Richard Lewis claimed that he abstained from masturbation because he worried he “might give himself something.” It was one of his many comic confessions effectively capturing how anxiety becomes not only a condition but a lifestyle. Attributing his lifelong struggle with worry, fear and insecurity to his family’s dysfunction, he also insisted that his dog committed suicide to escape the perpetual anxiety of the Lewis household. It was a Jewish home in a small town of New Jersey where, before Springsteen, the late comic said, “They had nothing to chant.” They would walk around the streets pumping their fists in the air silently.
His anxiety was, by his own description, a “blessing and a curse.” It was a curse for obvious reasons, along with his belief that it contributed to his alcoholism, but also a blessing because, as he believed, “it made me funnier.”
Richard Lewis died on February 27 of a heart attack. He also suffered from Parkinson’s Disease. The cruelty of that chronic illness affects patients in different ways. On his podcast, Lewis said that Parkinson’s robbed him of the ability to walk, but that otherwise, he was managing — enjoying his marriage, his friends and his work, including his appearances on the final season of his friend Larry David’s sitcom, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which is currently airing on HBO.
During an episode of his podcast, “Alive and Unwell,” in August, he opened by saying, “Recording in progress. You ever hear that on your computer? I’m a work in progress; a f**king mess in progress…I’m not an upbeat kind of guy. I’m not defined by my Parkinson’s. I’ve had it for a couple of years, and I’m doing the best I can. It doesn’t define me. There are many people who have it much worse than me now. But for those who have it, or anything, worse, you gotta keep plugging ahead.”
Like most of his comedy, the opening riff was extemporaneous. It was also simultaneously neurotic, a tad depressive, and oddly enough, ambitious. Great art lives in contradiction. Richard Lewis was a great artist, and the contradiction at the heart of his comedy was the combination of anxiety and hope.
Lewis rarely uttered an overt expression of hope, but he exercised the same hope of the blues musicians he often praised from the stage. The late Albert Murray, in his classic treatise on the musical form, “Stomping the Blues,” argued that through musical performance, the performer expresses pain, while finding the means to live with the pain. When dancing ensues, the performer and the audience mutually stomp the blues of their lives. According to the Murray conception, Lewis was a blues performer. Similar to a blues musician, he always looked cool too — the black suit, Chuck Taylors, a Jimi Hendrix tie, and long, wavy dark hair.
He was also jazzlike. Different from most comedians, he didn’t write bits or routines. Instead, he sketched outlines, and within the confines of his outlined topic, improvised his material on stage. I saw him perform live many times. Every show was radically different. There were times when his unplanned, extemporaneous delivery would cause frustration. He would start with a brilliant topic. Then, something would distract him, and he’d lose the thread. But most of the time his unique comedic style offered the thrill of discovery. His tendency to interrupt himself, mid-topic, led to uncharted comedic ground and demonstrated a sophisticated, active mind at work — an intellect he could not shut off.
At one show that I attended at a comedy club in a suburb just outside of Chicago, he opened with ruthless mockery of the curtain behind his microphone on the stage. It looked old and unclean. Lewis wondered if his career was in decline, and feared he would soon get sick from the unsanitized surroundings. This went on for 15 to 20 minutes with everyone in the crowd laughing the entire time. About half an hour later, when he was in the middle of a rant against the Republican Party, the sign advertising the club’s name behind him fell to the stage. This lucky coincidence of collapse and error enabled Lewis to end the show with a reprise of his opening lament.
When he discovered a punchline, the audience discovered a new reason to laugh. I would walk out feeling not like I attended a concert but had a hilarious conversation.
The internal dialogue that I had with Richard Lewis began over 20 years ago when as a high school student I first heard his voice and recognized something of my own. I too suffer from his affliction of anxiety. So, when I would spin one of his comedy CDs, watch a special, or catch an interview on television, I would hear someone describe what sounded like episodes from my life, but only with more energy and comedy than I could muster. His 2001 two-disc release, “Live from Hell,” became a close companion, mainly for the second disc — an unbridled, unscripted conversation with legendary Chicago journalist, Bill Zehme. After a few years, I could almost finish his sentences for him, never growing tired of his recollection of attending a party at a Christian Scientist’s house: “I bolted to the medicine cabinet. They just had drawings of the medicine they would like to take.”
I still recite his explanation for why he could never become president — after visiting Area 51 at Roswell, and seeing men with “vaginas growing out of their heads,” he would have no choice but to start drinking again. He was brilliant when explaining why the cliché “there are no bad audiences” is incorrect: “I’m not going to do well in front of the Klan. So, right away, that’s out.”
He also admitted to “apologizing for everything.” “I’ll be with friends in a restaurant, and I’ll say, ‘I’m sorry we’re having dinner.’” He would worry that they weren’t having a good time, just as he would worry that if he was “having a bad hair day” it meant that he “had a brain tumor.”
He also worried about the future of the United States, consistently making contributions to Democratic politicians, Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center. On the growing influence of the Christian right, he once said, “How dare they talk about the afterlife, and act like I’m going to be in hell playing shuffleboard with Stalin.”
Even emanating out of a car stereo speaker, I heard something of a friend when he inquired with Zehme on multiple occasions to confirm that the recording equipment was properly functioning. It was amusing, but it also signaled a mentality of knowing, even without evidence – even against evidence for that matter – that something is wrong. “Is everything wrong?” Richard Lewis said his mother would say when taking his calls from the road.
I recently made a list of diseases and conditions I’ve self-diagnosed myself with having in the past year. It includes lymphoma, oral cancer, and diabetes. Recently, when inspecting my mouth to monitor an incision from an oral surgery that I had a few months ago, I was alarmed to notice several bumps on the back of my tongue. My heart racing, I rushed to the computer to determine what type of tumor I had. I learned that the bumps were something horrific called “vallate papillae” — a normal part of human anatomy.
In addition to reaping myself many times, I’ve also become convinced that everyone I love, most especially my wife, suffers from every illness possible, even those that medical scientists have not yet discovered. Speaking of my incredibly loving, patient, but sometimes annoyed wife, she has compared me to Richard Lewis for years. Hours before the public announcement of Richard Lewis’ death, I actually texted her a photo of Lewis shrugging, looking particularly aggravated. My wife replied, “That’s you!”
My wife isn’t the only person in my life to make the comparison. A coworker once told me that if I was older, he would think that Richard Lewis and I were “separated at birth.” A few months ago, a dentist took an angry tone with me, shouting, “you have an infection!” when I asked why I needed antibiotics, even though she had not yet told me that I had an infection. When telling a close friend the story, he said, “This is your most Richard Lewis story yet. The dentist hates you for no reason.”
Lewis often talked and wrote about his mother. Every day, I feel fortunate and grateful to have a kind, generous and graceful mother. Anxiety is multi-generational, however. I recall as a young boy when my mother took me to the doctor, concerned about a hard “growth” on my foot. In the physician’s office, I removed my sock, he gave it a look, put his hand on it, furrowed his brow, and said, “It’s a bone.”
My mother inherited her anxiety from her father — also a wonderful person — who could never sleep when there was a thunderstorm, due to an extreme fear of tornados. He was a veteran of World War 2, and he cut stone in a quarry for a living — a tough guy — but he still had to contend with the demons that come with short nerves.
Anxiety is all the rage now. There are endless posts on social media from users who report suffering from it. Reddit pages on health anxiety contain thousands of words from various discussion participants. The state of the world — war, climate change, gun violence, the potential end of American democracy — causes millions and millions of people to “doomscroll,” swear off having children, and take medication.
The Wall Street Journal ran a story in August of 2023 under the headline, “The Booming Business of American Anxiety.” Its authors detailed how a flurry of entrepreneurs and multinational corporations have made boatloads of profit by marketing wellness, calming, and “peace of mind” products to increasingly anxious teenagers and adults.
Richard Lewis was a prophet of anxiety. Like many great artists, he captured the mood and motif not only of his time, but of a time in the future. His articulation of insecurity regarding everything from his sexual prowess to his health preceded and forecasted a cultural turn in which everyone is worried about something, and has a forum to share their concerns.
Unlike the average social media scribbler, Lewis transformed anxiety into art. When he transitioned from the stage to the screen, he was most effective in roles that enabled him to apply his comedic and talk show conversation style to the delivery of his character’s lines. Many people will remember his funniest moments on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” most especially his look of horror when Larry David has a loud argument with a child during a screening of his comedy special for television executives, or his reaction to Larry making a racist joke to a Black dermatologist: “You were like Pat Buchanan’s gym partner.”
He took funny turns in the film, “Once Upon a Crime,” and in his series with Jamie Lee Curtis, “Anything But Love.” His most moving performance was in the 1995 indie film, “Drunks.” He plays a debauched and disheveled alcoholic, revealing an underexplored potential for dramatic acting.
It is easy to imagine Lewis having an entirely different acting career in dramas, most especially because his comedy was full of pathos. David Letterman preferred to have him as an interview guest rather than as a performer. He thought he was funnier in a more casual context, but there was hardly any difference. Lewis’ comedic personality was a unique, seemingly stream-of-consciousness rap blasting out of the depths of his frustrations, pain and disappointments. As Aristotle understood, the line separating comedy and tragedy is thin, but the ancient philosopher contended that tragedy deals with virtue, while comedy deals with “weakness and foibles.”
Through a comedic and artistic testimony of his foibles, Lewis displayed courageous virtue. He was honest, sincere, and unafraid to render himself vulnerable to the judgments of his audience.
In 2000, he wrote his memoir, "The Other Great Depression: How I’m Overcoming, on a Daily Basis, at Least a Million Addictions and Dysfunctions, and Finding a Spiritual (Sometimes) Life." It is a deeply funny and moving book; often painfully confessional. After his father’s death, he describes his inability to deal with the unexpected complexity of his grief as transforming him into a “cafeteria of doom.” Even as a child, obsessed with music and comedy, he found his curative: “I had a need to become creative. I had to give birth to myself.”
By giving birth to himself, he eventually triumphed over his addiction. He was sober for 30 years. He also liberated and healed many of his admirers. His life proved the adage, as corny as it might sound, that “laughter is the best medicine.”
It helped Richard Lewis. It also helped those of us in his audience who relate to his stories of woe. The gift of his comedy was not an opportunity to laugh at the world, but to laugh at ourselves. We found freedom in his humor.
The night before the public announcement of Richard Lewis’ death, there was a tornado warning in the Chicago suburbs. I moved our cats into the bathroom and asked my wife to join us. I said, “Here we go. It’s already starting.” I sounded exactly like my grandfather, throwing my arms into the air. “What’s already starting?” she said. “The storms. The threat,” I answered back. “Oh, man…” her voice trailed off. The next morning, my wife said, “You were in Richard Lewis mode last night.” That’s why I texted her the photo of Lewis shrugging. We had a good laugh.
When I was a college student, I attended my first Richard Lewis performance. After he said “goodnight,” I managed to make my way to the corridor leading to the backstage area. I handed him my copy of "The Other Great Depression" and asked if he would sign it. He put his arm around me, said, “Thanks for reading, man,” and jotted something down with a green marker that he pulled out of his blazer. When I stepped into a well-lit area, I opened the book. He wrote, “All the best, and none of my pain.”
Thanks.
