One of the funniest long-running gags in comedy was Richard Lewis, who died on February 27 at age 76, insisting that he was the person who minted the expression “… from hellâ€: the lunch from hell, the father-in-law from hell, the colonoscopy from hell, the whatever from hell. He seemed intent on making sure everybody knew that was his thing. A few years back, he brought up inventing the phrase with me. I asked him if he truly believed he was the guy who got everybody else saying it, and he told me, earnestly, “Yeah, I do. I really do.†He did such a good job talking about it that today, when you read any obituary for him, it’s sure to mention that the comedian was to “… from hell†what Nikola Tesla was to the alternating current.
That obsession with a turn of phrase is Richard Lewis in a nutshell: He fixated on something silly for years, like ex-girlfriends he couldn’t get over or a therapist he had to drop because they were trying to “help me behind my back.†He took his anxieties and made them entertaining in a way that was never steeped in self-pity, because he talked too fast and moved so manically that there wasn’t even a split second of time to wallow.
In that way, Lewis was ahead of his time. Today, oversharing is the name of the game, whether it’s on a comedy-club stage, in a personal essay, through TikTok videos, or from some celebrity making headlines by talking up some traumatic incident in their life. Lewis was all about that nearly 50 years ago. He made things so personal and delivered his jokes and stories in such a frenetic way that his mental mishegoss hypnotized his audience. He was a skilled stand-up who treated the job as a craft, writing down ideas and jokes in a notebook and carrying it up onstage to try out material before that was common practice. He wasn’t the first comedian to descend into the dark shaft of his mind to chisel out jokes from his many fears and insecurities lodged in the walls of his subconscious. Woody Allen had already staked his claim as America’s foremost neurotic Jewish guy, but Lewis made it more accessible. Lewis wasn’t talking about philosophy and trying to pivot into an Ingmar Bergman phase; he was talking about himself. He was letting everybody in on his misery and whatever trauma was stalking him.
Lewis got into stand-up when it was still more associated with the Borscht Belt, Las Vegas nightclubs, and a million Henny Youngman–esque one-liners. By the mid-1970s, he was one of a handful of comedians who reshaped the idea of a person standing onstage telling jokes. In 1976, he was mentioned by New York as part of a “class†of a “new hot happening, hip, young†group of comedians along with Elayne Boosler, Andy Kaufman, andRichard Belzer, but there was no mention in the article of his childhood friend Larry David. Lewis and the other comedians of this class who killed or bombed on countless scummy stages in Manhattan and Los Angeles helped blaze the trail for a future generation of comics who would go on to create record-breaking sitcoms and sell out basketball arenas.
Along the way, Lewis got some opportunities of his own. Anything But Love is a gem of late-’80s television, a rom-com as TV show. A lot of people still can’t tell you what BoKu actually was (some sort of fruit juice?), but they knew he was the guy in the commercials. And, if I might be so bold, his Prince John in Robin Hood: Men in Tights is one of my top-five favorite Mel Brooks characters. He did well for himself beyond the stage, and like the Seinfelds or Roseannes who found fame and fortune on network TV, it’s likely more people associate him with his sitcom, movie, or Curb Your Enthusiasm work. That’s a shame, because I’ve seen very few comedians before or since who were as “on†as Lewis was when he had a microphone in his hand. His comedy worked because it was coming from such an authentic place. A dark place, mind you — there’s a reason Brooks compared Lewis to Franz Kafka — but he found a way to grab the audience, make them laugh at his litany of kvetches, and then maybe have them wondering, after it was all said and done, if he were okay.
Maybe, like “… from hell,†some of it was an act or an embellishment. But even if that was the case, it made Lewis all the more brilliant. His old friend Larry David — Lewis made sure to remind everybody that the two were born three days apart in the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital but didn’t end up meeting until they were 12 — would use a similar approach, using Larry David the man to give us Larry David the character. They’re not that different, but they’re not the same. Who cares how much is real and what isn’t? It’s hilarious. That’s what matters.
Whether it was the act bleeding over into real life or real life turning into the act, there was something undeniably real about Lewis when he was onstage at a club or a late-night show. Sure, he had jokes, but the more important thing was him. He was the focus. It was his hands flying all over the place, the black suit, the kvetch-y tone in his voice, the hypochondria, the low self-esteem, the irrational fears, and the relationship problems. He was a tornado of anxiety and neuroses at a time when men being macho and closed off was the name of the game. He went to therapy and had no problem talking about it in his act, but it was also obvious that he got just as much, if not more, out of oversharing in front of a room full of people and getting them to laugh. He really was a neurotic Jew who talked Brooklyn by way of New Jersey. He wore some amazing suits, wore sunglasses pretty much all the time, and probably had lots of thoughts on Zoloft versus Prozac. He just figured out a formula to take that and make it hilarious.