Richard Lewis (comedian)

Richard Lewis was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, where he graduated from Dwight Morrow High School in 1965.[1] His father worked as a caterer and his mother was an actress. The Lewises are Jewish[2] but not especially religious.[3] Lewis recalls teachers sometimes reacted badly to his antics as a class clown.[3]

Lewis attended Ohio State University, where he was a member of the Eta chapter of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity.

Lewis began performing stand-up comedy in the 1970s. He worked as a copywriter for an ad agency by day while honing his stand-up act at night. The ad agency was named Contemporary Graphics (now defunct) and was above Lovey's pizzeria in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. Lewis gained popularity in the 1980s with numerous appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and his own television specials on HBO. He is noted for always wearing an all-black outfit.[4]

Lewis made his screen acting debut in Diary of a Young Comic. He co-starred with Jamie Lee Curtis on the TV sitcom Anything but Love, which ran for four seasons, and with Don Rickles on Daddy Dearest. Lewis had a recurring role on Rude Awakening and as Rabbi Richard Glass on 7th Heaven. He appears in the Tales from the Crypt episode "Whirlpool". In 2007, he made a cameo appearance as Phillip on George Lopez. He also made cameos on Everybody Hates Chris as an old man in the hospital bed next to Chris Rock and as Charlie Sheen's accountant on Two and a Half Men.

Lewis has written comic articles for magazines such as Playboy and endorsed the popular early-1990s beverage Boku, as well as Snapple and Certs breath mints.

Lewis has achieved moderate success in films, appearing as Prince John in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, as a frontier doctor in Wagons East, as an unemployed actor in Once Upon A Crime and as himself in The Wrong Guys. He plays the lead role of Jimmy Epstein in Drunks and in Game Day. Most of his performances are in comedy, but Lewis also appears in the dramatic films Leaving Las Vegas, Hugo Pool, and The Maze.

On January 9, 2001, Lewis did The Howard Stern Show to promote his book The Other Great Depression, about his recovery from alcoholism. He has been sober since August 4, 1994.

Lewis has a recurring role as a character based on himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry David and Lewis met at summer camp in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York when they were 13.[5]

Lewis was ranked #45 on Comedy Central's list of "100 Greatest Standups of All Time".[6]

Lewis claims to be the originator of the phrase 'the ______ from hell' as in 'the night from hell', 'the date from hell" or 'the roommate from hell'. This theory is expounded in the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode "The Nanny from Hell". Lewis has petitioned the editors of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations for credit for the coinage, but the editors claim the phrase was a common idiom before Lewis used it.[7] (For example, during World War I, German troops nicknamed kilted Scottish soldiers "Ladies from Hell" (Damen aus der Hölle), and John Russell Fearn's short story "The Man from Hell" was published in Fantastic Adventures in 1939.) However, The Yale Book of Quotations attributes the phrase to Lewis.[8][9]

• Official site
• Richard Lewis at IMDb
• Richard Lewis Naked DVD Documentary at the Wayback Machine (archived 2008-02-20)
• Richard Lewis appearance at 92nd St. Y