Interview: Comedy Legend Lewis Black Brings His Final Tour to The Vets
Ever since Lewis Black started doing stand-up during the 1970s, he’s always had something to rant about. This has ranged from experiences while dining at an IHOP, Halloween candy watching the Super Bowl halftime show and the current political landscape among other topics. His approach to comedy has made him one of the top acts within his industry over the past few decades, but the end is near when it comes to Black hitting the road and performing all over the globe. This current tour he’s on that’s called “Goodbye Yeller Brick Road” is being billed as his last and he’s going to be performing at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium on 1 Avenue of The Arts in Providence on March 22 as part of the expedition. The show starts at 8pm and whoever attends is bound to laugh at honest and witty commentary about these crazy times we’re living in.
Black and I had a talk about what made him want to retire from touring, his thoughts on a certain individual coming back to host The Daily Show and his opinion concerning the Presidental election happening later this year.
What made you realize that this would be the right time to conclude touring and being on the road?
If the pandemic hadn’t come along, this would have been the time I retired and I would have done another special. I hope to do one now and it’s also partly due to the fact that there’s so many comics and performers where it’s currently a boom. It’s a boom time for performers and a lot of folks are catching up with the gigs they had, but I just kind of kept going and going. The way that I was touring, which was on a tour bus, was getting tougher and tougher to route and I don’t really want to sit on a bus for 12 hours. Basically, I got other things to do, to put it simply.
Yeah, you have the Rantcast and The Daily Show. Speaking of The Daily Show, the big news recently has been Jon Stewart returning to host on Monday nights. What are your thoughts on him coming back to the show after 9 years?
I think it’s good and I think he had enough of a rest from it while doing a much more serious show in a way. His heart and soul are both in comedy, I think he missed it and I also think it’s good that he’s doing one day a week, which has done well for us. I’m still on the show, so that’s good, and I continue to get the kind of freedom I’ve had with different hosts, which has also been good.
It helps you create and be more honest with your work.
Yeah, and I’m having more fun.
With 2024 being an election year, it looks like we’re going to have Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump part two. I have a feeling you must be thrilled about this for the material while also dreading the reality of the situation, is that correct?
It’s ludicrous, this is beyond stupid. This is proof that we all need to go back into a lockdown. You know what we need to do? We need to go back to whatever high school we were in or whatever high school we’re near, go into homeroom, sit in alphabetical order and get to know each other again because this is crazy. We need to get to know each other again so we can actually have two parties that are somewhat representative of what it is we’re fucking thinking. This it is the election nobody wants, it’s true.
Nearly 70 percent of the American people said from the very start of this said “No”, so who are these parties truly representing? Who are they fuckin’ talking to when they talk about the American people? They don’t give a shit. I used to think they’d at least pay attention, but this is insane. We’re going to repeat the same thing and hopefully get something done, but I doubt it, and people wonder as a country if we’re going in the right direction.
Then they talk about it as if it’s the fault of one or the other, but it’s actually the fault that they’re both running. We’ve been in the rinse spin cycle for-fuckin’-ever, we’ve been through it, we got it. Let’s vote next Thursday because there is nothing to be learned. How many years do you have to say that they’re not in touch with getting younger people through the door? If they’re young, we’re talking 50.
You’re spot on with all of that. After “Goodbye Yeller Brick Road” is over and this final tour is done, what are your plans for your career going forward? I know you have Inside Out 2 coming out, so are you still going to be doing voice work and acting for films along with the Rantcast and The Daily Show?
Yeah, that’s really it. Whether I get more film, TV and voiceover stuff, we’ll see. I probably will be doing some live Rantcasts, going somewhere to do one and getting other people besides me to read the rants. I’m going to do it like I did before by sending them out through satellite so people can watch for free on their computers or on their phone.
I saw some of those.
I’ll still do them from home or from wherever and I might on occasion open for somebody. Quitting touring doesn’t mean quitting performing, but I’m not going to be one of those guys who then shows up for 10 weeks in a row. I was showing up every week somewhere in the country, but that’s not going to happen. As soon as I announced that I was retiring, Chapel Hill [, North Carolina] started celebrating the 20th anniversary of the arts space that I’ve performed in. I performed in it when it was old, I performed in it when it was new and now they want me there for the 20th anniversary, but that’s after this tour that I have going on until December. I may pick up a few more shows until then because I really want to go back to Canada, I would like to do a couple shows in Toronto and Montreal, so we’ll see how that works.
That would be cool if you get the opportunity to head up North. You mentioned in the beginning of our chat that you’d like to make this tour into a special, so how have the developments been with that so far? Is it in the early stages where you’re just pitching it out to different places to see where it goes?
The goal of the special would be how over the course of my life, headlines have really become punchlines and my comedy is really no longer necessary because they’re all doing it so well. For example, [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis wanted students to be taught the benefits of slavery. I’ve tried 500 ways to get the audience to laugh at this concept and none of them have worked, I can’t figure it out. Now I just go ahead and say it because I think it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. We’ve become so worn out by this, but we can’t be and the only way to get through it is through laughter.
That’s nuts for him to say that out loud. We know that the benefits of slavery are that there are no benefits of slavery, that’s it. That’s the joke ya fucks! I used to go from village to town to city and I even doing it now where I’m getting people to understand something that actually happened while working the joke in. Now it’s right in front of them every day, whatever channel they tune into, and a portion of that audience has lost their sense of humor due to Donald Trump, they have. People used to come to see my show because I guess my strongest suit is that I’m not big on authority and I find authority to be problematic.
I think that’s why the folks who root for Trump, or as I like to call him “The Half Billion Dollar Man”, came out to see me. Now they’ve embraced the most authoritarian possible figure that I know of in my lifetime, and they want him to be President. They defend him while yelling at me for making fun of him the same way I’ve made fun of people before and some of them were Republicans.
I remember you during the Bush years, you had no problem making fun of him.
Yeah, and I didn’t get blowback because they got the joke. They knew this was stupid and it’s still stupid. Telling me that a 77-year-old who gorges on McDonald’s hamburgers is fitter than an 81-year-old who is falling down all the time? Come on!
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