Lewis Black comes to the Hippodrome Theatre next Sunday night, Apr. 2, bringing his blustery comic sensibility and political courage. He wears his bluster for the laughs. He wears his courage as part of his survival equipment — and ours.
The best comedians go for more than a few chuckles. They make us think. They make cultural connections, they blow the cobwebs off old perceptions and they help us whistle past graveyards instead of letting them haunt us.
Black makes his living in such intelligent precincts. Between punchlines, he’s got a full orchestration of facial exasperations, just to illustrate his anger. But his overriding question is clear: how has America allowed itself to get so stupid?
The last time I saw him, Black did something most comics were still afraid to touch. It was several months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were still in shock, still depressed and still imagining George W. Bush was the president to make things better instead of the guy who would lead us into 20 years of wars built on White House lies.
Bush had a few good moments in the aftermath of the attacks. He stood there in the rubble of the Twin Towers, holding a fireman’s bullhorn and told everybody that America would fight back.
By the time Black reached Baltimore and stood on the little stage at The Improv comedy club near downtown’s Power Plant Live! complex, the thinking about Bush was a little muddled.
He was our leader, after all, and we were frightened. To criticize him implied — to some — that we were mocking all those who’d suffered in the attacks and whose lives had been lost.
Black saw the fallacy in that line of thinking. After all, Franklin Roosevelt (and Eleanor) had their critics during World War II; Harry Truman caught flak over Korea; Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were vilified over Vietnam.
So Black made a joke about Bush. It wasn’t much of a joke, actually, but it helped break down inhibitions of the previous months. And it told us a truth.
Before Sept. 11, 2001, Black said, Bush was “an idiot.” After that date, somehow, “a genius.”
The packed house at The Improv that night seemed momentarily stunned. Was it OK to say this? Black went into some of the facial shtick he performs to soften his material: shaking his jowls, rolling his eyes, implying that it was crazy to imagine Bush was anything but the same lightweight he was before the attacks.
The crowd roared its approval. That single line gave Black — and us — new license to emerge from the darkness of our emotional bunkers. It was OK to laugh again, even at the ineffectual man in the White House, whose greatest luck is that Donald Trump has practically made us forget the Bush years.
Many still recall Black from his appearances on Jon Stewart’s old Comedy Central Show. For me, a single line made him a comic hero.
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