Lewis Black, Las Vegas Sun, May 28, 2004

Columnist Lisa Ferguson: Black making the most of not-so-sudden fame Lisa Ferguson Friday, May 28, 2004 | 8:29 a.m. Leave it to Lewis Black to obsess about the small stuff. Less than 48 hours after his first HBO special, "Black on Broadway," aired this month, the comedian had this to say of the finished product: "I was really pleased, except for what I was wearing. "It didn't work for me," he explained of the ensemble -- a black leather jacket, gray-collared shirt, black slacks and shoes. "I liked the jacket, I just didn't like the shirt. But that's not bad; I mean, usually, I'd be screaming about the rest of it, but I was pleased with what I did." What Black, best known for his weekly social and political commentaries on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," did was string together a host of unlikely topics -- from the nation's budget deficit to ideas for stimulating the economy; torturously long plane rides and the absurdity of bottled water -- in the ranting, finger-flailing fashion that's made him one of the hottest comics around. Count on witnessing more of the same when his "Rules of Enragement" stand-up tour stops for a pair of shows tonight and Saturday at House of Blues at Mandalay Bay. But not everyone was pleased with the HBO performance -- namely a couple of television critics whose reviews of the special Black happened to have read. One, he claims, called the show " 'obscenity-laced and shocking for shock's sake.' " (For the record, F-bombs pepper Black's ripped-from-the-headlines material, as well as his casual conversation.) "Some of the people's reactions, you go, 'How the (expletive) did you miss it? Why does the obscenity bother you so much?' It's like unbelievable in this day and age," Black contends. "Certainly I'm more than willing to take criticism but ... if I'm talking about budget cuts and stuff, one would think you might say, 'Hello, it's an unusual thing for a comic to talk about.' "One guy said, 'Get over it, Lewis, it's only bottled water.' Instead of telling me to get over it, why don't you say how much you love bottled water? It's like, why don't you take the position that I'm yelling about and defend it?" But Black -- who offstage is relatively sedate compared to his angry onstage persona -- takes the critical bull's-eye on his back in stride. It's better than the alternative: For more than 30 years the Yale School of Drama graduate penned dozens of plays, acted on the stage, in film and television, and performed stand-up comedy in relative obscurity. "It never really bothered me because I enjoyed doing it," he says. "Yeah, there were a couple of years where I thought, 'I'm beating my head against a brick wall. Am I really gonna keep doing this?' ... You do it long enough and you just keep trying to hone what it is you do, and eventually people catch on." Since joining "The Daily Show" in the mid-'90s, however, Black's career has shifted into overdrive. "What I think it did was kind of help establish me more as a performer; you know, it's that final arc of credibility," he says. "I've been in between cult (status) and having a larger audience and I think this kind of gets me there, and then I'll fall off the radar again. I mean, as much as I'm on the radar, I'm still not really that well known." That's debatable: In 2001 he was named Best Male Stand Up by the American Comedy Awards. He continues to perform his "social satire" at least four nights per week. "I'm at the point now where I have an audience, so it's fun to be out," Black says. "You go in and people are ready to hear you, as opposed to it used to be you were doing 10 minutes waiting for them to catch on." Time is precious to 55-year-old Black. "There's just stuff I wanna do," he says. "By kind of hitting my stride later than most comedians do, I'm trying to fit it in faster. I don't have that luxury of hitting it in my early 30s and having it for 20 years." He's staying plenty busy with his "Daily Show" duties, coupled with the tour and other projects. "My schedule is just so thick at this point that it's just been crazy," Black says, explaining, "I haven't had really a few days off in a row in 10 weeks." He is, however, looking forward to the "break" he'll have while meeting the obligations of a book deal he's inked. Black intends to write a tome "about how I ended up with my point of view," which he says developed in his early 20s. "I believed from the time that I was a kid that you really should set out to do what it is you want to do. Nobody's gonna pay you for it, but in the end, it's more rewarding than the financial remuneration," he says. Also, "I really kind of realized when you're a kid and you have this dopey idealism about the way things should be that I've always hung to my guns and said, 'Why aren't they (expletive) that way?,' as opposed to going, 'Well, you know, life's hard and yada, yada, yada.' " Black was, however, disappointed to learn recently that he won't be squeezing a sitcom into his crowded career mix. He filmed a pilot for a series, which looked to have a promising future, but ultimately failed to find a network-television home. "It had always been kind of my thing to try to get to the sitcom arena or an acting thing, because I have that experience," he says. "I was in theater and I'm a comedian -- that's called 'sitcom.' " That said, let the ranting commence: "I hope instead of doing me, they do an extra half hour of 'American Idol,' because I don't think they do enough of it; so that Americans can really just finally be driven off a cliff." Out for laughs Why did the comedy club cross the road? In the case of Whiskey Pete's Comedy Club in Primm, to get to the other side of I-15. The club recently relocated across the busy highway to Buffalo Bill's, where it's been renamed Funny's Comedy Club. Showtimes are 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; tickets are $14.95. Comedy doesn't come much cheaper than this, folks: Laughs at the Beach is a free show, featuring local and touring comics as well as improv troupes. It's staged from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Saturdays at The Beach nightclub, 365 Convention Center Drive. Look, up on the stage: It's a comic; it's a zombie; it's Artie Lange. Earlier this month news of the funny man's demise -- while he and other members of "The Howard Stern Show" cast were in Las Vegas broadcasting the popular radio show -- was erroneously reported on the Web site of a local television-news station. Lange returns to the scene of his brush with death when he performs July 23 in "Beacher's Madhouse" at The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel.