The Upside Of Outrage
Even while you're laughing at Lewis Black ranting and raving about cultural and political insanities, his physical fury fuels his comedy so blatantly that you worry he's going to burst a blood vessel any second. When I asked him over lunch how he originally adopted that angry persona, he responded in a very calm manner.
"I was working one night with Dan Ballard, a very funny and very huge albino comic from Michigan," he recalled. "After I came off stage, he grabbed me and said, 'Listen to me, I am on stage screaming like an idiot and I am not even angry, and you are angry and you're not yelling, so when you go back on stage I want you to start yelling.' So I did, and my persona was born."
In his new book, Nothing's Sacred (Simon Spotlight, 2005), Black writes about a heckler who "felt I was being too hard on Vice President Cheney. He informed me in no uncertain terms that the vice president was serving his country, and asked what was I doing for my country. I paused and said, 'I do this. This is what I do.'" Recently, though, he performed at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, and sat next to Dick Cheney. A situation like that can make any comedian uncomfortable, except maybe Don Rickles.
"It truly was hell preparing for the event," Black told me, "like taking a comic's SAT test. President Bush was supposed to be seated to my right while I performed, but divine intervention from the Pope saved me from that, so I was now staring at Vice President Cheney-which was bizarre, to say the least. It is an out of body experience. And I am supposed to make him laugh, which I actually did, which also freaked me out, as it made me wonder what was wrong with my comedy. He went on before me, which means that I can now put on my resume that the vice president opened for me. And he was funny. Then he got serious. I felt sick for a week before this event, because this is one of the most uptight groups of folks you could ever perform for.
"It worked out fine, as I had destroyed my usual act, in the name of entertainment. As long as you take the gig, you should be good at it, and I feel that nothing would have been accomplished if I had pissed all over them. I didn't want to spend the next week talking to reporters about it. I stopped and talked to the vice president as I left the dais. One of his closest friends is the brother of a close friend of mine who passed away a number of years ago. I asked him to please say hi to his friend for me-I hadn't seen him in quite some time. So basically I asked the vice president to be my messenger boy, and hopefully it would keep him out of trouble for a few minutes."