If Richard Lewis looks as though he’s in pain during this season’s episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” on HBO, there’s a reason for that.
He is.
And was – all through shooting last year.
Not just the psychic angst for which Lewis is so famous and which he shares so generously on the show and has, of course, during the past 49 years of his stand-up comedy.
No, this time Lewis‘ pain is of a decidedly more physical variety, and it has continued since “Curb” filming ended last year. For he has endured two surgeries in short order: The first last September, to relieve back pain that he describes as having been “100 out of 100”; the second in January, to repair a shoulder that shattered when he slipped after stepping out of a swimming pool, where he was trying to rehab from the back surgery.
None of which seems to have dulled his mordantly comic view of his troubles.
The swimming pool incident reminded him that he hadn’t “had on a bathing suit since I was (vacationing) in Florida when I was 9,” recalls Lewis. “I only went about a foot past the sand, and I had the glass goggles on. It looked like a goldfish (swam) across my screen, and I ran out of Miami Beach screaming.
“And I never went back in.”
In retrospect, Lewis might have been better off if he’d stayed away from the water, but he was determined to get his back into shape. So now he’s at home with his arm in a sling, hoping the next several months of physical therapy might help him avert a third operation, to replace his right shoulder.
On the positive side, Joyce Lapinsky, his wife, got him a new toilet.
“When she saw how much of a drag it is to get in and out of a bed when you can’t use your arm, she bought me this Japanese toilet,” explains Lewis, with obvious enthusiasm.
“When you walk into the bathroom, it opens automatically. I call it Sal.
“But that’s just the beginning. Without getting too graphic, there’s a little children’s waterfall in there.
“If I’m tired, and I get up in the middle of the night, it has a remote control: What kind of squirt do you want?”
Clearly, when your body is wracked with pain, you take your pleasures where you can find them. Still, “at night is when the Ingmar Bergman dreams are coming,” says the comedian.
The ultimate challenge, though, was trying to work – to be funny! – while you’re in misery, which is what Lewis had to do while shooting “Curb’s” 10th season. His back pain, which had bothered him on and off for decades, had been getting progressively worse.
He acknowledges that part of the problem has been his notoriously stooped-over posture, which leaves him “walking around like Groucho’s cousin” and long has given him comedic material onstage. Various strategies – acupuncture, cortisone shots and whatnot – did not help.
“He tried a ton of therapies – he had to be desperate,” says Lapinsky, whom he met in 1998 and married in 2005.
But Lewis says he had to soldier on, feeling “obligated” to his longtime friend/antagonist and “Curb” creator Larry David, and to the production itself.
“After 20 years of being associated with the whole show, it was too much on my mind that I couldn’t let him down,” says Lewis.
Recalls Lapinsky, “Larry and the production were kind enough to push off some of his scenes – push them back on the timeline,” in hopes that Lewis’ pain would decline.
Eventually, though, Lewis had to show up on set. Between scenes, “He’d be in a trailer, laying down in pain,” remembers Lapinsky. “Then they’d just perk him up and bring him in for the shoot.”
Lewis, of course, recognized the black comedy in all of this.
“When they finally needed me, I wasn’t really that great standing up,” says Lewis.
“So I had two days’ work with six scenes, and, fortunately, all the scenes were in restaurants. I don’t know what I would have done if it were anything else.
“They had to have me in these scenes. So they rented a room in an office building across the street (from the shooting location), with two medics in the room with me. They became medic/clothing stylists. They never had more fun.
“I mean, they’re medical people. But they’d say: ‘No, Richard, I wouldn’t wear the corduroy.’
“And I’d say: ‘Just help me put my pants on, this is what they want me to wear.’
“‘No, I’d go with the blue and the shorts.’
“Then they’d put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me across the street. And people are honking their horns: ‘Hey, Lewis!’
“And the medics were smiling and emailing, taking this tortured man to this set.
“The medics are now probably doing ‘Hello Dolly’ somewhere.”
So how do you perform, improvise, stay funny amid this agony?
“I was just so relieved that I was sitting down, number one,” says Lewis. “And I just was so highly charged, my adrenaline kicked in.
“You’re coming toward the last 10 or 15 minutes on the set, and you want to end killing it, having them want you to come back. That’s how I felt in these scenes.”
After shooting was done, Lewis’ pain got so fierce that, “I’m not exaggerating, I was screaming and crawling on my knees to get to the bathroom by my bed,” he says. “I wasn’t (yet) thinking of an operation. I was thinking: If I can get through this, I can get through anything. … And my wife could only just stand there and watch.”
Back surgery became inevitable, and afterward, “the pain was gone,” says Lewis.
But the poolside slip in January devastated his shoulder.
“The thing is, leading up to his back surgery, he was in such pain for so long with it, that his body totally deconditioned,” says Lapinsky.
“The back surgery, if you’re in good shape but you have a sciatic episode and you go in for surgery … you’ll come out, you’ll be in some pain for bit.
“Well, he wasn’t in that condition. Same with the shoulder. Some other people would go in and have the shoulder surgery and come out and go through therapy for the shoulder. His therapy is for his entire body.”
Lewis shared his woes with David, who seemed unfazed.
“I told him I had an operation,” recalls Lewis. “And I said: ‘I may have to wear a sling,'” if there were to be an 11th season of “Curb.”
“He said: ‘I think I can figure out how to work that in. Don’t worry about that. I can come up with an accident for you.’
“The guy has written 100,000 scenes,” adds Lewis, underlining David’s wizardry in indeed coming up with a comic scenario for practically any situation.
It’s not surprising that David and “Curb” would treat Lewis “like a king,” as Lewis puts it, considering David’s admiration of Lewis’ art, which goes back to their early days in stand-up, in the 1970s.
Even then, Lewis’ nascent comedy “was distinctive in that it was coming from his life,” David told me in 2009.
“I suppose at that time, people really weren’t digging that deep as he was.”
By the early 1980s, Lewis was gathering career momentum and technical polish as a stand-up comedian. A 1984 appearance at Zanies on Wells Street prompted me to write in my review: “The material pours out of him confessional-style, and not a word sounds rehearsed or manipulated for laughs. Yet the laughs are there – and in unbelievable abundance – because Lewis’ material rings of high craft and because the scenarios he laments go much deeper emotionally than one expects from one-liners. … He can communicate more with twisted body language than most comics can with words. He is the rare kind of comedian who broadens the art.”
In 1989, Lewis hit the big-time, winning the co-lead opposite Jamie Lee Curtis in the ABC-TV sitcom “Anything But Love,” which was canceled in 1992.
Lewis battled alcoholism but got sober in 1994, winning a small part in one of the great films about the disease, “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995) and a starring role in “Drunks” (1997), neither of which did much for his career.
Then, a surprise.
“Larry David came to my house when I was 50; I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do,” says Lewis, who felt his career was fading. “I was quickly starting to realize that people who were 30 years old” didn’t know who he was.
“You lose a little of that heat, unless you’re on another show.”
David was cooking up “Curb,” and, in effect, revived Lewis’ career, though that wasn’t his plan.
“The thought never entered my mind – that’s not why I cast him,” David told me in 2009.
“I cast him because he was a close friend, and I felt like we could bring what we had offstage into the show, which was a combative, funny relationship,” which dated back to when they were in summer camp together as teens.
The two have done exactly that, though it remains to be seen if their sparring matches will continue, should there be an 11th season.
“Right now, I’m not worried about ‘Curb,’ because it’s pointless,” says Lewis. “I’m in rehab.
“Even if I call Larry (and say): ‘I don’t know about coming back,’ he says, ‘In six months, July or August, you’ll be much better.’
“And he’s right. … Right now, I have to focus on getting my life back.”
And what about stand-up comedy? That’s the arena in which Lewis always has been at his best, pacing the stage, running his fingers through his hair, working his way – comedically – through his problems and, in a way, ours.
“I’m not thinking about stand-up,” says Lewis.
“I feel that I did it. And traveling, all that stuff. I’ll be 73 (in June). Who knows from day to day what’s going to happen?
“I want to spend as much time with my wife as possible, and not always leaving. It’s been almost 23 years (they’ve been a couple).
“I’m so lucky. I’m so riddled with gratitude that I have a wife who’s doing everything for me, except the rehab.
“When I get down, I think it could be a lot worse, really.”
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
