It is always sad to watch the final season of one of your favorite TV shows, as we fans of HBO‘s Curb Your Enthusiasm have been doing this season. We are grateful for all the great times and uproarious laughs the show has given us, and we are happy they decided to make this final season at all. But as delighted as we are to have these few final episodes to savor of an all-time great show, we cannot help but watch these episodes with a tinge of melancholy in our laughs as we try to push away from our minds the awareness that this will be the last time we will ever have new Curb episodes. This melancholy will become even sharper, and this latent sadness even more poignant, as we watch the final few Curb episodes with the knowledge that it will be the final time we will see Richard Lewis in any medium.

Lewis, the beloved standup comedian who gained even greater fame when he became a recurring cast member on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, died last week in his Los Angeles home at the age of 76. Born in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, Lewis was a part of the fabled 1970s New York City comedy scene and, by the 1980s and ’90s, had become widely respected in comic circles for his raw, refreshingly honest standup routines. While other standup comedians were getting laughs by making humorous observations about the external world, Lewis brilliantly and bravely got laughs by shining his comedic focus inward and making humorous observations about his own psychological foibles. Although he appeared several times on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and in several high-profile movies such as Robin Hood: Men in Tights, he was not well known to the general public until he joined the cast of Curb Your Enthusiasm during the hit show’s first season in 2000, appearing in the show’s very first episode.