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The Master of Oversharing
No one channeled their anxiety and neuroses into comedy brilliance quite like Richard Lewis.
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 1976, he was as part of a “class” of a “new hot happening, hip, young” group of comedians along with Elayne Boosler, Andy Kaufman, and Richard 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.
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