Richard Lewis' HILARIOUS Larry David Dinner Story

Some friendships are best understood through a single dinner. Richard Lewis offered Rich one, and it doubles as a perfect portrait of Larry David.

It started, as these things do, with a phone call. David rang Lewis in the afternoon and said, "Let's have dinner, I'll meet you there now." Lewis pushed back. He had just eaten a hero sandwich. Now? David did not budge. "All right, I'll meet you at 4:01," he said. Lewis's verdict on his old friend: "Guy's a mental case. He's like Rain Man."

The two then stayed on the phone for an hour, somehow negotiating their way up to 5:18. Lewis arrived an hour early and tried to do the decent thing, which was pay the check before David showed up. That is where it fell apart. The man at the restaurant refused his money. "Mr. David would be upset," he explained. Lewis was incredulous. "What do you mean I can't pay?" It escalated into a full screaming match before Lewis finally forced his credit card on them.

David arrived an hour late. Lewis tried to reset the mood with nostalgia, proposing they "make believe it's 1972 and we're broke and all we care about is comedy," back when they would split a single soup at a cheap Chinese spot and the whole thing ran five dollars. David was not interested in splitting anything. He knew the chef personally, he said, and did not want to insult him.

What arrived was not a modest meal. The chef came out with 18 entrees on a turntable. Before they could even discuss it, the phone rang. Steve Martin. David took the call, stood up, announced he had forgotten he had to speak somewhere that night, and left without a goodbye.

That left Lewis alone with the bill and a spread he could not identify. His description is the kind only he could land. It "looked like a peacock smoking a joint," he said, and he had no idea what any of it was.