Lewis Black Explains How He Came To Create the Last Live Theater Special of 2020

Lewis Black’s new special, Thanks For Risking Your Life, is out today and available now on iTunes and Apple TV.

The special recorded on the last day before all live theater shows were cancelled across America back in March.  The show was filmed during Black’s, “It Gets Better Every Day” Tour at the Four Winds New Buffalo’s Silver Creek Event Center, but when he went on stage that night, Black had no idea he was filming a special. He had planned to shoot a special much later in the tour, he told me in a phone interview.

“We would have done it in August or sometime in that month. My hope was possibly, to do it at the National Comedy Center. Do it at some point during the month of August, early September and do it as a fundraiser for them and then do, and it’s a good room, The Reg Lenna, a good room to do it. Great. Great. Great. Then this happened, so that’s out the window.”

The night of March 13th,, he said, they knew that was the end of things. He was in Buffalo.   “We knew we would shut down,” he said. “I knew that I was not going to fly out of O’Hare. I was lucky, we had the bus, the tour bus.I knew  we were going to get on the bus. I’m going to take the bus back. I’m not going back into the airport. The ball game’s over.”

There were mixed emotions as Lewis took the stage that night. Black had read enough at that point, that he was feeling trepidation about the show, about people taking risks to come out and see him.  Questioned were raised, debating took place. Ultimately he  decided to perform. Knowing that was going to be it, struck him as important, but when he went on stage that night, he had no idea he was filming the last live audience theater special of 2020.

“No. I had no idea. None,” he said.” I knew that I was still working on trying to get precisely what it was that I wanted to say, because I really write on stage. So, every night is a rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, and I thought I’ve finally rewritten enough and that it was setting it in stone, … it turned out when we were done, that was really what I’d done was I had hit my marks, It was really, it’s like watching a really good dress rehearsal.”

They had  cameras were there because Black routinely records his performances with two cameras for a segment he does at the end of every show called The Rant is Due.  Black reads rants  and livestreams the rants on Facebook. “I read the rants of folks who either are in the audience, live in the city or in the state. I’ve been doing that for about six years.” He called it a “happy accident” that they had two extra cameras that night that were shooting for the big screen at the theater.

Had things gone according to schedule, when they were ready to record, there would be bells, there would be whistles, there would have been eight or even twelve cameras. . There would be lighting designed, entrances planned. And of course, material carefully culled for the hour.  The audience would have been filmed and mic’ed.

But a special is really about the material and the performance, and Black said when he got off stage that night, his opener, Jeff Stilson said to him: “That’s a special.”

And it is a truly special “special” in that it captures a very real moment in time.  It wasn’t planned, but it was captured, and it was an important moment.  The scaled back filming didn’t detract from the hour- in fact it accidentally made for a more beautiful, more intimate special.  The result is striking, and unique, and puts all the focus on Black.  It’s a great match for Lewis’s material. “It would not have been a way that I would have shot a special  given a choice, because they asked for all of the hoo-ha,” Black said. “But there was an intimacy that I had not seen. There’s an intimacy in that special that every comic on stage has a sense of, and that this special, I hope conveys, that sense of intimacy with the audience.”

Comedian Jim Norton in fact, told Black he thought taking the audience out of the filming worked great. “I was talking to Jim Norton actually about that, and he said, “I never understood why we show the audience during a special. It’s like, what’s the matter with us?” Because you’re going to these people who are, you sit there, they’re laughing, their faces are strange. They’re contorted.”

Since that last show, Black, like most of us has been sidelined.  When I asked him what he does to stay sane he joked, “Cutting. I do some cutting,” and then quickly added, in true Lewis Black fashion, “I know you’re not supposed to say that because then it triggers things, but you know what? Anybody who read that or hears this or whatever, and then goes, “Ooh, boy, he really…” No, I didn’t. Okay. The setup was, what do you do to calm yourself? Obviously, it’s not the way you calm yourself. That’s called a joke, you fucks. It’s not called… Am I sympathetic to people who had that problem? Yes. I’ve had friends’ kids who have that problem, but I’m not looking them in the eye and telling them that joke.”

The real answer?  “I turn the TV on, then I try to figure out, do we have oatmeal, yogurt and granola? Do we have egg salad? Do we go just crazy? Then it really is emails. What I do is, I get 150 emails a day asking me for money for a variety of campaigns. Then I just have to sit there and I used to read them. I don’t even do that anymore. Just getting rid of them is a task. Then, it’s just a fog. Then it’s a slight fog.”

“Somebody the other day said, did I feel like weeks and months were shorter, but days were longer? No, I don’t have that, but actually how I get through this, it’s two glasses of wine, two to three glasses of wine a day, which my therapist says is better than Xanax. So, it’s two to three glasses of wine after dinner. That’s how I manage. The fact that I haven’t become an alcoholic is really, whoo. That’s my level of pride.”

He misses being on the road, but doesn’t consider himself someone who has to be out there all the time.  He’s not going to do the Zoom performing. He’s not really a Twitter guy. And he’s not going to write his next hour, because he writes on stage. “I don’t really write jokes. I stumble into them,” he said.   If he decides to start writing during his time away from the stage, it will be a book or a play, not material.

But at some point he realized what he really missed was ranting.  “I was doing something, a podcast maybe, it was a podcast. I was yelling and shouting for about half of it. When it was done, I went, “Oh God, I feel so much better. I haven’t felt this good in a while. That’s what I miss.”

He confirmed that The Rant is DueI  will return, from wherever he is.  He’ll do it without an audience and just have folks send in stuff pissing them off or upsetting them, “the way we’ve done it before,” he said. There’s already one planned, for the New York Comic-Com.”They had all the people bitching and moaning about whatever it was that they missed, or they’re glad that they’re not going to go there. I’ll do that, and then I’d like to do one on education and homeschooling. Then I’d like to do, let people get shit off their chest. That kind of way, I could work because that’s, to me a combo pack of what I do onstage in the Daily Show.”

While you’re waiting, Lewis Black’s new special, Thanks For Risking Your Life, is out today and available now on iTunes and Apple TV.  If you need an outlet for your own inner rage in 2002, this is your hour.

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