One of the most satisfying things about Curb Your Enthusiasm’s continuing reign as the funniest thing on television (fact) is the re-emergence into the public eye of the great Richard Lewis. During the comedy club explosion of the 1980s, he towered over—or rather stooped below—the brick wall brigade by tearing the top off his head and letting tireless neurotic agony burst forth like a geyser. Clearly, he wasn’t the first comedian to mine angst for laughs (and lord knows how many lesser talents ripped him off), but Lewis wasn’t just telling jokes. Relentlessly manic, he paced the stage like a nervous animal, his body flailing and contorting in concert with the surrealist jazz of his material—vignettes about love, sex, death, and despair spoken in a dizzying barrage that, over the course of an hour-long set, began to sound like music, an anxiety fugue.

In a period that saw live stand-up proliferate madly before turning into a parade of observationalist clones in jeans and blazers, Lewis was equal parts classic comic and innovator, a mélange of Lenny Bruce, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Reichian therapy. His triumphant cable specials, I’m In Pain, I’m Doomed, and I’m Exhausted (recently reissued in a DVD collection) were the very best live comedy could aspire to: idiosyncratic, confessional, cripplingly funny. Having conquered the stage, he moved down the familiar path of the successful stand-up. His better-than-average network sitcom with Jamie Lee Curtis, Anything But Love, lasted four seasons—before drug and alcohol addiction derailed things personally and professionally. He returned with a recovery memoir (The Other Great Depression), and has remained a talk-show and guest-star staple. But it was the advent of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which he plays a fictionalized version of himself in a recurring supporting role alongside his friend Larry David (they’re like a deconstruction of a classic comedy team—two Abbots, two Hardys), that has restored Lewis’s particular greatness to the main stage of TV comedy, where it belongs.

It should come as no surprise that Lewis has never stopped performing live. He’ll be in town (well, Bellevue) tonight and tomorrow, doing two shows a night, at a club called Parlor Live. You hear a lot these days about the resurgence of stand-up comedy, but it still seems like a form dominated by middlebrow hacks whose popularity seems like it has to be some kind of long con designed to demonstrate that the public will swallow anything if they can wash it down with booze. Nevertheless, here’s a chance to go see an actual master of the craft in his natural environment. Tickets are still available, but not for long.

700 Bellevue Way NE Ste 300, Bellevue WA, 98004. 425-289-7000. $25-$35. http://www.parlorlive.com/parlorlive-main.html