The Voice Of Neurosis

Hey, comedy fans: here's an interview with Richard Lewis, the actor, comedian, and world-class neurotic, which I did for SEE Magazine here in Edmonton.

This was one of the more challenging interviews I've done in a while, just in the sense that Lewis is such a talker that it's hard to find places to jump in and steer the conversation, but he's so funny and candid that it's hard to complain. And he was extraordinarily generous with his time — he talked to me for a full hour, and probably would have been happy to talk for an hour more. Sadly, space constraints forced me to leave out the part of the interview where we talked about Curb Your Enthusiasm and his friendship with Larry David, which I figured has been well covered elsewhere. I asked him about David's upcoming collaboration with Woody Allen, Whatever Works, which Lewis hasn't seen, but he had a funny line about how he was forbidden from visiting the set since having Richard Lewis, Woody Allen, and Larry David in the same place at the same time could very well create a black hole of neurosis that would collapse the fabric of the universe.

Here's the article. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, so I hope you enjoy it.

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“I’m an asshole. I’m an asshole. I am such an asshole.”

Richard Lewis has telephoned me 15 minutes later than he was supposed to, and before I can even say hello, he’s off and running. “I couldn’t get a cellphone signal! I have about 20 antique clocks in this living room alone,” he says, “and with every second that was ticking off, I was... I’ve been sober for almost 15 years, but I was going to go drink over this! I was going to blame Bush — and you! For having set up this appointment!”

It’s kind of an honour to have been added to the gallery of Richard Lewis’ neuroses. Not that it’s all that exclusive a club: fear of intimacy, fear of death, fear of women, feelings of sexual inadequacy, self-hatred, mother issues, father issues, God issues, anti-Semitism, struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction, career woes, money woes, worries about health, hypochondria, his agent, the president, that heckler in the fifth row... all of them have contributed to the hilarious, unceasing howl of torment that constitutes Lewis’ nearly 40-year career as a standup comic.

His trilogy of specials — I’m in Pain, I’m Exhausted, and I’m Doomed — along with his multiple guest spots on Carson, Letterman, and other talk shows, always dressed in black, his hand constantly reaching toward his forehead as if to keep his weary brains from spilling out of his skull as fast as his words were spilling from his mouth, cemented his image in the public mind: The Prince of Pain, they called him, and so they call him still. He once did a guest role on an episode of Disney’s Hercules — perfectly cast as the voice of Neurosis. But arguably Lewis’ best TV showcase are his numerous appearances as himself on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, opposite his longtime friend Larry David. (The show is shooting its seventh season, and Lewis will once again be a needling presence in Larry’s life.)

There’s a serious side to Lewis’ art, though, if you know where to look for it. In 1995, when he was wrestling with a drinking problem that he freely admits nearly ruined his life, he appeared in two films about alcoholism: he had a small supporting role as Nicolas Cage’s agent friend in Leaving Las Vegas; and a larger, showier part in the well-reviewed indie Drunks as an AA member falling off the wagon. He’s written very articulately and insightfully about his battle with the bottle in his 2001 memoir The Other Great Depression. He's currently working on a new comedy/drama series with comedy pros David Steinberg and Alan Zweibel, and which he hopes will someday show up on one of the cable channels.

Richard Lewis spoke to me earlier this week about comedy, addiction, and his secret optimistic streak. It was a challenge to get a word in edgewise with him, but here’s our (highly condensed) conversation.

Q: You’ll be performing here in Edmonton next week—

Richard Lewis: That’s what they say! That’s what they tell me! I’m 61 — if I get out of bed and don’t have a stroke, I consider it a victory at this point.

Q: I was going to ask you what your morning routine is like. Do you get out of bed and greet the day?

RL: (incredulous) Greeting the day? I don’t think I’ve ever used that phrase. I’m warning the day! Listen — I’ve been in the arts for 40 years, man. I’ve been on the road for 38 years, I’m an actor, I’m an author, I got married for the first time four and a half years ago — my wife is up in the cabin, what she calls “the getaway house,” which is really just a getaway from me. The truth of the matter is, she told me after the fact, once she saw my three-storey house, which is just filled, every inch of it is antiques and artwork and memorabilia — it’s called the museum. It’s an insane asylum, really. Now she works for a charity, urbanfarming.org, which is an amazing thing — they grow gardens in inner cities. Anyway, she loves what she sees here, but the stimuli is so overwhelming to her that she said to herself a decade ago, “If I ever end up with this clown, I’m going to have to get my own house.” And she did!

Q: You’ve built a whole persona on being this “glass is half-empty” sort of guy, but it’s interesting to me that you’ve married this woman who does charity work. And Larry David is the same way — he married an environmental activist. Do you respond to that kind of idealism in others? Are you an idealist yourself?

RL: I am an idealist. Look, I’m not going to beat a dead horse about sobriety, because I wrote a book about it and I talk about it onstage, but I was ready to pretty much lose everything in the early ’90s. But a series of events led me to get sober, and I’ve remained so for 15 years. And the thing that I got out of it was that, other than saving my life — I mean, if I hadn’t wound up dead, I’d have been homeless, I was going down that path... I wish I could drink, I wish I could moderate, but I can’t. So what I’ve gotten from it is clarity — I joke about this, but I’ve got a microscope into my head that lets me despise myself more! But it’s true: I really didn’t have a great upbringing, I really did see humanity for what it was, I really did see the darkness and I was trying to run away from it. Now, I have far more acceptance. Now, I really do celebrate other people’s idealism. And I’m grateful I’m alive. I’m not suggesting there’s anything heroic about this, but when I go onstage and ramble about my life experiences, I know a lot of people in the audience share these fears and phobias, and I’m here to tell them I’m alive to tell the tale and that their life doesn’t have to spin out of control. You know what? Maybe I’m the messiah! I think I might be the messiah! [Laughs.] But you know, even Mother Teresa, they found some diaries of hers, and near the end, even she was not a happy camper. I think you’ve got to be some kind of psychotic to always be walking around in a haze saying everything’s beautiful.

Q: A lot of creative people can get very romantic about their neuroses and phobias and dysfunctions, and they think that if they ever got “healed” that they wouldn’t be funny or creative or interesting anymore. Did you ever worry about that? Is that just a romantic fiction? Or did you just turn out to have plenty of neuroses left over?

RL: Yeah, I had a few stuffed in the freezer. Fortunately for the planet, people like Eugene O’Neill, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor — a lot of these guys are twisted and have horrible marriages and abuse alcohol throughout their life, but somehow they found the time to put their art on record or write their plays and then go back to these lives that were pretty dysfunctional. I don’t think every great piece of work or every great author or comedian necessarily had a screwed-up life, but it’s fair to say that a great many did. But saying that, I know a lot of great musicians who laid down a lot of amazing tracks while they were junkies and out of control in their own lives but managed to put down songs that will last forever. I’m not putting myself in that group, but I was lucky to be able to get sober and then go back onstage and still realize I had more clarity about how screwed up I was and still am. I have a great marriage, but I still get moody, I can still go to a dark place in my head, but I don’t drink or take drugs because of it. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m one of the lucky ones. A lot of people kill themselves or O.D. over these problems. I haven’t so far, and I don’t think I will. To see people make that transformation is such a gift — that’s one of the reasons I stay sober. I might be in a hotel in Edmonton about to do two shows and get a phone call from someone about to take a drink or do drugs, and I’ve got to call someone to tell them to get over there and help this person. I didn’t even know that lifestyle existed 15 years ago. When people ask if [sobriety] has affected my work, I say it’s never been better. I played Carnegie Hall 20 years ago and it was a great night, it was sold out, and I was good — but right now, I am much superior as a comedian. I know my dysfunctions much more clearly, and I can be much funnier about them.

Q: You use the word “clarity,” and I’m wondering what that means in terms of developing your act. My impression is that you’re not someone who takes their material and hones it night after night until you’ve arrived at some ideal version of your act. You seem like someone who’s more about energy and spontaneity, and being in the moment.

RL: When I started out as a young comic, you had to get on Carson. And to do that, you had producers come to see you and watch you do a couple of five-and-a-half-minute monologues. So even though I had a lot of material, I knew I had to get three of these five-and-a-half-minute monologues together to audition for these guys, or nothing was gonna happen. So I would certainly work and hone those routines. But I was always writing jokes — I had thousands of them, stacks and stacks and stacks. This was pre-computer — I’d put them in a security box in case there was a fire in my house. So fast-forward to now, after hundreds, thousands of TV appearances, and I’d never repeat anything on any show I’d do, whether it was Conan or Jay or Maher or Craig Ferguson.

Q: Is that a point of pride for you?

RL: How I work, 38 years into the game, I have about 30 hours of material in my computer. So before a show, I’ll print out the last two, three months of material, I sit in the hotel and just pore over these premises. I’m holed up like a prisoner of war — I hate to trivialize that phrase, but that’s how it is — all I’m thinking about all day is that night’s audience, scrolling through hours and hours of new material. In my act, I used to have a piano onstage and I’d bring this six-foot sheet of paper Scotch-taped together that would literally have all-new material on it. I’d take a quick glance at it and see “fear of intimacy” or whatever, and then I could pop up and do 15 minutes on that. But one agent told me, it looked too much like a work in progress. And it is! My life is a work in progress! If I have a funny argument with my wife today, and I have a show tonight, I’m going to be jotting down thoughts and I know I’m going to come onstage and talk about it. But what I do know — if you see me in Edmonton and then come see me a year later, you’re not going to hear the same act. Maybe remnants of the same topics, but that’s it. There are some comedians you can come back a year later and hear the same act verbatim. I’m not knocking those guys, but for me, that’s not being an artist in the purest sense. I need to tell people how I’m feeling in the moment. If I’m bored, I won’t be as good.

Q: I’m always wary of that cliché of comparing a non-musical performer to a jazz musician, but it sounds like it really does apply to you — just as a jazz artist will improvise over the chords to “I Got Rhythm” or “Tea for Two,” you’ll improvise over a theme like “fear of intimacy” or “fear of death.” Do you listen to a lot of jazz?

RL: Yeah, I do. Charlie Haden, the great upright bass player, is a very old friend of mine. If anyone listened to our conversations, they’d be clueless — we’re all over the joint. He’s said that he grooves on the way I do my standup — he actually wants to tour with me. But he’s such an iconic guy in jazz! I don’t know, though... I’m very flattered, but it would need to be a very special venue. He says he never knows where I’m going to go, and I don’t either.

Q: Are there any jazz musicians you feel a particular affinity with? I mean, you’re not exactly a Dave Brubeck type, are you?

RL: If I’m really on fire, I’ll go right to Miles Davis — except I won’t turn my back on the audience. God, I’d love that — if I had a really bad audience, to just turn my back on them and talk to myself. That’d be really hip. Actually, Miles Davis is maybe too easy a choice. I just sort of feel like I’m in the middle of someone who really respects the spoken word, but also wants the audience to know that if they laugh, if they’re really with me, I’m going to start doing material I’ve never done before. That is the highest of highs for any performer who works like this — to have the audience rolling with laughter over something that never existed before you went onstage... it doesn’t get better than that.