Richard Lewis, the beloved comic and longtime friend/foil to Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, died on Wednesday. He was 76. The cause was a heart attack after a short battle with Parkinson’s. Tributes naturally poured in, social media teeming with clips of Lewis (as “himself”) engaged in endless verbal battles with David (as “himself”). One of those came from David himself, and it’s both moving and very him.
“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, whose darkly acerbic comedy was a staple of the entertainment industry since the 1970s, was in on Curb Your Enthusiasm from the get-go, having appeared in the original 1999 HBO special that birthed a series that’s currently airing its final season. He swung by for 41 episodes, about a third of the full run.
But Lewis and David went back way further. In an interview from last summer, Lewis discussed meeting his future sparring partner at a summer camp when they were kids. It didn’t go well.
“I disliked him intensely,” he recalled. “He was cocky, he was arrogant. When we played baseball, I tried to hit him with the ball: we were arch-rivals. I couldn’t wait for the camp to be over just to get away from Larry. I’m sure he felt the same way.”
The two reconnected a decade later, when they were both working the NYC comedy scene. “I looked at his face and I said, ‘There’s something about you, man, that spooks me.’” Lewis remembered. David replied, “You’re Richard Lewis!” “You’re Larry David!”
Lewis had health problems in his final years, with surgeries keeping him from appearing but briefly in Curb’s 11th season. Luckily he was able to appear in this season’s third episode, which only aired a week-and-a-half ago. Lewis will be missed, but he left behind a rich and prolific body of hilarious work, and not only when he was tussling with his good frenemy Larry David.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)