Actor Jamie Lee Curtis said Lewis, her long-time friend, was the reason she was sober. She said she had initially seen a billboard of him and asked casting agents to bring him in for a pilot she was working on.

“I thought he was handsome. He made me laugh, which is the one thing that a strong, capable woman, can’t really do for herself,” she said.

“It was a love triangle show and they didn’t pick up that pilot but they came back to me and said that the chemistry with Richard was so great and could we revamp the original pilot which is the show we ended up making for a couple years [Anything But Love].”

“Watching his stand-up is like sitting in on a very funny and often dark therapy session,” the Los Angeles Times said in 2014.

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The Philadelphia’s City Paper called him “the Jimi Hendrix of monologists”. Mel Brooks once said he “may just be the Franz Kafka of modern-day comedy”.

Following his graduation from Ohio State University in 1969, the New York-born Lewis began a stand-up career, honing his craft on the circuit with contemporaries Jay Leno, Freddie Prinze and Billy Crystal.

He recalled Rodney Dangerfield hiring him for $75 to fill in at his New York club, Dangerfield’s. “I had a lot of great friends early on who believed in me, and I met pretty iconic people who really helped me, told me to keep working on my material. And I never looked back,” he told The Gazette of Colorado Springs in 2010.

Unlike his contemporary Robin Williams, Lewis allowed audiences into his world and melancholy, pouring his torment and pain onto the stage. Fans favourably compared him to the ground-breaking comedian Lenny Bruce.

“I take great pains not to be mean-spirited,” Lewis told The Palm Beach Post in 2007. “I don’t like to take real handicaps that people have to overcome with no hope in sight. I steer clear of that. That’s not funny to me.

“Tragedy is funny to other humorists, but it’s not to me, unless you can make a point that’s helpful.”

Singer Billy Joel has said he was referring to Lewis when he sang in My Life of an old friend who “bought a ticket to the West Coast/Now he gives them a stand-up routine in LA”.

In 1989 at Carnegie Hall, Lewis appeared with 180 centimetres of yellow legal sheets filled with material and taped together for a 2½-hour set that led to two standing ovations. The night was “the highlight of my career,” he told The Washington Post in 2020.

Lewis told GQ his signature look came incidentally, saying his obsession with dressing in black came from watching the television Western Have Gun – Will Travel, with a cowboy in all-black, when he was a kid. He also popularised the term “from hell” — as in “the date from hell” or “the job from hell”.

“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 ’80s on and I never wore anything else. I never looked back.”

After getting sober from drugs and alcohol in 1994, Lewis put out his 2008 memoir, The Other Great Depression — a collection of fearless, essay-style riffs on his life — and Reflections from Hell.

Lewis was the youngest of three siblings — his brother was older than him by six years, and his sister by nine. His father died young and his mother had emotional problems. “She didn’t get me at all. I owe my career to my mother. I should have given her my agent’s commission,” he told The Washington Post in 2020.

“Looking back on it now, as a full-blown, middle-aged, functioning anxiety collector, I can admit without cringing that my parents had their fair share of tremendous qualities, yet, being human much of the day, had more than just a handful of flaws as well,” he wrote in his memoir.