Lewis Black is a comic hurricane with a brain at the eye of the storm. Even as he enters a spasmodic fury that racks his body, twists his limbs and sets his glasses sliding down his face, the truth of what he says — for example, "The Democrats are the party of no ideas, and the Republicans are the party of bad ideas!" — sets you free to laugh and feel and think.
Underneath all the convulsions is a no-nonsense sort of mensch. So it's not surprising that when the angriest comic alive learned that he was the American Visionary Art Museum's 2011 "Grand Visionary," his reaction was — "What the [expletive] is this?"
And when AVAM's Rebecca Hoffberger informed him that previous Visionaries included Desmond Tutu and former head of the NAACP Julian Bond and his wife, Pamela Horowitz, Black immediately thought, "This is like the SATs! 'Who doesn't belong on this list?'"
Then Black saw that the museum was in Baltimore. He said last week, "My instinctive response was, 'Oh, my parents live there. I'll get to see them.'" And he will, next Saturday.
Black is a busy man — a true comic triple threat (emphasis on threat). In addition to touring and charity work, he released his third book last winter, "I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas." His play, "One Slight Hitch," goes up at the Williamstown Theater Festival in July.
"Why aren't you giving it to [Sen.] Bernie Sanders?" Black asked Hoffberger. She wouldn't budge because she knew her choice was perfect. "Every year," she said last week, "our museum takes one grand theme that has bedeviled or inspired humankind, and this year it's 'what makes us smile' — a very serious theme to be communally contemplating."
She sees Black as a blissful contrast to stand-ups "who do variations of time-tested jokes as their form of comedy. Lewis Black's entire creative output has been in service of his idealism." And though he's famously irreverent — his books include "Me of Little Faith" and "Nothing's Sacred" — he makes Hoffberger recall "the Jewish midrash and the Islamic hadith that teach, 'He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh.'"
Black is also just plain hysterical. "He's a great stand-up," says director Barry Levinson. "He's not like 'here's a joke, and here's another joke.' He takes something about the way we are and how we function, and examines it. I think he's the best comedian doing that right now — he has certain runs that are fall-down-on-the-ground funny."
Not long before Levinson cast him in his 2006 comedy-drama, "Man of the Year," he saw Black go on a satiric spritz about Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at Super Bowl XXXVIII.
Black admitted that he and his football-watching buddies didn't notice anything slipping out of Jackson's costume at the half-time show.
They saw her bared breast only during slow-motion replays, "when they played it over and over again and then on the news — look at that! See! Oh my God! See! Let's show it again! Isn't it terrible! Oh my God! Again!" Black noted that "in Congress, they had blowups of the malfunction — they would blow it up so much they found Osama bin Laden hiding in there."
To Levinson, the bit contained everything that makes Black special — his brightness and anger and sense of the absurd.
Black puts humanity on the couch and declares its condition incurable. He's already looking forward to riffing on election madness when he appears at the Modell Performing Arts Center at the Lyric on Oct. 22. Black never feared that he'd lose his iconoclastic edge or his comic momentum when Barack Obama became president.
"Stupidity didn't flee the country," Black said. "The stupidity is always there. The election allowed more of it to surface. When it takes you this long to figure out that the president is actually from this country … it disgusts me."
Now 62, he remembers when there were more authentic leaders in each party. "You don't have a Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the Left anymore, and you don't have an Everett Dirksen on the Right — you don't have people who are actually thoughtful, like a William F. Buckley."
Born and raised in Silver Spring, Black grew up as a red-blooded '50s American boy. "We were always playing one sport or another every day." He never longed for urban grit and intensity. "A suburb only prepares you for space travel. There's no sense of grounding. But for a guy it was a fun place to grow up. As soon as I got out of the suburbs and into cities, I liked them more." Now, when he's not on the road, he divides his time between New York City and Chapel Hill, N.C.
He always thought of Baltimore as a hard-working town with dynamite sports teams.
Later, he discovered "National Bohemian beer. I drank it one night in high school with friends, and that beer got me drunker than a lot of things that I've had in my life."
He went to college at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, then earned an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. He wrote scores of plays and became associate artistic director of the West Bank Cafe Downtown Theater Bar in New York's Hell's Kitchen.
One Yale buddy, James Yoshimura, became an executive producer of "Homicide." Black acted in an episode shot at Pimlico.
Nine years later, he said, "I got to act with Mr. Baltimore himself, Barry Levinson. And Barry was just great. To shoot 'Man of the Year' in 32 days was extraordinary. We sat around and discussed the scenes between takes and anything we should add and why and yada yada — it was like being at a really intelligent campsite."
He also logged time in Owings Mills. "But Owings Mills is not Baltimore — Owings Mills is a land unto itself!"
Fresh out of Yale, he worked at the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting on an educational series meant to dissuade high school kids from early marriages.
"Because of the Eastern Shore constituency, I could not mention birth control of any sort. I lasted a year." Ten years ago his parents moved to Owings Mills. They and a bunch of Black's friends will be at the AVAM gala on June 4.
Hoffberger believes Black belongs on her Grand Visionary roster partly because of his passion for charity. He gleefully undercuts that notion: "I do the charitable work because if there is a heaven and hell, there will be some people who made it Up There who will work in my defense."
But he has supported the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for 17 years. He has ties to a half-dozen other charities. And in 2000, in memory of his late brother, he established the Ron Black Memorial Scholarship Fund for The 52nd Street Project, a theater-based mentoring program that pairs disadvantaged children from Hell's Kitchen with stage professionals.
Levinson admires Black for "drifting into stand-up" while doing all that theater. Now Black is at the point where can juggle books and plays and concerts. "All I've got to do is focus," he grumbled.
As a performer, he's uniquely memorable. Bond recalled when he and his wife went to Minnesota for her college reunion 10 years ago, "In our hotel, there was an atrium and we could see this big crowd of people below." Minneapolis-born comedian Louis Anderson was hosting a benefit there. But the performer who really killed that night was someone they had never heard of: Lewis Black.
"We were just taken with him; he was as funny as he could be. Just terribly funny. He does seem to be an angry man," said Bond — and he chuckled as he said it.
If you go
The American Visionary Art Museum 15th Anniversary Gala starts at 6 p.m. on Saturday, June 4, at the museum, 800 Key Highway. Tickets are $500-$250 for the full gala and $50 for just the after party. Call 410-244-1900 or go to avam.org.