Lewis Black In His Own Words: ‘Old Yeller’ On His Final Tour & The State Of Comedy

Lewis Black, one of the Comedy Central mainstays whose “Back In Black” segment on “The Daily Show” is the last remaining throughline to its earliest days when Craig Kilborn was its host, is in the midst of his final, “Goodbye Yeller Brick Road,” comedy tour. He’s not retiring, exactly, but won’t be spending 120 nights a year on stages in different cities between “Daily Show” sets.

Black, now 75, is well-known not only for his shouty, sweaty takes on politics and society but, for those in the concert industry of a certain age, for his three consecutive years [2004-06] regaling jaded industry execs and other attendees as host of the annual Pollstar Awards. If Stockholm Syndrome exists in comedy, this is your proof of concept, because we couldn’t get enough of him.

In addition to “The Daily Show” and touring, Black is the chairman of the executive board of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indianapolis, and a supporter of the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York, the birthplace of Lucille Ball. He is an author and an accomplished playwright, having earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Yale School of Drama.

Here, Lewis Black talks about his comedy career in his own, inimitable way.


On Retirement & The Road

It’s just a career adjustment. Touring is not my whole life. I just can’t continue the way the landscape of touring has changed since I started.

Part of it is the business; it used to be kind of easy to book. There’s so many people going out, so many people wanting to play theaters – musical acts, comedy, all kinds of “America’s Got Talent” people. There used to be spaces in between that I could go to and find fairly easy travel routes, because I was [touring] on the bus and playing something like four days a week.

The past couple of years I’m noticing that instead of driving four or five hours, we’re driving eight or 10 sometimes. It’s kinda tough. I would’ve retired already if there was no pandemic – instead of retiring during a pandemic, I basically had a five-year plan for the first time in my life.

Political Comedy In A Weird Year

It’s the role of comedy, in part, to give people what I’ve always called insulation. If you’re talking politics, or social stuff – I really saw myself more as a social commentator than a political commentator – but it’s whatever people call it. It can be just slapstick. It allows you to step back from the madness for a moment and take a breath and say “Oh yeah, this isn’t all that life is about.”

But now it’s kind of appalling. It’s like you wake up one day and find you’re in some kind of a hamster wheel. What makes it really difficult to be a political comic at this point is: How do you satirize what’s already satiric? Is there anything funny about [Donald Trump] saying that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is a better medal to get than the Medal of Honor? You kinda go, “How am I supposed to make that funnier?” It’s so perverse. And he’s running to be the president. If you read this stuff in a book, you’d be laughing.

A friend of mine said, “This is like stuff [author Kurt] Vonnegut wrote. You used to read Vonnegut, and it was like, “Wow, that’s really crazy.” Now it’s really nuts. There are people in Congress saying things that literally make you think, “Where are the adults?”

And you look at social media; it’s high school to the Nth degree. Every day you wake up, and you’re walking down the hallway as soon as you open up any of those Instagram, XYZ things. It’s like, “Oh boy, look, they had sex. Hee-hee.” You can’t say or do something without somebody having to comment on what you did. What is the matter with you? You’re not nice. Stop it.

I don’t know if a comic really says, “You know what? Today I’m going to start my chat with some shit.” But basically, you find ways to make fun of it. … It really is a comment on society where things have gotten so horrific you’ve got to turn to the comic. Everybody seems to need it from TikTok to Instagram and podcasts. Everybody seems to need a comedy fix much more than they ever did.

On Changes In The Comedy Biz

During the course of my life, comedy made inroads – where it wasn’t just about going to theaters. It was also about clubs and there are a ton of them everywhere. Somebody could wander into a town that doesn’t have a theater, but they’ve got two comedy clubs.

I’d get kicked out of college for this, but I was a comic at the end of what I think of as the industrial period, or whatever we want to call what we’ve been through. And we’re in the early, early stages of sort of the technological period.

A number of comics, like Steven Wright and Sam Kinison and others, were made on “The Tonight Show.” They went from “The Tonight Show” to the clubs. Me and my friend David Attell became in part the basis of Comedy Central for a while, which boosted both of us in terms of our touring. Dave and I, and the late, great Mitch Hedberg, toured together through theaters, and that was not normal at the time. The Comedy Central brand established theater comics and then Live Nation came along, and the agents said, “Do you want to work with us?” And I said, “Sure, can I get a tour bus?”

So it was TV and Comedy Central that did that. I did a ton of “Conans” and all of that helped flip the switch, and then the HBO boom. So it was all on the [TV] box, and that box doesn’t dominate anymore. Now you’ve got all of these options. It’s not on the table anymore. Now we’re in an age where you have comics who are coming out of social media and debuting on podcasts.

So you have comics who do podcasts and TikTok or Instagram or Facebook, and then there’s YouTube. It allows some of them to skip steps that we did, going club to club, and some of these guys are going from being seen on the phone to playing clubs. It’s a different world. They’ve been given the opportunity that they have, which I’m jealous of in the sense that they bypassed all the bullshit, in part. You went from “The Tonight Show,” and got your best friend to set up the can in the back of a club or your living room or wherever the hell you went to do it. That’s a difference. It’s how comics developed and were found. But those things have changed. It’s developed into a whole different thing, and it will change again, because there’s still all of these clubs.

Looking Back

One thing I learned from my career is I got lucky in a sense that it was all about timing. Being in the right place at the right time. I’m on Comedy Central, I’m on “The Daily Show.” I have been given this small little niche in which to yell and scream like a lunatic, and people will talk about the fact that they saw me do this, and they’ve never seen anything like it. And that was how it broke, when I was 40. But this was really okay. This is what I wanted to do.