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Letter to the editor

Comedy's dark star

Funny man and social critic Lewis Black's not-so-sunny take on the world has found a ready audience this election season.

By RICK GERSHMAN
Published November 7, 2004

The amazing thing is there are people who have never left this country who (claim) we're the greatest country on earth. How dumb is that? . . . If you haven't left here, you don't know. There may be countries who are giving away (stuff) on a daily basis. Canada's one of those countries. You know what they give away? Health insurance!

- From the HBO special, Black on Broadway

If Lewis Black seems a little frazzled when he performs tonight at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, that's understandable.

The standup comic and social critic averages 250 dates a year on the road, and that's in addition to his other gigs - most notably, his nine-year stretch of "Back in Black" commentaries on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In the past year alone, the former playwright also found time to produce his first HBO special, Black on Broadway, develop a television pilot, be a panelist on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn and make several other television appearances, including a dramatic role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He also has written a book, Nothing Sacred, that he hopes to have out next spring.

So especially after this rough-and-tumble election season, if tonight Black seems a bit on edge, a touch fed up, a hair, um, hair-triggered, well . . .

Who are we kidding? He's always that way.

And though Black seems to be constantly agitated, at 56 he never has been more popular. The Daily Show has enjoyed excellent ratings and enormous buzz, and its America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction is a bestseller. Black's vexation with the state of the United States seems to be tapping into a ground swell of uncertainty and discontent in a deeply divided society.

The self-described socialist grills politicians, corporations and all types of authority figures in his standup act. But he also goes after such seemingly benign subjects as soy milk ("There's no such thing as soy milk. It's soy juice. But they couldn't sell soy juice, so they called it soy milk. Because every time you say "soy juice' you actually start to gag. How dumb do they think we are?") and the International House of Pancakes. ("At IHOP, there's always someone there who weighs 350 pounds more than you'll ever weigh. You've got six syrups on the table and you feel like you've got to use all of them. You just start drinking the boysenberry.")

Black no longer writes the two-minute "Back in Black" segments for which he's best known. Daily Show staffers put together the script, which Black reviews and tweaks.

"The guys writing me write me better than I can," Black said by phone from Manhattan. "They can work on it for four days while I'm not around."

Why is Black always out on the road, always working so hard? "Because I was broke all my life. You realize, I was a playwright all my life, which put me in the same economic category as a migrant worker."

Like a couple of guys America has heard a lot about lately, Black is a Yale grad. He received a master of fine arts degree from the university's prestigious drama school and struck out to be a playwright. "Struck out" being the operative term. He wrote and performed more than 40 plays, but it never paid the bills.

Black's sideline, standup comedy, became his bread and butter in the late 1980s. Before his breakthrough on The Daily Show, he picked up small roles in such films as Hannah and Her Sisters, Jacob's Ladder and the Michael J. Fox-James Woods buddy-cop film - and who wouldn't want that on his resume? - The Hard Way.

He intends to take no chances with his book, Nothing Sacred. "I'm going to publish it with the exact same cover as America (The Book). I mean, the exact same cover. We're going to try to trick people into buying it."

Not a bad idea, since The Daily Show has enough heat of late to go around. It doesn't hurt that Stewart recently appeared on 60 Minutes and the cover of Rolling Stone, while his contentious appearance on CNN's Crossfire picked up media coverage far and wide. Black appreciated his buddy's courage for speaking out against the devolution of political discourse.

"Jon said what had to be said. I don't know how comfortable he was, but someone had to say it. I agree with him," Black said. "What Crossfire is - I mean, sitting around a table yelling at somebody? That's my job."

Lewis Black, 8 p.m. Sunday, Ferguson Hall at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, 1010 N MacInnes Place, Tampa. $30.50-$35.50. 813 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045; or www.tbpac.org

[Last modified November 4, 2004, 14:42:26]