Lewis Black ready to rant at Luther Burbank Center

Editor’s note: Lewis Black has canceled his Nov. 4 show at Luther Burbank Center and postponed shows in Loleta on Nov. 5 and Monterey on Nov. 6, according to his website.

Lewis Black is an easy interview. Just ask what’s upsetting him.

The comedian, whose “Back in Black” tirades made Jon Stewart laugh uncontrollably on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” has a long list of grievances.

So, what’s enraging him?

“The question would be what doesn’t? Just about everything,” he says in a recent phone interview.

The elder facility where his 103-year-old mother lives has become a “cash cow,” he says, run by “group of people who care about more about renovating a building than their patients.”

Turning on a dime, he rips into social media, which he believes has made much of the country stupid and gullible and less willing to do things for the common good, like get the COVID-19 vaccine.

“We’re idiots,” he stammers, his blood beginning to boil. “We consider ourselves the greatest country on Earth. We have all the vaccine that is needed, but we say no. I guarantee you can go to Africa and say, ‘vaccinations.’ There'll be right there.”

Black, 73, says he’s “double vaxxed” but is still “freaked” about going on tour and performing in rooms with hundreds or sometimes more than a thousand people.

His ire turns to TV news media and the breathless segments about a missing woman (Gabby Petito) while most other news is ignored.

He assails reports about breakthrough COVID-19 cases that don’t compare the number of cases among the unvaccinated with those who did get shots.

It’s gotten so bad that millions of young people get their news, if they get it at all, from the satirical “Daily Show.”

In a 2006 interview with A.V. Club, Black said, “The guys who do news can’t figure out how to point out what the (expletive) is going on and we (comedians) are left with the job. I mean, how dumb is that?”

Black, who has become a vent for the nation’s anger, was to appear Nov. 4 at Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center but has canceled that show.

He saves his vitriol for the stage and doesn’t encourage people to spew anger in their daily lives.

“I do it for you,” he says in our interview, “so that you don't have to do it.” But, he adds, “the people are angrier than I am.”

Questioning authority

Black was colicky as a baby thus “destined to be angry and easily irritated,” his website says. His parents encouraged him to question authority.

His first love was the theater, and he attended Yale Drama School.

Later he became the “playwright in residence” at an off-Broadway theater called West Bank, where he’d perform brief stand-up routines before a play.

In the late 1980s, Black became a full-time comedian.

His big break came in 1996 on “The Daily Show,” before Stewart became the host.

Black’s segment, called “Back in Black,” channeled unhinged newsman Howard Beale from the film “Network.” (Beale’s tagline was “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”)

Twenty-five years later, Black continues to appear on the show, now hosted by Trevor Noah.

His first Grammy nomination came for a 2006 album recorded in Santa Rosa, “Luther Burbank Performing Arts Center Blues.” He didn’t win for that album but received two Grammy Awards in the next five years.

Black has acted in several movies, appearing with Robin Williams in “Man of the Year.”

In the 2015 Pixar film “Inside Out” he voiced an animated red-faced character named “Anger” whose hair caught on fire.

Like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin and George Carlin, whom he has cited as influences, Black is outraged by hypocrisy, for example, by politicians who rail against vaccine mandates then get a COVID-19 shot themselves.

His “big discovery,” he says, came decades ago, “when I found out that I’m funniest when I'm angry. … I reach a point where I’m just kind of flustered by my own anger, because I don’t even know where to go with it.”

There’s suspense in these combustible moments. At times Black becomes so apoplectic that his fans fear he could have a heart attack.

He’s “playing at anger” but says he doesn’t think “people are attracted to my comedy because of my anger. That's certainly part of it, but it also has to do with the fact that I don't treat them like they’re idiots.”

Black’s most recent TV special, “Thanks for Risking Your Life,” was recorded in March 2020, just before he shut down his tour.

“It’s hard to be funny now,” he says in that show at the dawn of the pandemic, but his barbs kept the audience laughing.

Channeling the audience

Not only does Black respect his audience, he invites them to send in their rants and reads the best ones on stage.

Ideally the rants are “written by the people who live there. So if I was in Santa Rosa, well, it’s a show about Santa Rosa.”

Black selects rants while he’s on the bus getting to his gigs, reviewing them “an hour before showtime.”

He allots about 20 minutes at each of his shows for audience-written rants, and these have become so popular that he now does a regular rant podcast (www.lewisblack.com).

Some of the rants he receives are “brilliant,” he said, “remarkable, unbelievable, as well-written as anything you will see on television.”

At a 2019 show in San Diego, after reading a rant about recycling by a woman named Alison Patton, Black said, “I’ve been asked a lot recently what gives me hope: It’s that a lot of the stuff that’s sent to me is brilliantly written by people who aren’t writers. There’s this real working intelligence out there.”

Contacted by phone, Patton said that what made her rant so funny was the way Black delivered it.

A longtime fan of the comedian, she said Black is a “big believer in people” and wants to “give them a voice.”

She called Black “a connoisseur of life, a real humanitarian. … He’s angry because he cares so much.”

Michael Shapiro writes about the performing arts for The Press Democrat and other publications.