Richard Lewis was the first comedian I tried to model myself upon. That’s a nice way of saying I straight-up stole his look, vibe, and way of speaking for several years in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. I am sure I was insufferable during this period—more than I am now, if you can imagine. I had a couple of friends who also stole Richard Lewis’s entire deal. One even grew his hair out and bought a wardrobe of baggy black t-shirts or short-sleeved collared shirts with strangely opulent pockets and stitching, and jet-black pants and black shoes. When we all did stuff together in public, we looked like members of a cult. Because we were. Most people had no idea who Richard Lewis was back then. Sure, comedy fans knew he was on track to become one of the greats, and he was sort of breaking through, slowly, in his own way. But he could probably have walked down any big city street in America and not been noticed by anyone but people who watched a lot of late night talk shows (he was a regular on Johnny Carson and David Letterman) or saw his standup specials on cable (between 1988 and 1991, the years in which I slavishly impersonated Richard Lewis, he released three classics: I'm Exhausted, I'm Doomed, and Richard Lewis: The Magical Misery Tour). But those who knew, knew. He could act. He was good. His best performance is probably on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” as himself, aka Larry’s best friend. (He’d been friends with David almost his entire life.) But he was also memorable as Prince John in Mel Brooks’s “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” where his mole changes position from shot to shot. And he was in sitcoms that were never big but built loyal audiences. One was “Anything But Love,” starring Lewis and Jamie Lee Curtis as writers at a Chicago magazine who had sexual chemistry galore but weren’t a couple. It ran three seasons and got overhauled twice by the network, which kept trying to turn a cult favorite into a hit. “Daddy Dearest,” which ran less than a year in 1993, was a father-son relationship show that teamed him with insult comic Don Rickles. It never quite figured out what it was doing, but it never got the chance to, either. No matter. It was the standup, the monologues, the patter that made Lewis great, and that gave me a target to shoot for—in my warped mind, at least. I could’ve listened to him talk for twelve hours straight, given the chance. He might have been the coolest comic that ever lived whose stage persona was based entirely on confessing what a disaster he was. It was the standup that made me not just love Lewis, but want to be Lewis. Even as a young man, I knew I was never going to be one of those guys who seemed to have it all figured out. But when I looked at Lewis, I saw a guy who knew he didn’t have it all figured out; in fact, he knew that he didn’t have the slightest clue how his own personality worked or what it would take for him to become happy. That appealed to me, that level of self-knowledge. Knowing what you don’t know is progress, right? Maybe a little? I probably first saw Lewis on David Letterman’s show in high school and found him hilarious; a West Coast, self-aware, self-lacerating Baby Boom-generation comic, in the tradition of somebody like Albert Brooks, though Lewis, unlike Brooks, seemed content mainly to be a performer who often wrote his own stuff, and never tried to be a triple-threat auteur filmmaker, as Brooks ultimately became. Lewis represented himself as a mess, as his own worst enemy, as a boiling vat full of largely untreated neuroses, and as such an incompetent relationship partner that he drove women either towards marriage or away from heterosexuality, but at the same time, he was obviously great at what he did and was on TV a lot—and his persona was that he had no trouble getting women, just keeping them. That last part appealed to me because I was an inexperienced young man just starting out in the world of dating and sex and relationships and thought that if Lewis’s description of himself was true, it meant there was hope for a guy like me, who was well-read and had a sense of humor and could look presentable under certain circumstances but would never be mistaken for a movie star, a jock, or one of those Michael Douglas master-of-the-universe types, which was the template for “desirable” then. One of the lines I loved to quote was, “One of these days I’m gonna write a sex manual. It’s gonna be called Ow! You’re On My Hair.” “I tried phone sex,” he said once. “It gave me an ear infection.” “During sex, I fantasize that I'm someone else.” He exaggerated. Even his exaggerations were exaggerated. One of his most lasting contributions to the English language was appending the words “from hell” to a noun. “Girlfriend from hell.” “Restaurant from hell.” In season three of “Curb” there was a subplot about Lewis trying to officially be given credit for creating the phrase “[BLANK] from hell.” The Yale Book of Quotations credited him. He wrote to Bartlett’s Book
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