At 70, comic Richard Lewis makes another comeback
CHICAGO - "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Richard Lewis!"
With those words, a shaggy-haired, 30-something comic takes the stage at Zanies on North Wells Street, offers a quick bow and scans a seemingly endless scroll of paper, as if cramming for a quiz he should have thought about last night.
When he spots something he likes, he puts down the notes, steps up to the microphone and begins telling all.
It's March 1984, and I've never seen or heard anything quite like this before. The man restlessly prowls Zanies' tiny stage as if trapped, runs his fingers nervously through thick brown locks and looks up to the heavens every once in a while, perhaps hoping for some kind of deliverance that clearly isn't coming.
Even at this early moment, I know I'll follow every twist and turn in this comic wizard's work for as long as he and I are at it.
Between riffs, Lewis keeps stepping away from the microphone to scrutinize the Talmudic manuscript on stage, as if trying to remember all his neuroses (admittedly a long list).
The jokes tumble out fast and furiously, but they're so much more than one-liners: Really, they're barely censored insights into the psyche of a hilariously self-tortured individual.
Before he goes out on dates, he tells the audience, he asks his potential lovers if they have anything that rhymes with "werpes." Lewis' mother is so gloomy that she publishes a magazine for the family called Who's Dying and Who's Ill. Shortly before he makes a stage debut that he's been fretting over for months, his mother informs him: "You know, of course, that your Aunt Fay can't move her knuckles anymore."
Some of Lewis' problems are a bit too anatomical to repeat here.
Flash-forward three-and-a-half decades, and Lewis has a lot more to worry about. And not just that he turned 70 last June.
More important, in 2016 he fell off his roof and shattered his right hand, which "started a two-year
