Okee dokee folks…For all of you folks who like to be the company of intelligent, critical thinkers who like to laugh a lot then you should be at Providence Performing Arts Center on Thursday, November 8th when Lewis Black brings in his “The Joke’s On Us” Tour. Black is one of today’s preeminent political/social comedians whose humor/philosophy aligns with with Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and the late George Carlin. After all that has been going on an evening of levity could just be what the doctor ordered. Hopefully the joke won’t be on us and this post election day performance will give us a chance to laugh comfortably. I had a chance to speak with Lewis Black again and you can read the complete interview below. For more about the show, meltdown to www.PPACRI.com
Lewis Black: Hi, it’s Lewis Black
John Fuzek (Motif): Hey, how are you?
LB: Sorry for the delay, there was nothing I could do about it, they put four of these (interviews) back to back and it gets crazy!
JF: No worries! How are you?
LB: Oh, it gets better everyday, doesn’t it? Every day is just more of the wonder and joy. It’s just what I’ve been waiting for…for these golden years to be really golden, almost as if I am standing by a fire (laughs)
JF: Are in you in New York?
LB: No, I am in Fort Meyers Florida, I have a show tonight
JF: You still live in New York though?
LB: Yes
JF: How many shows are part of this tour?
LB: Around 35, September until some time in December, three or four shows a weekend
JF:How do you maintain your sanity and not have your head explode these days?
LB: You watch the first news cycle and turn it off! That’s what you do. That helps. Same way so you wouldn’t overdose on drugs, let’s say you needed a drug for cholesterol you wouldn’t take five of them, you know, you watch CNN until they start to repeat themselves, or whatever channel that you are watching for news, they just repeat themselves after 15 minutes, they don’t have new news, it’s always the same news, it’s not good, and they’re not doing news they’re doing conjecture, like the journalist that was assassinated by the Saudis, you can’t make that the news all day, they’re discussing with two or three people about what it means, do other things that should be done, like just how deep is this shit with us and the Saudis?, do information, stop with the conjecture! stop trying to make stories and actually give us information and make a story out of the information! you can do that, why don’t you go to journalism school you fucking pricks!
JF: It must be hard for you to constantly try to make heads or tails out of this for your show
LB: What’s really impossible is to talk to an audience and they don’t have, your dealing with, um a certain chunk of the audience shows up and has their own facts, you know, the president says something and they believe what he said, they don’t look it up, they don’t care… it’s unbelievable
JF: Do you get a mix of people in your audience or primarily left leaning folks?
LB: I get conservatives, real conservatives, I get adults, adults who are liberal and adults who are conservative
JF: Do you have any audience members who get upset and leave?
LB: Not before he (trump) was elected, no, now they do, i get people who say “i used to be a fan but now you’re insulting”, well, I’ve insulted all the presidents, that’s the gig, asshole! you just weren’t paying attention before, I don’t even talk about it for the first twenty minutes of my act, and then I barely talk about it, and I never mention his name
JF: I wish we all would never have to mention his name!
LB: (laughs) I mean I don’t like him, since I object to certain things that come out of his mouth, and certain things that I believe that he has done, and certain things that he has said about women, we can go through the list, it doesn’t mean that I am a liberal or a leftist, I’m way beyond, I’m way beyond these politics, I’m a socialist, so I’m not threat to anybody that is what’s stupendous, I am going to change the world you idiots? there’s six of us! We barely have enough for a baseball team!
JF: I’m with you so there’s seven!
LB: (laughs) You can’t count socialism as liberal, there are conservative socialists you assholes! They have no clue, they have no clue because they stopped teaching it after I got out of high school, they at least discussed it and the history of it, it’s part of the history of this country…they’ve completely thrown things out the window, not saying that if you know it you become it but you should know about it, that’s how the whole thing happened that how the country evolved
JF: True, all they teach nowadays is how to take a test, not rational or critical thinking, they;re are just fed information to spit it back out later with a number 2 pencil and a black dot…so, do you ever turn on Fox “news” just for fodder?
LB: No, I don’t watch much of that, I don’t watch much of MSNBC or much of Fox. I watch a little of CNN, I mostly read the paper, The Times and USA Today, when I am on the road and I read a thing called The Week, which kind of gives both sides of the stories, I am usually about a week behind in news, I don’t pay attention to the breaking news on my phone, I have friends that do that, they’ll tell me, and I will get things sent to me, and I watch the nightly news, so I don’t have 17 people explaining to me what it was that I just heard, you show me what happened, now I can digest it and move on, I don’t need to have people interpret it for me, there’s only 3 or 4 people on TV who are worth a shit about interpreting stuff, who I trust and one of them is David Gergen who is a conservative, he’s probably the best a this, in terms of parsing through this nonsense, I think that they should have the news, they should show us something like this is what was said, Mitch McConnell say something or Chuck Schumer says something and afterwards they should have a barnyard of animals and that should be who’s commenting, you have ducks, chickens, pigs, they should all be making noises and that should be the commentary
JF: It would be about as good as what we get now
LB: It would be BETTER!
JF: It’s like we are living Orwell’s Animal Farm right now
LB: Yeah, we are, it’s just appalling…you can’t call Medicare and Social Security entitlements, you can’t, they’re not entitlements, it’s the entitled telling the unentitled that they can’t be entitled, fuck you! while you have your health insurance, what are you kidding me, are we going to go through this again? you figure out how to make it possible because you’ve got it and what did you do? you won an election? so therefore I have to pay for you to be healthy? are you kidding me? And most people in this country agree with me on that and yet somehow we can’t change it. It’s astonishing!
JF: And today you have trump cheering on the politician who body slammed the journalist
and you have no Republicans, you have people that come on as Republican commentators, no senators or congressman, who try to cut through it immediately, no Republican comes on to say that this is not acceptable. They’re a bunch of chicken shits, everyone of them is a chicken shit
JF: Yup, they are
LB: Sell the country down the river so you can have your two little things, so somehow your agenda comes through, no reason for it, none
JF: We’re basically screwed
LB (laughs)
JF: So we have spoken a couple of times in the past, I have watched all your specials, and I am right there with you with your commentaries… I tried to find one of your specials on Netflix last night to refresh myself with your comedy but there weren’t any! You were on Netflix but not sure what happened, it was the special from the last tour that you did, it had Jewy Jew’s Gun Store that I remembered from your last show at PPAC.
LB: It should be on Amazon, I will have to find out about Netflix, I’m getting a little pissed about that.
JF: You know, personally, I would love to see a tour of you and Kathleen Madigan at some point
LB: We did it in Canada which was fun and we have done it in a couple of other places…I just spent three days with her playing golf!
JF: I love her, too but I don’t think that she is as well known in these parts and I know that you usually do have a comedian open for you, will you have that again this time around?
LB: Yes, I will, John Bowman
JF: Yes, he is the one who was with you last time you were in Providence, loved him! He is very funny! Comedy is hard, I watch a lot of it on Netflix and some folks that I have never heard of are hysterical and some I have heard of doesn’t do a damn thing!
LB: I know, it’s wild
JF: The thing I like about your comedy is it makes you think and the others are just sophomoric humor, which i guess is needed sometimes
LB: Right, it can’t be the whole thing that you are doing
JF: Yours makes you look at things in a different way, you call attention to things and it makes you think and a lot of comedians are not like that
LB: Well, thank you! This time I will be talking about healthcare, I think people will enjoy that, I actually got sick in Ireland the summer before, 2017, so I talk about what it’s like to deal with healthcare in a country that has what people would call “socialized medicine”, you know because that’s a dirty word, so what is interesting is that I have experienced it and those people who talk about haven’t experienced it
JF: What happened to you?
LB: I came down with a severe case of pneumonia and I was hospitalized for 10 days. but I learned a lot about, well, here’s the thing, same kind of care that I would expect here and it would only cost about one fifth of what it would cost, it’s ridiculous, we can’t figure it out and we have someone like Mitch McConnell saying that he’s going to figure it out for me, No, you’re not, neither is Chuck Schumer and neither are the other people who are in office because they’ve allowed health insurance companies to pay their way, it’s getting sillier by the minute
JF: I am sure that we could go on about all of this forever but I should let you go
LB: well, just tell the folks if you could that we’ll be doing the live stream for the last 15 minutes and if the good people of Providence could send in questions of comments about their city or rants about their city or rants about anything, on my website ( ) if they can send in their comments, every show that I am doing now is driven as much as I can by the city that I am in, so the people that live there are running the show, I’m performing the show
JF: You did that last time, right?
LB: yes, only this time I am really pushing for it!
JF: Well I will encourage folks to send you rants and questions!
LB: Thank you, and I wish that I was funnier today!
JF: You were great! No worries!
LB: Alright, thank you, see you soon!
As mentioned above Lewis would love for you to send questions, comments or rants to him before the show. He will address as many of these as he can. A lot of responses are done during the Live Stream that happens in the last 15 minutes of the show which you can watch from your computer. To do this, go to: www.lewisblack.com. Don’t let Lewis down!
That’s it for now. Thanks for reading. www.JohnFuzek.com
