“I went onstage to talk about myself. And it wasn’t for the money — it was to have people who would listen to me.”
Richard Lewis: The Penthouse Interview
He walks onstage dressed in black, like some Ingmar Bergman specter of angst. The spotlight hits him, and comedian Richard Lewis paces with a stooped Lieutenant Columbo gait, hand constantly touching his forehead, his voice railing in that insistent narrative thrust against the troubling particulars of his waking hours. Here is one severely agitated Jewboy majoring in misery, loneliness, and bad posture. Oy, the pain:
“My mother faxes me bad news from the family. I have problems flown in fresh daily.”
“I was paranoid in the first 12 seconds of my life. I thought I left my wallet in my mother’s womb.”
“My grandfather was in a Russian-Yiddish circus. He was a Jewish juggler. He used to worry about six things at once.” “Bob Cratchit was my role model. In high school during student-government week, I was ‘Coroner for a Day.’”
It is the comedic persona of a big-time neurotic and, to hear it from his colleagues, not so far removed from the real-life Richard himself. As fellow comic Jimmie Walker says, “Forget the act. That’s Richard Lewis. That neurotic fucking thing all the time. You’d just go, ‘Well, all right, Rich. I gotta be somewhere.’”
Not so with audiences. Since the early 1980s, when Lewis began appearing regularly on “Late Night With David Letterman” and then in comedy clubs and concert halls, his tortured figure has been widely embraced by the public. As a stand-up performer and as journalist-worrywart Marty Gold on ABC-TV’s sitcom “Anything but Love,” he has found a large following for his relentless kvetching.
But for the 46-year-old Lewis — now featured opposite Don Rickles in the Fox Broadcasting sitcom “Daddy Dearest” and in Mel Brooks’s latest film, Robin Hood: Men in Tights — the path to showbiz glory was hardly a greased rail.
Lewis grew up in Englewood, New Jersey. His father was a caterer — a good man, as Richard tells it, but so consumed with making a buck that he hadn’t much time for his son. The rest of his family life wasn’t exactly “Ozzie and Harriet” either — a clue to the impulse that led him to comedy.
“I’m not out there for the money — the only reason I’m onstage is to talk about myself,” Lewis says. “Because I wasn’t listened to in my childhood.”
Lewis got attention at Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, where he was “your basic homeroom cutup: plastic vomit, joy buzzers, the whole bit.”
He went on to Ohio State, graduating with a degree in marketing. While working for an advertising agency in New Jersey, he began to torch for comedy. After the death of his father in 1971, he traveled to Manhattan to try out his act in showcases like the Improvisation.
Lewis came along at a time when talented comedians like Robert Klein, David Brenner, Gabe Kaplan, Jay Leno, Jimmie Walker, and Steve Landesberg had begun the push from the lmprov toward stardom. One by one, each of them moved up quickly in the business.
Lewis was not so fortunate. In his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” in 1973, he failed so badly he feared he had blown his career.
What followed were years filled with hard wages and difficult relationships with women. As Lewis once said, “I’m taking fear-of-intimacy antibiotics. I’m never satisfied. I really have had hundreds of bad relationships. I really have spent half a million dollars on therapy.”
Eventually, he put that confessional sound into his act, and pretty soon he was prowling stages in that feverish way of his, coaxing big laughs with his nonstop plaint.
His career went on the upswing in the early 1980s, when his friend Letterman got his own show and extended a regular invitation to Lewis. Those frequent appearances gave Lewis recognition and a bigger paycheck on the comedy-club circuit and led to his role opposite Jamie Lee Curtis on “Anything but Love.”
“Four years in front of 30 million people every week — that’s monster time,” Lewis says of “Anything but Love.”
In the meantime, Lewis earned two Cable ACE award nominations for his HBO comedy specials, and his 1989 one-man show at Carnegie Hall played to a standing-room-only audience.
With a degree in marketing, what did you figure your future was when you graduated from college?
I had visions of getting a job in advertising. I knew I didn’t really want to do it, but I was just millions of miles away from thinking of performing. I mean, in high school I always laughed and joked, but I never thought about doing anything about it — I mean, seriously.
So what happened?
I got a job as a copywriter in an advertising agency in New Jersey. And as soon as I got a little bit secure, I started writing for a comic named Roger Riddle. Seven dollars a joke he paid me. And after a while I just couldn’t stand it. I guess I was frustrated that I wasn’t doing more. But then I started writing for another comic, Morty Gunty. He was a little more successful than Riddle. We’d go to the Stage Delicatessen, and there I was with my little portfolio and 12, 14 pages of jokes. And everyone’s going, “Hiya, Morty. How ya doin’?” And I’m there — someone’s writer again. I got that same vibration and I got uptight again. Like I just knew I didn’t like it. I didn’t like being someone’s writer. About this time I was working three jobs, part-time as a copywriter, and then I was working in the library of the Museum of Modern Art. And I worked in sporting goods in Herman’s World of Sports. I was going from the beautiful archives in the library, reading all these secret letters of Dalf … to getting jocks in the cellar for some guy… to writing ads. And always I had my notepad with me, and if I thought of something that Morty Gunty might like … I just wrote it down and —
He used your jokes?
Yeah. Same thing. Seven dollars a joke. I remember there was a “Sesame Street” thing I wrote for him, and he told me, “I’m gonna do it on David Frost tonight.” And so I went over to my girlfriend’s house and I taped the whole fucking show. Like an hour and a half of David Frost just for his one line. And the line scored. And like… as soon as he said the line, I turned up the volume so the laughter was louder.
“I don’t even know if I’ve had intercourse in three years.”
How soon after did you try to do comedy on your own?
By June 1971. I was living in some rooming house in Teaneck, New Jersey. A very drab place. On a main drag, right next to a bowling alley. It was clean and neat — a square little room. And I had to share this little john with a Greek guy, and it was very strange. I didn’t get along with the guy. Just seeing the guy, hearing him talk or playing all this Greek music all night — I just was really uptight. Greek movie soundtracks … continually … whenever he was home, and it made it very difficult for me to write. You know, like the soundtrack from Z. It was always ning ning ning ning.
But I sat up there and I wrote material when I came home from work every night until I thought I had enough to get up onstage and rap. My birthday’s in June — June 29. I wanted to go in to New York and perform that month — before I turned 24. It was crazy, but that’s what I wanted to do. So a week before my birthday, I went to the Champagne Gallery in the Village — a showcase for young guys — and did my act.
How were those showcase years?
Pretty weird. I remember a place in the Village, Feenjon’s. I was scheduled to go on at midnight. I had a friend with me and my girlfriend. So I get there at midnight, and the place was empty. Not a soul in the audience. So I stood on the stage and I looked. There was a mirror parallel to the stage, and I was looking at me performing. And, like, for the first time I realized how fucking crazy this business was and was gonna get. Because here I was… logged down to do a show and the guy… “All right, Rich Lewis, you’re up.” And he was, like, straight when he said it. And he didn’t even stay. He was the ticket man and he went out to take a crap or something. And I was holding the mike, looking at myself in the mirror, and I just said… I don’t know who I was talking to… I guess to my reflection… I said, “I’m sorry, folks. I can’t go on with the show.” I put the mike back and I walked out.
Was that the worst experience?
No. A year or so later, I went up to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to visit a friend. And they had a club there, a place called the Pretzel Bell. My friend went up to the owner and said, “Look, I got a friend of mine here from New Yaaawk. How ‘bout letting him do a set?” The guy didn’t care. He said okay. It was a beer-type place. A lot of fraternity people sitting around. I was feeling very comfortable there. The band finished its gig. Greaser-type band, all wearing, like, red jackets. My friend walks up to the mike and says, “And now, while the band takes a break, here’s Richard Lewis, a comedian from New Yaaawk.” And he pronounced it that way again. And the audience… their ears sort of propped up. They took offense to that “New Yaaawk.” I felt the vibes. They were there just for music.
So I go on, and it was getting increasingly difficult to get their attention. Even my friends weren’t laughing. They were intimidated by the crowd. I was bombing pretty bad for about five, six minutes. For some reason they didn’t want to see a comic. But I was valiantly trying to get them, trying to be as loose as I could… until a chick sitting up front walked out. I kibitzed about it, and she didn’t say anything. She walked out and five seconds later one of the leads in the band walked up to the stage, put his hand into his pocket, pulled out a switchblade, and went tchooo. The blade came out. And he cut the microphone cord. I figured if I really acted tense about it, it could be bad. So I introduced him as my singer and said that it was part of the act. And I still didn’t get the audience. But yet, foolishly, I walked over to the other microphone and continued my act. The greaser went down and Frenched his girlfriend for about five minutes, and I was starting to laugh at that. Because I knew where he was at. Like he cut my balls and then he was going to lord it over me by Frenching her. I found some humor in that. Anyway, I kept going. And at this point, my friend moved up to the stage and said, “Why don’t we go? It’s not getting anywhere.” And he yanked me offstage.
So it was no day at the beach in the beginning.
Uh-uh. When you first start out, it’s like being thrown into the deep end of a pool. Because you can read about it and hear about it, but until you’re onstage and a guy shouts from the back, “You’re not funny,” which happened one night to me … until something like that happens, hecklers are strictly theoretical. This guy was drunk, and I just had a verbal thing with him and, luckily, I won. I talked about his clothes. He had an incredibly shiny sharkskin suit and very bulky white socks and a thin Wyatt Earp tie.
Another time, a drunk couldn’t verbalize his insults. So he would yell out in the middle of my bit, things like “rib roast” or “grapefruit.” It was totally inane and ridiculous. So I started shouting back other fruits and other meals and got big laughs.
The best squelch I ever heard was from Steve Landesberg. He was going the Improvisation on a Saturday night in New York. And there was a guy who was talking to another guy very loudly, cursing…. “Fuck it… Yeah, shit, forget it… Fuck that…” And it was distracting the entire room. And Landesberg looked at that table and said, “Rabbi Moscowitz, you showed up.” And at that moment, it was brilliant.
By 1973 you got your shot at the big time — your debut on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.”
Yeah. I remember I went to a store in Hackensack, New Jersey, run by four or five Italian brothers. I told them I was going to be on “The Tonight Show.” So they dressed me how they figured a star entertainer should look. Blue shoes to match a blue outfit that made me look like a hit man. Frank Nitti Goldberg. That night I felt uncomfortable with how I looked. It got worse. The guest before me was George Peppard, who talked about his lung cancer. I actually cried behind the curtain hearing him talking about his cancer. And when I walked out, I felt the audience was depressed. So I became overly frantic to win them over. I treated the 300 people in the audience as though this was a nightclub. I got laughs, but the verdict from Johnny was, “He’s too frantic for the show.” In other words, I’d blown it.
It was not a great time in my life. After that shot I broke up with my girlfriend of five years. I had no money and no “Tonight Show.” I went into hiding. Those are the times when you want to give up. Then one night I was driving around New York with David Brenner, who’d kind of been a mentor to me, and I told him I was depressed. I was sick of working my three jobs. I had money problems. I told him, “I want to do comedy full-time.” Brenner said, “What do you need?” I told him, “If I had a thousand bucks, I could quit working.” David whips out his checkbook and writes me a check, then says, “Here, you’re a comedian.” The next day I quit every job, and a month later I went on tour with Sonny and Cher.
And pretty soon you’d moved to Los Angeles.
And fallen in love with Nina van Pallandt. I was about 28, she was in her early forties — a woman who had been a baroness and a big star in Europe and had gone through the Clifford Irving-Howard Hughes scandal. He wanted her to lie and say she knew Howard Hughes, remember? Anyway, I was broke, living in this one-room flat next to a whorehouse. But we fell in love. I went through so many years in therapy thinking I had to get validated externally, from success… from being a comedian or an actor or a writer… when really Nina loved me for being this poor, struggling, bad-postured comic. She taught me I could be loved for myself. I wish I could have taken that in and stopped going to therapy, because the real problem I’ve had is not believing that I’m someone, apart from whatever being a celebrity means. With Nina it was the only time I experienced unconditional love with a woman.
The problem was I felt I had so much to do still with my career. I can remember Jimmie Walker returning to the Improv six months after landing the sitcom “Good Times.” Just by their announcing his name now, he would bring the house down. They couldn’t wait to hear him say, by and large, the same act he had six months earlier. He was still funny, but the thing was… he was presold. As soon as they announced his name, the people were roaring. I mean, they went through the roof. I saw it and said to myself, “I’ve got to taste that.”
What it came down to was, I couldn’t put my energy into a relationship. I had no choice. I was too young to commit and get married. Nina had three adolescent kids, and I was more worried about getting a good spot at the Improv than helping one of her kids with physics. This is even before I started doing Letterman. So I mean, it was well before I was known in the country.
And love’s never quite bloomed like that since?
Oh, man. I’ve been in relationships that even men on death row would say, “What do you need this for?”
What type of women?
Actresses and models who, as I learned, were as tunnel-visioned about their careers as I was when I started out. The difference is that the actresses were getting younger and younger, and I was getting older and more successful… and ready to give more to a relationship than they were capable of. So I got burned by most of them.
Great actresses are passionate. They can turn on the emotions in a moment. But in the end, I’d find out that I’d been hoodwinked by women who didn’t care for me. Sometimes I’d be driving with a buddy through L.A. and suddenly the car would stray. “Why are you driving so erratically?” my friend would say. I’d point to a billboard. “Look up there. She killed me. Another model who jerked me around.”
I had a tendency, and probably still do, to fall head over heels over something which I know now to be insanely superficial — pure beauty. I wish I could say I do not care about beauty. But I mean, how many people can really say that? I don’t think it’s wrong to want to be hot for someone. Unfortunately, every hot person I’ve met since Nina and I split has been mainly self-absorbed and selfish.
So where does that leave you these days?
I need a woman to marry who I can feel like she’s a buddy. I need to feel like I’m going to marry a best friend who is a woman, who gets me hot. And if for some odd reason she doesn’t like to lie in bed and scream at “The Honeymooners” as much as I do… or doesn’t understand Mel Brooks’s 2,000 Year Old Man album as much I do… or doesn’t want to fly to Vegas to see Mike Tyson’s first fight when he comes out of prison because she hates boxing… I won’t get psyched out anymore and say she’s not for me… because she’s given me so many other things in my life. You know, I used to want everything. And I found out wanting everything was my way of keeping myself from giving anything to someone else. Because I can’t give everything, either. Nobody can.
So I guess I have to make a list — prize fighting, the Knicks, Buffalo Springfield… it would take me forever to write a list of what would most disappoint me in a wife who didn’t share my interests. “What do you mean? You don’t think Procol Harum is one of the most authentic rock groups ever? All right, the marriage is over.”
I don’t know how far I’d go. It remains to be seen. I’ve lowered my expectations quite a bit. I have thousands of jokes about low self-esteem and lowering my expectations. And the truth is, the jokes are embellished and hyperbole, but they come out of my anger that I wasn’t with a good woman. So I would just turn it around and put the blame on me. Because if I’m complaining onstage, it’s not entertainment.
Speaking of entertaining… back in the early 1970s, when I first saw you perform, you didn’t prowl the stage or do material so personal or dress in black. How did that Richard Lewis evolve?
The black clothing just happened. I think it might have unconsciously been a way to hide. I mean, any color up from black would be, like, sunlight. Black baggy clothes — it was like wearing my clubhouse.
Clubhouse?
Like sitting in the clubhouse I never built in the backyard cause I can’t climb trees and I quit the Cub Scouts after a week. I felt I was, like, a clubhouse with sneakers. A black clubhouse. It was like no one could see me onstage. In fact, from Vegas to Atlantic City or Carnegie Hall, I make it a point to have the lighting director shine the light so bright on me that I can’t see anything.
Why?
Cause I can’t bear to see maybe one person who might have been dragged along on a date to see Richard Lewis. And what I used to do is, like, I would play to the person who didn’t want me and try to win over his approval. And that would screw up my whole act. So you know, if 3,000 people were digging me, and one person was scratching his head, going, “I wish I could get out of here and go home and make love or get some Chinese food,” I would try to win that person over. And it’s not fair to the other people. So I learned that very fast. I learned that early on when I played the lmprov, where the whole room was lit and I could see everybody. And particularly when, in 1971, I went on at two in the morning-you know, a lot of those people were unconscious to begin with.
As far as my material, I went onstage to talk about myself. And it wasn’t for the money — it was to have people who would listen to me. I think it probably evolved from feeling that I was not listened to by enough important role models while I was growing up. And when I had an audience and a microphone, it slowly dawned on me that I could express what I wanted to. The lucky part of it is, I had some sort of knack for turning phrases about my feelings. And it was fairly obvious to me a year or two into my work that I cared much more talking about feeling lonely than describing a department store.
In 1986 I did a special for Showtime — “I’m in Pain.” Soon after that I was standing on the corner of Sunset Boulevard, and this Corvette goes by with four college kids from U.C.L.A. — the most stereotypical-looking, beautiful Southern California couples. They must have been about 18 or 19 and, as they whipped by, they shouted, “Hey, Richard Lewis! We’re in pain, too!” So I said to myself, “I got to them, too. Good for me.”
Richard Lewis in a Mel Brooks comedy about Robin Hood? Sounds incongruous somehow.
Yeah, it’s like 30 English people and a Brooklyn Jew. I play Prince John, a neurotic paranoid who is a pretender to the throne while his brother, King Richard, went off to the Crusades. I’m Mel 20 years ago. If I’m flattering myself — so be it. But I told Mel that. In fact, I told Mel just before I got the role, I said, “Mel, look. I’m frightened of horses. I can’t look at their teeth. I don’t like to see flies coming in and out of their nose. I get nauseated. I’m not riding a horse. I’m out of the movie if I have to ride a horse.” So it was in the contract that I wasn’t going to be near a horse, which was fine. The other thing was, I said to Mel, “You know, I’m reading this script, and there’s a lot of me and there’s a lot of you in it.” And I said, “I’ll make you a deal. I will give you ‘you’ if you let me have ‘me.’” So I called myself, as a running joke through the whole movie, Mel Lewis.
In “Daddy Dearest” you’re a psychiatrist whose wife has left him and you’re living with your father, played by Don Rickles, who also has been abandoned… by your mother. That’s the setup, right?
Right. But I’m not a straight man to Don. I mean, I’m pretty whacked up myself. I have moments when I can be crazy. I’m an excellent therapist and an excellent father. It’s just that my parents drive me crazy, and my brother drives me nuts, and most probably a lot of the women I’ll be dating won’t be the right ones for quite a while.
Are you a straight man to Rickles away from the set?
I try not to be, but Don is razor sharp. I kid him, sure. He has a tendency to sweat tremendously on his head, and I say, “Don, you might have to go to Sweden for some kind of operation. Because if you sweat, they might have to keep us late and reshoot scenes because your head’s dripping.” The thing is, you can get Rickles on the ropes, but when he comes back at you, you’re gone, man. You can’t beat him. When Rickles phones me, and I hear his voice on my machine, I never answer. I just put on the tape recorder. I have about two hours of him destroying me.
Saying what?
Saying, “I know you’re hiding there in your black cape, thinking of what destructive, psychotic woman you want to waste your life with later on.” Or, “You’re probably just thinking, ‘Should I wear the black cape, or the black cape that goes with the other black cape?’” I mean, he just destroys. He destroys my posture, he destroys every part of my body. But then, as soon as he sees me, he hugs me and says, “You know, you’re like a son to me.” See, that’s his genius. He strokes you and he means it, and as soon as you let your guard down, he knocks you out.
Change of subject: You’ve made no secret of your reliance on psychiatry as a modern convenience. How often do you see your therapist?
I call her from the road if I need to. But usually I try to see her maybe twice a month. And she’s always around for emergency calls.
A year ago you told me you’d stopped seeing her.
Yeah. I went, like, five, six months without seeing her. A buddy of mine, who’s also a shrink, said to me, “Look, if you feel more happy than unhappy, then there’s really not much of a reason to go to a therapist.” I felt that after 15 or 20 years in therapy, I understood what was making me unhappy. Mainly, it was loneliness tied to my being such a workaholic. Even when I got “Anything but Love” and all of a sudden the country knew me, I wanted to do everything. You know. Carnegie Hall, the Guthrie in Minnesota, every college in America. I worked crazily. It almost destroyed me from sheer exhaustion. When the actors would take vacations after “Anything but Love,” I would be booked on these incredible tours where I would do about ten or 12 shows in nine days and then come back in time to rehearse. But I had to do it because I got a charge out of being in some hotel room knowing that people were, like, an hour or two away from coming to see me. And that was what I always wanted to happen.
Anyway. So now I’m trying to give myself more freedom, more time to enjoy life. Now I’ll just hop a plane and go visit a buddy. Or I’ll go to Rome and hang out in cathedrals or in museums, where I would never have done that before because if I wasn’t working, I felt I was wasting my time. It’s tragic when I think about it. Yet I don’t think I ever would have done what I’ve done …. I don’t think I could have done close to 50 Letterman shots if I had just said, “I’m gonna hang out for a month in Columbus, Ohio, where I went to school.” Instead of doing that, I wrote another hour of material, which became another six Letterman shows. So I mean, you can’t do it all. But I think now I’m in the prime of my life and I have a chance to do some things I never did. Read some of the books I want to read. Maybe even read something by Thomas Pynchon that I can understand. I’ve tried to get through one or two of his books, and I’m either a moron or it’s a practical joke. I read a sentence at a time. I take a nap. I reread it. I juggle the words.
‘Oh, man. I’ve been in relationships that even men on death row would say, “What do you need this for?”’
I’ll tell you what else I’m reading. Anything by Richard Yates that I haven’t already read. I once had dinner with him because my friend Larry David, who writes and produces the “Seinfeld” show, was friendly with Yates’s daughter. I’ll never forget this. We went to a Chinese restaurant, and I had read his novel Disturbing the Peace, which really blew me away, and another called Young Hearts Crying. People magazine had just done a story on me, and I’d made a point of holding up Disturbing the Peace in the photo. I showed Richard Yates the picture. And he understood why I did it. He’s a real erudite, eccentric guy with a beard down to his soup. He’s like a writer’s writer, but not in the mainstream. And I told him, “I did this because I knew 30 million people would see the name of this book, and maybe a million of them love me. And let’s say ten of those go read the book. Maybe ten will go out and buy the book.” Well, he gave me this look like he was so moved that I would do that. Cause who in this world helps the other guy? He says to me, “I can’t express my feelings, so I’ll write you a letter.” Sadly, he died not long after, and I never got the letter. But it didn’t matter, because I knew how happy he was.
What else do you do to relax?
I just wrote a song with Keith Reid, who wrote all the songs for Proco! Harum, not to mention “Whiter Shade of Pale.” Keith did the lyrics to “Whiter Shade of Pale,” and Gary Brooker did the music. Keith’s a good friend of mine. It’s not the first song I’ve written, but it’s the first good song I’ve written. And I think it had a lot to do with writing with someone I consider a genius. Anyway, one day Keith and I were on the phone talking about women, and in the course of conversation he said, “She left me to die.” And I started laughing. I dropped the phone. I said, “Do me a favor, Keith. When you write the song ‘She Left Me to Die,’ just talk about women that broke our hearts.”
And then 20 minutes later, I heard my fax machine go on. And I went in and I saw two stanzas there that he had written and this notation: “…over to you, Richard.” Meaning I should write the next stanzas. And it was like the first time I went onstage — I went, “Wow.” He wanted me to write this with him. So for the next two hours we kept faxing and we wrote the song. So who knows what will happen? We’re getting it out to musicians to write the music.
Are those dumbbells against the wall of this hotel suite decorative? Or is Richard Lewis a late convert to body-building?
Years ago I could never afford the luxury of having a trainer stand over me for an hour three or four times a week. But I’m telling you, if he didn’t do it, I wouldn’t do the 200 sit-ups and 300 side-bends. I wouldn’t do it. I know it. So in the last year, I decided to take it seriously. When I come to a hotel, I ask for a typewriter and some dumbbells and healthy food.
It’s not Joe Piscopo time with me. This is just to try to maintain some semblance of a body. Like I went out with a woman the other night whose mother was a psychologist and five years older than me. The daughter’s 24. And I thought, What am I doing here? And then I realized I had to have dumbbells because that’s realistic.
A 24 year old is a woman. It’s conceivable if I was, like, a dairy farmer and married to my childhood sweet-heart, that this 24 year old could be my daughter. It got me very nervous. So I guess the point is, I’m not a dairy farmer. I’m a comedian. I am almost twice her age, but she’s a woman. She’ll be 25 years old and she wants to go out with me. But for some superficial reason, I have dumbbells in my room. I think it’s clear that I don’t want to feel like, you know, her uncle if we’re fortunate enough to make love. Which is difficult for me now cause I’m so paranoid. I completely cover my body in Saran Wrap. I don’t even know if I’ve had intercourse in the last three years.
Clearly Richard Lewis remains funny as ever, and quite possibly just as famous as ever. He has learned to appreciate home, though, so you’ll need to check his site for tour dates as he decides to schedule them. We all need to enjoy life more, honestly, as Richard Lewis himself says, after all, “When you’re in love, it’s the most glorious two-and-a-half days of your life.”
