Comedian Richard Lewis dies at 76
"I'm so proud to be part of this people. I wouldn't want to be part of anything else."
(JTA) Comedian Richard Lewis, who parlayed his neurotic Jewish personality and self-deprecating humour into a 50-year career as a stand-up and actor, died last Wednesday aged 76.
Lewis had been in ill health for a number of years and last April announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease two years earlier. Although he considered himself retired as a stand-up, he appeared again as a regular in the current season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO show created by and starring his childhood friend Larry David.
“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 released by HBO. “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.”
Lewis’s sensibility, in clubs and on screen, could be as dark as the funereal suits he often wore. In a signature joke, he spoke about an uncle who was so depressing that he would sit at home listening to the soundtrack of The Pawnbroker, the grim 1964 film about a Holocaust survivor.
He also is credited with the tagline “from Hell”, as in “the ex-wife from Hell”. When the Yale Book of Quotations gave him credit for the catchphrase in 2022, he tweeted, “Where is my Nobel Prize?”
Lewis also appeared in a number of films, including Robin Hood: Men in Tights, in which he played an extremely Jewish-seeming Prince John.
Lewis was born in Brooklyn and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, the son of a caterer and an actress in community theatre. “My father was so well known as a caterer and so booked up that he was actually booked on the weekend of my bar mitzvah, so I had to have my party on the Tuesday,” he once told an interviewer.
He began writing and regularly performing stand-up comedy in 1972. The Jewish comedians Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce were obvious roles models. Comedy Central ranked Lewis #45 on its list of “100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time” in 2004.
Lewis told Britain’s Jewish Telegraph in 2011 that he was not a synagogue-goer but that he consciously infused his Jewish identity into his comedy – and that he viewed comedy as a deeply Jewish act.
“I have a tremendous love affair for being a Jew,” he said. “I’m so proud to be part of this people. I wouldn’t want to be part of anything else.
“Because of what the Jews have gone through since literally Day One, one of the survival mechanisms was to talk about all the hell that we’ve been through. It’s so much funnier being a Jew than anything else. If we don’t find humour, then we’re in deep trouble.”
He struggled with addiction issues for years, proudly explaining in 2016 that he was “22 years sober” and that he mentored those in the recovery community.
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