Lewis Black will still appear on The Daily Show, the satirical news program from which Black burst into public consciousness in 1996 as a peeved commentator, pre-dating even long-time host Jon Stewart.Joey L/Supplied
A second Donald Trump presidency is proving too much for the always vexed American comedian Lewis Black, and he wants Canada’s help.
“Your country needs to come and put us all in straightjackets,” he says, quickly rising to full lather even though our video interview has just begun. “I’m serious,” he insists, as if there was any doubt. This professional ranter is as serious as the heart attack he appears to be on the verge of having.
“We need Canada to run a large-scale counselling service because we have lost our minds. I mean, Trump is telling Ukraine that is was their fault they were invaded. There has to be a breach in the brain to think that.”
Black, who holds a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama, pauses and sighs: “I can’t do it any more.”
He really can’t. The blustery finger-pointer whose throbbing forehead vein can be seen as the pulse of a nation, is decommissioning his tour bus after three decades. The Goodbye Yeller Brick Road jaunt takes him to Toronto’s Massey Hall (March 21) and Montreal’s L’Olympia (March 22). After the tour is completed, other than one-off appearances, Black is taking his rants off the road.
Although the septuagenarian recently cancelled a series of concerts, he says his health is fine. Years ago, when he was in his 60s, Black saw a much older Don Rickles still grinding it out, night after night. “That won’t be me,” he thought.
“It was great for Don,” Black says. “I think it gave him real energy. But, for me, it would be just too sad.”
He’ll still appear on The Daily Show, the Comedy Central late-night satirical news program from which Black burst into public consciousness in 1996 as a peeved commentator, pre-dating even long-time host Jon Stewart. Though he was nearly 50 years old when he made his debut, his clench-jawed tirades were appreciated by the show’s beer-bonging demographic.
“The young people found me first,” he explains. “Their parents, those idiots, came later. But the kids would tell me, ‘You’re just like my dad, only funnier.’ That was a great compliment.”
The compliments kept coming for Black, who earned a Grammy Award for his 2006 album The Carnegie Hall Performance. Working his brand as a fed-up observer of life’s idiocy and annoyances, he has twice hosted the World Stupidity Awards at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival. At the risk of being typecast, he voiced the Anger character in the Pixar films Inside Out and Inside Out 2.
Black was voted 51st of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all time in 2004 by Comedy Central, but he is not a joke machine. He is an ornery humorist – Will Rogers, but with glasses and spitting-mad grievances. Or he is the angrier version of the 19th-century performers who travelled the Wild West, reading clippings to news-starved townspeople.
“I have newspapers and items off the internet,” he says about the preparation for his stage shows. ”Like the story about Elon Musk firing a bunch of nuclear workers, and they can’t find them in order to rehire them.”
Black has fostered a community of the exasperated. He is Sidney Lumet’s Network film night after night, mad as hell and not gonna take it any more. Not for nothing is his fan club called the Frustrated Union of Cynical Kindreds Universal.
Underneath his rage, though, there is an expression of vulnerability and humility that the sympathetic fan discerns. When it is suggested that audiences hold an honest affection for him that a Seinfeldian joke-teller could never engender, Black is humbled: “That’s very kind of you, though. I’d rather get a laugh than applause. What a Jerry Seinfeld has is in the crafting of the joke. Me, I don’t know where the joke is going to come. When I stumble into it, I think, ‘Oh, god, now I know what to do next time.’ The audience shows me where the punch line is.”
Sometimes the audience provides him with the set-up as well. He welcomes notes from fans who write to him about their frustrations. Black’s responses are livestreamed straight from the stage after his main set, in a segment called The Rant Is Due. He has recently transferred the format to a weekly podcast, Lewis Black’s Rantcast, which is akin to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s radioed fireside chats, but with more fire.
On a recent episode, the comedian, whose ancestors were Russian Jews, raged about the U.S. opposition to a United Nations resolution that condemned Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.
“Whose fault is it then?” he stammered on the podcast. “Basically, it’s like blaming the woman for being raped. … Oh, that Ukraine, they were out there showing their stuff, their breadbasketness and all of those minerals. They were just asking for it. Are you kidding me!”
Black plans to concentrate on writing books and plays, with occasional live appearances. He says audiences have allowed him to improv every night on a level he never thought possible: “I don’t know if they’re showing up to see me fall on my face, but they’ve been unbelievable. The gift they’ve given me is a kind of freedom on stage.”
Early in his career, when he reached a certain level of status headlining 300-seaters in Las Vegas, an Iowa farmer approached him and said he was a terrific philosopher.
“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really something,’” Black recalls. “So, if I’ve been a funny philosopher, then, that’s pretty nice.”
