With Richard Lewis, Kvetching Was Charismatic

William Knoedelseder’s book “I’m Dying Up Here,” about stand-up in the 1970s, presents Lewis as the Lothario of the scene, dating stars like Debra Winger and once picking up a Danish baroness at the Improv in Manhattan with this line: “I’ll take you out for a tuna fish sandwich anywhere in the city.” It worked.

Lewis belonged to a class of young stand-ups, like Seinfeld and Bill Maher, who were influenced by the acerbic Everyman persona of Robert Klein. But Lewis eventually developed a frenetic, jazzy style that also owed something to chaos agents like Mel Brooks and Robin Williams. His jokes were delivered with rollicking energy, making misery a full-body exercise, slumping, pacing and, most of all, gesticulating. His comedy had choreography, a visual language of pointing, air-sawing and face clasps. To say he talked with his hands seems insufficient. His whole body never shut up.

Lewis was a student of comedy, and the first of several times he responded to stories I wrote, he took issue with a piece examining how the humor of Lenny Bruce held up. In a letter to the editor, he began saying my article was “aggravating.” This felt like a small triumph because what’s more fun than Richard Lewis aggravated?

While his subject matter tended to be different, less political, than that of Bruce, Lewis shared a similar dogged commitment and unruly spontaneity. He didn’t like to perform a set the same way twice. He could wander, searching for something hilarious rather than relying on what worked. This had high risks. I once saw a frustrating show of his that seemed to have far more setups than punchlines, with jokes that didn’t go off on tangents so much as live there. On an episode of “The Tonight Show,” he went so long that he plowed through the commercial break despite a producer telling him to wrap it up. For that he earned a ban from the show that ended soon after he pleaded with Johnny Carson for forgiveness.

Lewis was too good a talk show guest to abandon, precisely because of his unpredictability and insistence on finding the really funny part of his story. He worked well with and off other comics, including Richard Belzer, with whom he started as a stand-up in New York. Tied to a tour they did in 2009, The Times profiled them and Lewis joked that inevitably the interviewer would boil them down to: “He was a Jew, and he wore a black suit.”