Lewis, who announced last year that he had Parkinson’s disease, played himself as David’s friend on the show (as he was in real life). He and Essman, the comedian and actress behind the invective-spewing Susie Greene, the wife of David’s manager, provoked very different reactions from fans, he recalled.
“When I’ve been with her in public, they want her to yell things back at them,” he said. “For me, it’s like, ‘You’re going to be all right, Richard.’”
He dialed me directly, rather than having a publicist connect us, as is more common, and seemed happy to stay on the phone and crack jokes.
Listening to the recording of our conversation on Wednesday after news of his death at 76, I hear a lot of my own laughter. Lewis was effortlessly funny and sharp.
“I’ve got to give Jeff Garlin a lot of credit for hanging in,” he said of the comic who plays David’s manager and Essman’s beleaguered husband, the object of her expletive-filled, improvised tirades. “I mean, it’s a television show, but how he can have any self-esteem left after what he has taken — it’s just a barrage. Every time a scene is over, it looks like he’s limping back from the Civil War. He’s just all bloodied.
“There should have been a corner man,” he continued, picking up steam. “You know, like in ‘Rocky’ — Burgess Meredith — for any actor taking in her insults. There should always be a chair, with a trainer, putting smelling salts under actors’ noses.”
David, who created “Curb” and played a heightened version of himself, has said repeatedly that the current season, its 12th, would be the final one — but Lewis said it was “allegedly” the final season.
“It’s such an air of melancholy — you know, talking about people in the past tense,” he joked, as if his friends were gone. “But I’ll do the best I can.”
“Curb” began airing on HBO in 2000 and once took a six-year hiatus between seasons. Did Lewis imagine David would change his mind about ending it now? “He’s always changed his mind,” Lewis said.
The two met as kids at summer camp and had been friends for most of their lives, including in their early days as stand-ups in New York, Lewis said, recalling, “I always had a pad with me, from Day 1, and so did Larry. And we would write premises down, wherever we were.”
He preferred comics who were authentically themselves, he added. “Without sounding too pompous about it, I always dug comedians who were the same onstage as they were offstage. There wasn’t too much fake stuff going on, they didn’t create a character, they were just who they were.”
He called David “the storyteller of my generation,” comparing him to Norman Lear.
“He’s not going to stop writing things down,” Lewis said. Then again, nearly a quarter-century is a pretty long run.
“I’ve always been so blessed to be on this show, and so grateful,” he said. But there was one thing that bugged him — that he didn’t get more one-on-one screen time with Essman (who was not much like her character, he noted, and with whom he happily toured).
“I’m in the scene, eating ravioli, while she’s screaming at everybody else but me, for some reason,” he said. “I’m like such a nice guy, apparently.” Given the chance, “I would’ve gone out of my way to screw up the scene, just to make her angry at me.”
He hinted that there would be such a moment in a coming episode. “Maybe I’ll have an opportunity to hear her get upset toward me.”
And if not, he had a plan. “If Susie gets a show, say, if it was just called ‘Susie,’ I would beg him for at least a guest spot on it,” he said of David. “Please let me do something to make her feel horrified. I don’t want any money. Don’t pay me. I might have to just fly to New York and sneak into Susie’s house and antagonize her. In fact — don’t tell her — but I plan to play a horrifying joke on her, so I can bear the brunt of her wrath.
“If it’s all the news that’s fit to print, so be it,” he continued, really cooking, as he might put it. “The truth is, I am going to get her to yell at me, if it’s the last thing I do on this planet.”
I was laughing — and then, so was he.
Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.