I probably owe my entire career to Richard Lewis. That might sound weird, since I’m a writer and Lewis is famously a comedian. But I was nine when I first saw Anything But Love, the show Lewis starred in with Jamie Lee Curtis from 1989 to 1993. Lewis played Marty Gold, a magazine writer, and helped shape what I wanted my “adult” life to look like. I didn’t quite understand the concept of “Jewish neurosis” at the time, but I didn't need to. When I looked at Marty, I saw an adult that reminded me of me, sort of. He was cool, but undeniably weird compared to all the other guys on television. That, and he dressed really great and had an incredible head of hair. I wanted to have a job like Marty Gold ,and I wanted to dress like him. That was being an adult to me—and in some weird way, it still is.
As I tell Lewis, when I was 10, I asked a barber to give me his Anything but Love haircut. His reply: “Sorry, kid. You can’t cut hair that way. It just is.”
“God,” Lewis sighs. “My hair. I had, like, a challah bread landed from another planet on my head.”
While he was known for the hair and his “loose elegance” suits, there was one big difference between the character Lewis played on his old sitcom and the real-life one: Lewis loves to wear black. He’s a cross between one of the thieves from Reservoir Dogs and an undertaker. And while I got to know him first through his television show, he’s first and foremost an all-time great stand-up. (How great? Mel Brooks cast him as Prince John in 1993’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights, but also once paid possibly the highest compliment by saying Lewis could be the Franz Kafka of modern comedy.) You might know Lewis as one of those things, or from his time as the spokesperson for “adult” juice boxes called Boku in the early-1990s. But most likely you know Richard Lewis from his work alongside his oldest pal, Larry David, on Curb Your Enthusiasm. But whichever guy you met, you knew this much: the thing about Richard Lewis is, well, he’s Richard Lewis. He might have played a few fictional characters along the way, but the guy has made consistency an art form over nearly 50 years. His act, his vibe, and—maybe most underappreciated—his look provide a lesson in sticking with something because it works, but also knowing when to make the slightest, most subtle tweaks here and there.
That’s probably why, when it was announced earlier this year that Curb was returning for an 11th season, the internet was ecstatic for a moment...until the news came out that Lewis, who was recovering from multiple back and shoulder surgeries, wouldn’t be part of it. It really killed the excitement for a minute. Who could imagine Larry’s misadventures without the neurotic yin to his miserable yang? A few months later, however, there was a reprieve when Lewis tweeted a picture of himself on set, saying David had asked him to do one episode. The tweet did Kardashian numbers. (It probably would have been one of the biggest tweets of the week, but the president tweeted something about science being back the next day and overtook the spot. “I was quite moved by that,” Lewis says.) And while he can’t divulge any secrets or give a look into what his old friend has in store for the new season, he’s hopeful the show will come back for another season after this one, so he can be a larger part of it. In any case, it's been a joyful run. “The show's been on since 2000, so when you think of that, say some guy's in medical school, he's 25, he was only five when the show started," Lewis says. "So there's been a lot of generations. It reminds me of [Don] Henley, you know, telling me he has to sing ‘Desperado’ for the grandparents, the parents, and the children.”
And through it all, Lewis has almost always been clad in all black. Looking back at over 20 years of Curb alone shows the subtle evolution of his uniform. He was wearing slouchy suits long before the current wave of stylish people went rummaging around for vintage Armani. These days, the look is a bit more closely tailored, and Lewis will sometimes wear a t-shirt underneath his blazer instead of a shirt and tie.
Lewis has been on Curb Your Enthusiasm since its first episode in 2000. Part of what makes his character so unique is that, the same way David basically plays himself, Lewis plays himself and brings his own uniform. Since Curb is a closed universe governed by the rules and whims of David, the show version of Lewis occasionally finds himself in conflict with David’s over what Lewis might be wearing. In one episode, for instance, Lewis is wearing a Nehru jacket with a Mandarin collar, (which is not an easy look to pull off, but he does). It’s inspired by one of his heroes, Lenny Bruce, but it's nonetheless a target for Larry to make a joke about. What Lewis wears has become part of the show’s lore. One Season 10 episode put Lewis and David on the golf course. The costume department asked what he would wear, since black isn’t something you see on the golf course that often. But Lewis relinquished and found a black polo that worked. He’s also is fond of wearing sunglasses inside. He does it because, just like the Nehru jacket, only a certain kind of person can pull that off, and he’s glad to be that kind of person—but also because it annoys Larry. “I get no bigger thrill than to antagonize my buddy,” he says, “and sunglasses indoors would be one weapon.”
Curb Your Enthusiasm is a show about the art of the kvetch: it’s about a guy who sees things a certain way and has a difficult time understanding why others would see things differently. But the way Lewis approaches working on the show couldn’t be any further from that. “I was the easiest actor in the history of filmmaking for the wardrobe department,” he says. “I would say ‘there’s nothing for you to do, have a good day,’ and I had to schlep all my shit for eleven or twelve seasons. And then I’d have to take it all back home.” It was never a bit for him. He says he loves Armani, but also spent his time going to small shops on the Upper West Side of Manhattan or in the Beverly Center in Los Angeles. Little shops he heard about from more fashionable friends. “Real high-minded style stuff,” he calls it.
The black sort of came incidentally. “I didn't make the conscious effort to find a costume, you know, as a hook,” he says of his signature color. Lewis thinks maybe his obsession with dressing in black came from watching the television Western Have Gun – Will Travel when he was a kid. “They had this guy, Paladin, and I thought he was the coolest fucking cowboy, and he wore all black.” His own move into sartorial darkness just happened naturally. It’s sort of like the way he popularized the “X from hell” formulation—as in, you know, “the date from hell.” And when he started saying it, people loved it. So the line became one of his signatures. “That just came out of my brain one day and I kept repeating it a lot for some reason. Same thing with the black clothes. I just felt really comfortable from the early eighties on and I never wore anything else. I never looked back.” He says he always dresses like he’s going to a funeral. “When people say, ‘Hey, we're going to Malibu,’ and it's bright and 90 degrees out, everybody can see the ocean and everybody is in white pants, I walk in there in a black suit and it scares some people.”
Comedians have often blended style into their acts. Eddie Murphy had his purple leather suit and John Mulaney is a fan of custom tailoring. But it’s a little more intertwined with Lewis—life imitates art and art imitates life, and he has turned wearing black suits into an art form. He’s made clothes part of the act, and his wardrobe can feel almost as important as any joke he’s made. It’s a lesson he learned from his father, who died when Lewis was young. Dad was a caterer, who Lewis says was “a genius” at his job. He’d take young Richard shopping for clothes, and ask him why he was buying that shirt. “He said, save up to buy a cool shirt. I don't know if he used the word ‘cool,’ but he said something that really stands out. And I always remembered that. He said ‘Don't buy crap. Wait a couple of weeks, save up some allowance and come back to you and get this one.’ I struggled like most artists did, but once I had some bread, I always looked for the coolest for me—for my taste—the hippest clothes I could find.”
