By ALEX WITCHEL
Published: March 13, 2005
O.K., Lewis? We're ready for you to gouge your eyes out.''
Lewis Black set down his coffee cup and followed a production assistant onto the set of ''The Daily Show'' for a pretaped bit, the punch line to a joke in his ''Back in Black'' commentary that would be on the air that night.
Black sat behind the desk and stuck his thumbs in his eyes. ''Does that look good?'' he asked Craig Spinney, the stage manager. ''Is that funny?''
Spinney pressed his headset closer to his ear, listening to the director in the control room. ''Hold your fingers up more vertical,'' he instructed. Black complied. A young female staff member walked into the studio and glanced at the desk. ''That's a pretty look,'' she murmured. Spinney spoke into his headset. ''You don't need the hands is what you're telling me,'' he said. Black, blinded and frustrated, shouted: ''What do you mean? What's the joke, then?'' (That is actually a completely sanitized version of both those questions).
''O.K., that's it, Lew,'' Spinney said. Black took his thumbs out of his eyes. ''Yeah, but was it funny?'' he fretted. Spinney sighed. ''Hysterical,'' he said.
Black headed back to the greenroom with his script, chewing gum frantically and flipping through the pages. He appears on this comedy show once a week -- a disgruntled Everyman in his rumpled suit, tie askew, who mouths off on politics, media and culture. The eye-gouging would follow a bit that had him savaging the indecency witch hunts in the wake of Janet Jackson's bared breast. Somehow, he noted, no one had mentioned another incident; then he played footage of the sportscaster Rick Majerus, saying at the end of a disappointing basketball game televised on ESPN: ''Well, there's not much to look forward to from here on out, so I'm trying to find Ashley Judd in the crowd. It beats the adult videos at the hotel.''
Black went on: ''That was commentator Rick Majerus, talking about his plans to masturbate later that evening. In case you forgot, Ashley Judd looks like this.'' A glamour shot of Judd appeared. ''And in case you're wondering, Majerus looks like this.'' Bald, middle-aged man appeared. ''And when I think about that, I look like this.'' That's where the gouged eyes came in, complete with droplets of blood added to the final shot.
Although he used to write his own comic rants, Black no longer has the time, since he spends 250 days a year performing on the road. The show cuts him some slack; this is actually his first appearance here in four weeks. ''At this point, these guys write me better than I do,'' he said.
Jon Stewart, just out of makeup, appeared in the doorway. ''How was the time away?'' he asked Black. ''You just did the bus, drive at night, that kind of thing?'' Black nodded. ''That's awesome,'' Stewart enthused. ''You're like Bon Jovi.'' He walked off, into the writers' room.
''Yeah,'' Black said glumly. ''Without the women.''
or Black, now 56, success is particularly sweet. Unlike most of his peers, he began his career in the theater, as a playwright, earning a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama in 1977. Since then, he has written 40 plays -- the equivalent, he says, of being a literary migrant worker. Many of them have been produced in theaters across the country, including the Alley Theater in Houston and the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. From 1981 to 1989, he was the playwright in residence and associate artistic director of the West Bank Cafe Downstairs Theater Bar on 42nd Street in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York. There he, along with two friends from Yale, contributed to the annals of theater and starving artistry by supervising the production of 1,500 one-act plays, charging as little as $3.
Black was also the presiding master of ceremonies, honing his stand-up routines as the opening act for the plays. He was known for his dark humor and political bent, but for years he simmered on the edge of comedy and theater alike, unable to locate a confident voice for his act or score a sure-fire hit with his writing. Still, a devoted network of Yale alumni and theater people sought out his idiosyncratic take on the world. He was an uneven performer, but if you hit it right, he could be thrilling. Offstage, he seemed an odd combination of dyspeptic and hounded, looking in perpetual need of a hot meal and a good night's sleep.
Along the way he also did some acting, small roles in film, television and theater, and spent eight years on the road, playing comedy clubs. In 1997 his fortunes began to shift when ''The Daily Show'' hired him. Comedy Central gave him four specials, he contributed to the network's ''Indecision 2000'' election coverage and he became a frequent guest on ''Late Night With Conan O'Brien.'' He released three CD's, won best male stand-up at the American Comedy Awards in 2001 and last year had his first comedy special on HBO.
The world seems to have finally caught up with Black's singular brand of anger. Although he has been compared with antiauthority comedians like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, Black's stylized apoplexy of yelling, hand-waving and finger-jabbing encompasses a sense of absurdity even as it astutely nails the hypocrites du jour in both political parties. And anger is the social taboo that keeps on giving; people don't want to express it themselves, but if someone else will, they sure like to watch.
On April 1, Simon Spotlight Entertainment will publish ''Nothing's Sacred,'' Black's first book. Part memoir -- until age 27 -- part stand-up, the book gives Black's family ample time in the spotlight. The chapter on his mother, Jeannette, quotes her as telling Black and his brother: ''Next time I'll raise dogs. They are more loyal and more excited to see you.''
Well, it would seem there was plenty of anger to go around in that house. Yet the dirty secret about Black is that in real life -- these days, at least -- he's not angry at all. Although his humor is dry and his nervous energy is exhaustingly high-throttle -- even offstage, those fingers rarely stop pointing, jabbing or wiggling -- he has an almost gentle way about him. You can see the drama teacher he once thought he would become; he actually listens when people talk to him and he remembers what they say.
But when other comedians are involved, there go the manners. Rory Albanese, the 27-year-old producer of ''Back in Black,'' is a stand-up comic himself who has opened for Black at a number of club dates. When Albanese bounded into the greenroom with a revised script for that night's segment, Black just shook his head with exaggerated disgust. ''I have it already,'' he said. ''I am so far ahead of you.''
So what's it like, working with Lewis Black? Albanese's expression turned angelic. ''It's so much more than just a job,'' he intoned. ''It's a life chance, really.'' Black did his version of laughing at someone else's joke: he adopted an appreciative expression with a closemouthed smile, a series of nods and no sound, only a string of short, exhaled breaths through his nose.
''I try to keep him in the loop, but I can't always,'' Albanese went on. ''He's all over the place. I'm on the phone with him and say, 'Are you at home?' and he says, 'No, I'm in Cleveland, man.' How am I supposed to know where he is? He tells me, 'Check my Web site.'''
Black put down his script. ''Rory's a funny comedian,'' he said. ''I had him open for me at Caroline's. And we did Chapel Hill and Baltimore. That was great because he was terrible.''
Albanese choked with indignation. ''What are you talking about? I killed in Baltimore.'' Black made his exhaling noises.
''But then we did the Stress Factory in New Jersey,'' Albanese recalled. ''Lots of bikers. I go on and all they wanted to hear was Lewis. I could see him backstage, laughing.''
Black's tone was conciliatory. ''I knew you were going to bomb,'' he said. ''That's how you learn it. And that's a great club, by the way. Though Friday late shows is the third rung of hell. They're drunk and they don't get it. But that's also how you learn when it's you and when it's them.'' He smiled wickedly. ''It was Rory.''
Albanese turned to leave. ''When I do stand-up without him now, I go in expecting the Lewis Black treatment,'' he said. ''I go: 'Where's the greenroom? Where's the Champagne?' Then I think: Oh, right. I skipped the 20 years it took to get there.''
Black turned back to his script. A page later, he was still exhaling.
Even though the West Bank Cafe remains Black's home base -- when he's in New York, he eats there and holds business meetings there, and he had the party after his HBO special there -- his actual residence is an apartment in a modern high rise near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. On the night I went to see him, there was a huge rainstorm, and I arrived at his door with soaked boots and a dripping umbrella. I offered to leave them out in the hall, to protect his floors.
Black shrugged. ''It's a rental,'' he said, opening the door wide. He has been single ever since a brief marriage during his Yale days, and he still dresses like a student: jeans, corduroy shirt, white Ecco sneakers. He led the way into the small living room, which featured floor-to-ceiling windows and a howling wind straight out of a horror-movie soundtrack. Dressing-room signs that say ''Lewis Black'' hang on the doors to his bedroom and bathroom, and newspapers are piled in the hallway, near a half-full wine refrigerator. More papers are piled in the kitchen near a counter covered with vitamin bottles. An easy chair sits in the living room along with an old couch. The floors are bare. If a grown-up lived alone in a high-rise frat house, this is what it would look like.
These days, when Black goes on the road, he has his own bus, with beds and a kitchen. Although he likes his insulated home away from home, it hasn't prevented him from picking up a rotten cold. He doesn't look sick, though; he is still tan from recent gigs in Palm Springs and Phoenix, where he played some golf, his favorite thing in the world next to performing.
He sat on the far end of the couch, in profile, and it was probably best that he kept his distance. When Black speaks, something invariably moves; arms, hands, fingers. And once he gets involved in a story, he tends to pitch back and forth. He looks like a troubled sleeper with incongruously open eyes.
''I fully expected that the theater would work out for me,'' he said, talking about why it took him so long to develop his stand-up persona. ''We were doing more new American one-act plays in that tiny basement than anybody else in the country. But working in the theater, you're one step away from being a junkie. Saying that I'm going to work for bubkes so I can play the whatever in 'Miss Julie' and have two lines, down on East Fourth Street, that nobody in their right mind is going to see -- that takes the mentality of an addict. And I was addicted to it. I loved doing it. I loved seeing it.''
And what kind of plays did he write? He grimaced. ''Surreal, dark comedies,'' he said. ''I might as well have filled out food-stamp forms.''
Black and his creative collaborators, Rand Foerster and the late Rusty Magee, never incorporated their enterprise at the West Bank as a nonprofit organization, as most theaters do. If they had, they would have been able to raise money. ''The bar was essentially the funding,'' Black said. ''In the meantime, the stand-up was coming up. But for so long I thought, Nobody's going to take this seriously. And then I started going to clubs, Catch a Rising Star, in particular, and went, 'Wow.' See, at the West Bank I was working totally in a void. I was just talking and hoping I'd get a laugh. And that evolved into looking at newspaper articles and seeing things that I thought were funny. What was happening, in retrospect, was that I was developing a point of view as a comedian. Which was different from my point of view as a writer. The writer sits in solitary, and you can take your voice and throw it in five or six different directions. The comedian is up in front of people, so that it's you, and the other character is the audience. That took me a while.''
So did figuring out that anger was the key to his stage persona. A fellow comic told Black he was obviously angry, so why not yell? ''I was essentially sitting on the anger, which doesn't make people very comfortable,'' Black said. ''Write an angry line and try to deliver it as not angry. You can't really pull that off.''
As he spoke he chewed gum, mouth wide open. ''I mean, all that yelling did for me was allow me to start to feel comfortable onstage. Because that was the voice I have in real life when I'm funny. But this happens all the time. You meet a kid and you sit down before the show and he's funnier than hell. Then get him onstage and he starts talking about 'How many of you eat at McDonald's?''' He clutched his head. ''It takes a long time for some of us -- me, for instance -- to get to that point where you see what you should be doing.''
After Black got angry onstage, he had to learn that anger by itself isn't funny; channeling the fury into the persona of an angry performer is. ''I think that my character carries the audience through stuff that they may not want to listen to,'' he said. ''And sometimes if they don't get what the joke is, they think it's funny how crazy I get. Because everybody's always saying, 'We thought you might have a heart attack or an aneurysm.' If they'd seen me 12 or 15 years ago, I could understand it, before I had any sense of proportion. From the start I'd be screaming, but there was no way people could really get it. I would be six minutes into it, and there'd be nothing.''
What has also changed is that the audience is increasingly in sync with Black's sensibility. ''There's a lot of frustration that's been built up out there,'' he said. ''You can have all the July Fourth parades you want, but for the people who don't coalesce around something within their community, there's a whole swatch out there who are livid. And that face is not the same face. That's where I think that these idiots are mad as hatters when they try to do their demographics. Because if you come to my audience and look at these people, it is literally a cacophony of faces. What unites them is frustration and anger and a sense of disenfranchisement. So when they see me yelling, there's a sense of catharsis. If comedy is tension and release, then what's the fastest way to build tension? Anger.''
A growing part of Black's audience is children, some as young as 10. ''The first time a 10-year-old showed up, I asked the parents, 'Are you sure this is O.K.?' And they said: 'Well, look, you're his hero. What are we going to do about it?' I said, 'Well, first thing you do is get him some care.'''
Black has also noticed more gay men and women in his audience since he started defending gay marriage. Though, like many straight men, he expresses disbelief that anyone who has been spared the shackles of marriage would seek it out. Black's parents have been married since 1945 and raised their children in Silver Spring, Md. Sam Black worked for the Defense Department for most of his life but retired at 55 in protest of the Vietnam War and became a painter. Jeannette Black taught high-school math and became a substitute teacher in Black's school, where she was famous for her sarcasm. When Black wanted to go to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, she said: ''You want to get killed? We can kill you right here at home. It'll save you a trip.'''
I asked Black if I could interview his mother, but when he asked her, she refused. ''She said I could speak for myself,'' he said with a hangdog resignation. ''I said: 'I know I can, but I'm not the one asking. If it were up to me, they wouldn't be talking to you at all.'''
Although Black has had a number of romantic relationships through the years, he is not in one now. ''It's tough because of the travel,'' he said. ''What woman is going to get on a bus with a group of guys and wander around the country like an idiot? What is her job going to be? And how does somebody deal with the 'Oh, look, it's Lewis Black' thing? It's difficult, because a lot of the time somebody who would want to do that is somebody you don't really want around.''
When he is in a relationship, what is he good at? He seemed surprised by the question, but judging from his answer, he must have given the subject some thought. ''I'm the transition guy between the bad relationship and the guy she's going to end up marrying,'' he said. ''I give a fair amount emotionally but not enough of a commitment to seal the deal. The women I've been involved with might come down as more angry about it, but I think they would agree. I am very emotionally supportive of women. I listen well. I just can't do the final 10 yards to commitment. So I think I give a woman a sense of what she would like from a guy if he would close the deal.''
And what is he not good at?
''Addressing what it is I'm feeling. I'm not good at being honest if somebody says, 'What do you think of what I'm doing?''' He threw up his hands. ''If a relationship presented itself, sure,'' he went on, ''but I don't really think about it. And I'll tell you what is a big cure-all for that. You go Christmas Day to all your friends. You forget what it's like to be around family at Christmas. It's just evil. I mean I've spent it with lots of women and their families. And then I'll go to my friends, my close friends whom I love and adore, and I adore their kids. I'm there three or four hours and I go, 'Am I glad I don't have this!' ''
Perhaps his most meaningful relationship was with his brother, Ron, who died of cancer in 1997 at age 46. Even though Black was the older brother, it was Ronnie, as he called him, who always took care of him.
''More than anybody else, he was the one who supported me,'' Black said. ''He was a computer guy for Lloyds Bank of London. He lived in New York, and he would come to see me perform. And if I was stuck financially, he was my Lloyds Bank. He really did everything for me and was always like, 'Don't worry about it.' Ronnie was kind of like my dad, just a sweet, nice, mellow guy.'' Black started to cry and stuck his index finger in his eye before getting up to take a bathroom break.
''My mom is definitely the conundrum, but I ended up with a sense of humor from her, so that doesn't really faze me too much,'' he said when he returned. ''It was a lot of what made it interesting.''
Black then had a coughing fit and was back up, at the refrigerator. ''Want some water?'' he asked, depositing a plastic bottle of Poland Spring on the coffee table, without a glass. For someone who lives in a bus 250 days of the year, drinking glasses are simply not part of life. The road is a tough way to make a living, isn't it?
He shrugged. ''Initially I'd go out for three weeks, stay home for one week,'' he said. ''I was in my early 40's and thought: I haven't got a lot of choice here. I've got to get with it. And to me, as long as you're learning something, it's fascinating.
''Also, you've got to realize, I was completely broke. So it was like, 'Oh, Jesus, an income!' Then what happens is you find your audience. And because of 'The Daily Show' and Conan and HBO, you go from clubs into theaters, and that's a whole new learning experience.'' His smile grew subversive and delighted. ''And you've always wanted to work theaters,'' he continued. ''So now you've actually pulled off the playwriting thing, you've pulled it off in an underhanded way. You could find a better cast, but now you go into a theater. And all of a sudden they're paying you a ridiculous amount of money. And because of the years that you've spent before, you have absolutely no retirement plan. So you're doing it in part for that, but mostly you're doing it because you finally found your audience. So what are you going to do? After wandering around the desert like an idiot, you're going to say, 'Well, now people like me, let's sit around the house'?'' He clutched his head again. ''I've been looking for an audience for most of my life. I always had an audience, but I wanted a few more people.'' He smiled, but he also looked tired. ''I wanted to get to that point where I didn't have to hand out fliers.''
It is 7 p.m., the height of the pretheater dinner hour at the West Bank Cafe, when Black walks through the front door. In the years since he worked here full time, the restaurant has gone upscale, serving boutique vodkas and sauteed scallops instead of burgers and beer. Black is dressed in his namesake color, and his recent short haircut becomes him.
''Lewis, you look good,'' the hostess purred.
Steve Olsen, the owner, shook his hand. ''I like the tan,'' he said.
Black headed toward the back of the restaurant and down the stairs to the theater. ''That's why I come here,'' he said. '''You look good,' 'You look tan,' 'You look less Jewish.' All the good stuff.''
In 1999, this theater was officially named for the actress Laurie Beechman, who died of cancer. She was married to Neil Mazzella, a close friend of Black's from Yale and one of a group of pals gathering here tonight to celebrate Olsen's 51st birthday, including the actor Mark Linn-Baker (''Perfect Strangers'') and the writer James Yoshimura (''Homicide''). They, too, were at Yale with Black; Yoshimura was in his playwriting class. The theater had no performance that night, and Black and Olsen sat at an empty table, bantering back and forth. They have the kind of friendship adults tend to make when the families they were born into are simply not enough.
Speaking of which, Black said that despite a second request, his mother still refused to be interviewed. ''I told her, 'Fine!''' he said. '''If you won't be my mother, Joy Behar will!'''
He and Behar, who has found stardom on ''The View,'' the morning talk show, came up together on the comedy circuit. ''Lewis is a guy women love in the business,'' she said by phone. ''He is so different from his persona, not angry at all. He's a pussycat. He'll help you out, show up for benefits, laugh at women's jokes. He's a good guy.''
Olsen offered his own praise, even though it made Black squirm. ''For the entire time Lewis produced 1,500 shows here, he was living on a very small salary,'' he said. ''The courtesy and generosity he showed every person in this room, steering people in their careers toward employment he wasn't getting, was extraordinary to me. He had no animosity about that at all. That was the single most impressive thing about watching him work.''
Olsen's former partners, with whom he opened the restaurant in 1978 and to whom he now refers as Null and Void, were a little less enamored of the arrangement; in 1990 they threw Olsen out. ''This was probably the only restaurant in the world where an artist was on staff for the payroll,'' he said. ''I could never justify it with my partners. But the good thing was that Lewis had to go out and get a job.''
Olsen sued his partners and won, and resumed ownership of the West Bank without them in 1991. So, does he miss Black? ''Listen, I'm happy that he's out conquering the world,'' he said, his smile turning sly. ''It's much better here without him.''
Black starts exhaling at this. He is so comfortable with Olsen, I can't resist asking whether it's true that he sees a female shrink. Black nodded easily. ''It is,'' he said. ''She's a remarkable person. I started seeing her when I was feeling that it made no sense that I wasn't having success. I became more and more convinced it was me, that fear-of-success thing. I mean, I probably did have an anger-management problem for a long time. I would scream at really powerful people who could help me. But within a year of seeing her, I would say, 'Oh, I get it, just keep your mouth shut.'''
What was his fear, exactly?
''I thought I would have to compromise what I was trying to do,'' he said. ''Mold myself to achieve a wider audience. I didn't want to change. And I didn't.''
He's successful enough these days that when he performs, his CD's and DVD's are sold in the lobby along with T-shirts and a bobble-head doll made in his image. ''That thing gives me the creeps,'' Black said. ''But people buy them, and we've auctioned them off for charity, made a couple of grand.''
''It's nice to be an industry,'' I said.
Black looked pleased. ''Yes,'' he replied.
''Cottage,'' Olsen added.
After returning to the set of ''The Daily Show'' to rehearse his segment for that night, Black was summoned by the writers to discuss some cuts. Then he waited in the greenroom for the new script, which Albanese rushed to him.
As the taping grew closer, Black grew increasingly nervous. His hands shook so hard when he picked up his coffee, he didn't even try to drink it; he just put it down again. Throwing the script aside, he began a heated monologue about working to develop a cable-TV show, recalling a number of his pilots that failed. As he spoke, he rocked in his chair, pinching his nose, wiping his mouth, stroking his cheek, cupping his ear. It was hard to tell if he was revving up for his performance or beginning a breakdown. When he finished, he picked up the script and studied it as if he'd never seen it before.
''Lewis is like a miner, he's really earned it,'' Jon Stewart told me later. ''There's calluses on that boy's mike hand. But what's nice about his success is that his intensity hasn't changed, and neither has his work ethic. Although would it kill him to buy a new suit? He looks like Ralph Nader.''
It was finally show time. Stewart was out on the set warming up the audience, while Black paced in the back of the studio. Two men in their 30's sitting at the top of the bleacher-style seats spotted him and practically pitched over the side in a frenzy of pointing and nudging.
I nudged Black. Did he see how excited they were?
He took a quick peek, and for at least three seconds, his hands were still. ''It's wild,'' he said. Then the show's music started and the cameras rolled back, and after staying long enough to laugh -- loudly and generously -- at Stewart's opening bit, Black slipped away, down the long dark hallway that led to the stage.
