how much he loved me. To be loved by Richard Lewis. A true gift.”

Lewis, like David, grew up around New York City at around the same time. Lewis was born in Brooklyn on June 29, 1947, and grew up in Englewood, New Jersey. He first met David at summer camp when they were both 12. Lewis told Howard Stern he hated David then.

Lewis’ father was a caterer, and his mother was an actress. Lewis started doing stand-up after his father’s death in 1971, performing at New York’s Improvisation and Pips. Within a few years, he became a Tonight Show regular, and by 1979, he starred in his own TV movie about a stand-up comedian, called Diary of a Young Comic, on NBC. After he and David both ventured into stand-up comedy, the two men liked each other’s work and became friends.

But it was Letterman whom Lewis credited with helping elevate his career initially. “David Letterman set me off,” Lewis told Vulture in 2017. “He called me into his office when he got his late-night show in ‘82. I was doing a lot of stand-up shows, but he told me I was moving around too much onstage. He told me to move back to New York and write for his show, and I could still be a comedian, too. I told him, ‘No, David, I just moved. I can’t.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You can come on the show as often as you want, but you’ll never be doing stand-up, not on my show.’ … I never did standup on television from 1982 on because of Letterman. Every time his show would say, ‘Let Richard do five minutes,’ and Dave would say no. ‘Richard doesn’t do stand-up on television. He sits down.’ That was because of Dave.”

In the late Eighties, he starred opposite Jamie Lee Curtis on ABC’s Anything but Love, which ran four seasons. He starred opposite Kevin Nealon on ABC’s Hiller and Diller for a season in the late Nineties, and made guest appearances on 7th Heaven, ‘Til Death, and The Simpsons, and in Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff” video.

The CableACE Awards nominated him for Writing a Comedy Special for his The I’m Exhausted Concert in 1989, and the Screen Actors Guild included him in its nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series for Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2006.

In a statement, veteran comedian Howie Mandel called Lewis “one of the very first people I saw when I first got into comedy and he was genuinely and uniquely funny.” He added, “After today, there’s going to be a lot less laughter in this world.”

In a heartfelt memory, Billy Crystal recalled his first time on stage at Catch a Rising Star comedy club. “Richard Lewis put his arm around my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s gonna be great’ … I then was introduced by Richard Belzer and so it began my friendship with Richard and my career … in that order,” he said in a statement. “I am sad, and angry that he is gone and that before he left us, I didn’t have a chance to put my arm around him and say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s gonna be great.’ Damn. As his friend Warren Zevon said, ‘Enjoy every sandwich.'”

Offscreen, Lewis struggled with alcohol dependance. He managed to take control of his addiction almost 30 years ago. “August 3, 1994, I thought that I was near death from alcoholism,” he tweeted in 2021. “Early the next day I was rushed to the ER and turned my life around a day, sometimes a minute at a time. If you’re struggling, you can get help. I did.” He wrote about his struggle with sobriety in his 2000 memoir, The Other Great Depression.

Curtis credited Lewis with her own sobriety in an Instagram post. “He … is the reason I am sober,” Curtis wrote on Instagram. “He helped me. I am forever grateful for him for that act of grace alone. He found love with Joyce and that, of course, besides his sobriety, is what mattered most to him. I’m weeping as I write this.”

Lewis saw his comedy career as a privilege and always remained grateful for it. “I’m mostly useless at any other endeavor and still have a need to express my most private feelings — hopefully for laughs,” he told Vulture. “But I’ve been very blessed.… I got a review once in The New York Times and — I’m boasting — it said I was a transitional link between the older generation of comedians and the new edgy ones. I’m somewhere linked between Alan King and Gilbert Gottfried. I don’t know. I’m just really lucky.”

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