Albanese
also got to see Black’s creative process up close. “He just gets out
there and talks about it. He’s not the guy who sits on a laptop and
creates every word and tweak. ... He’s one of those guys who finds it onstage!”
The
theatrically trained Black also uses silences in ways that frighten
even some other top comedians. “Lew can stop talking, and he walks back
and forth, and he just knows how to inflate the balloon in the room,”
the producer says. “He takes it to that moment — and then
pops it!”
***
The first time I saw Black perform live was at HBO’s 2006 taping of his Emmy-nominated special “
Red, White & Screwed” at the Warner. He opened by saying he tells people he was born in Washington. Then he deftly spun to the punch line:
“I
wasn’t really born and raised in Washington, D.C. I was born and raised
in Silver Spring, Maryland. ... But I tell people I’m from Washington,
because if you say you’re from Silver Spring, Maryland,
it sounds like you’re a [wimp].”
He
razzes his home town mercilessly. “Of course, there is no spring there,
and I can assure you no one was mining for silver,” Black wrote in his
2005 bestseller, “
Nothing’s Sacred.”
“Its only claim to fame is that it is the largest unincorporated city
in America. In other words, we were too lazy to govern ourselves. Our
town motto was, ‘I’d like to vote, but I don’t feel like driving.’ ”
Black’s Silver Spring was profoundly different. “When I was a kid,
this was a s---hole,” he tells me. “There was nothing here. We would
hang out at Langley Park Hot Shoppes and the Little Tavern for burgers.
Gifford’s for ice cream. ... The Beltway was the beginning of the
change. What did it was the Metro. It created a boomtown.”
Black
likes to say that as a comedian, coming from the suburbs was like coming
from nowhere. Suburbia is “an oxygenated void,” he wrote. “As a result
it prepares you for either depression or space travel.”
Yet it was
here that Black found the footing to sharpen his cynicism. “From the
first time I met him in junior high, I knew Lewis wasn’t in the
‘mainstream’ of what most kids our age fell into,” says Hughes, a former
Post journalist. “I first saw that when he ran up to me yelling,
‘Lenny, there is no God!’ ” after reading a Post article about a woman
killed by a manhole cover that blew off. “He was a serious kid, but he
was fascinated, as all our friends were, by the humor in the ironies of
dark events.”
The first time Black doubted adult authority was
when the school conducted hide-under-your-wooden-desk drills in the late
’50s in case of a nuclear blast. “We were hiding under kindling!” he
says in his act. The ’60s brought the Vietnam War and President
Kennedy’s assassination, which Black says ripped a tear in a boy’s
“protected” universe. To cope, he gravitated toward those dark ironies.
Black
honed his wit with smart and somewhat rebellious friends, including
class president/prankster Don Smith, now a Montgomery College
administrator; schoolteacher Ray Larson, who lives near Black in Chapel
Hill (Black has a home in Hell’s Kitchen, too); Edward Wasserman, a top
journalism academic; Cliff Figallo, an online-communities expert;
percussionist Rick Redcay, who has created music for some of Black’s
specials; and physician Cary Engleberg, with whom Black wrote the
college musical “Do You Know Where Your Children Are?,” staged at George
Washington University in 1970.
In high school, Black and friends would make Manischewitz runs to
Ernie’s Liquor. In college, some tried psychedelics. Amid the “Sgt.
Pepper’s”-era experimentation, Black says, he also had his mind expanded
by scathing humor from such writers as Yippies “investigative satirist”
Paul Krassner. In the work of Krassner and Kurt Vonnegut, and later
George Carlin, Black discovered a way to take on the world.
“Satire,” he says, “both shocked me and reinforced the way I look at things.”
***
It
is a warm June night in 2007, and there’s high anticipation at Silver
Spring’s Springbrook High: Black — big-time comic and Hollywood actor —
is set to take the stage at his alma mater for the first time in 39
years. The event is a stand-up benefit for the school, so the crowd
mostly consists of Friends of Springbrook, including many students, who
embrace Black’s edgy material.
The room brims with warmth. Black
points out faculty members from back in his day. There’s Mr. (Richard)
Ahlberg, the school’s first principal, and Mr. (Ephraim) Salins, the
math teacher who kept Black from being valedictorian. “Gave me a ‘B’ —
p----!” Black jokes later.
After the benefit, I meet Black’s parents, Sam and Jeannette, both now
94. Longtime friends, like Wasserman, detect the comedic influence of
both. Black breaks it down simply: “I think I am my mother when things
piss me off — I’m my dad the rest of the time. I think they are a
synthesis in my act.”
Sam Black — a placid, easygoing man —
briefly tells me he used to work for the military before pursuing art
professionally. He was employed at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in
White Oak. His work involved sea-mine engineering until he discovered
that the mines were being used as offensive weapons in North Vietnam
waters, and not as defensive deterrents. So, at 53, Sam quit — in a
moral decision that sticks with Lewis still.
Then there is
Jeannette, quick and bitingly hilarious. In the ’50s, after getting a
master’s in biology, she taught at an all-black D.C. school during
segregation. According to Black, she tried to make the math curriculum
relevant; the administration objected, so she quit. She later
substituted in Maryland schools, using withering sarcasm to keep teens
in line.
Black says nearly half his act is rooted in interactions
with his parents, who live in Owings Mills. Plus, there are the
genetics: Withering sarcasm runs deep in his veins. “You listen to Lew,”
Bowman says, “and you can’t avoid Sam and Jeannette.”
The other
family member mentioned often is Lewis’s younger brother, Ron. “They
were as close as I’ve ever seen two people be,” Bowman says. Ron worked
in finance and was “brilliant,” says Torie Clarke, former assistant
secretary of defense for public affairs under Donald Rumsfeld.
Ron moved to New York, worked at Lloyds Bank and lent his brother
money when pay as a playwright was thin. “He was just hugely
supportive,” says Black, emphasizing that Ron broadened his brother’s
horizons. “He moved to Norway, and flew me over to France. I was broke,
and he basically took me around wine country and Spain.”
When Ron died of cancer in July 1997, Black wrote in his 2008 book “
Me of Little Faith,”
he stared at Ron’s “ashen, lifeless body and knew that he was gone. Yet
his spirit filled the room. I felt it all around me. It was so strong
that I knew he was still there. In this moment of extreme loss, I was
comforted by him, by his presence.”
Shortly after Ron’s death,
Lewis’s stand-up career took off. “Career doors that had been closed to
me began to swing open,” he wrote. “I have no doubt that my brother was
the one who was helping to unlock them.”
***
Amid his
soaring stand-up career, Black never surrendered his sometimes agonizing
passion for playwriting. “Being a playwright is like the equivalent of
doing a jigsaw puzzle that has 1,500 pieces, and it’s a jigsaw of a blue
sky,” he tells me. “Not a cloud in sight.”
Off and on for 30 years, he has nurtured a play he wrote after a breakup. At Yale Drama, he met talented student
Caitlin “Katie” Clarke.
After his 1977 graduation, they lived together for nearly three years.
She did not want to get married, the comedian says, preferring to focus
on her career. She headed to London to be the co-lead in the 1981
fantasy-action film “Dragonslayer.” She and Black broke up. Several
months later, she was engaged to another man.
Black was stunned, as was Caitlin’s family. “We adored Lewie,” says Clarke, one of Caitlin’s four sisters.
Black
channeled his emotions into a romantic farce based on Caitlin and her
family. In “Hitchin’,” the dumped boyfriend shows up at the Cincinnati
wedding attempting to derail it. The original production was staged at
Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. “The entire family went,” Clarke says —
except Caitlin.
(Caitlin would go on to appear on stage and screen — including
Broadway’s “Titanic” and brief roles on TV’s “Moonlighting” and “Sex and
the City” — before dying of cancer in 2004.)
Black’s “Hitchin’,”
which became “One Slight Hitch,” had readings at Arena Stage’s Kreeger
Theater and Baltimore’s CenterStage; it has been performed from Tampa to
Seattle, and at the Williamstown (Mass.) Theatre Festival. “I do
stand-up and get treated nicely and get a certain amount of respect,”
Black says. “But I write a play and put it out there, and some of the
[this summer’s reviews] I read in Seattle — it
hurts that they don’t get it.”
One
reason Black sticks with the play is a “greatest generation” speech by
the bride’s mother, about life in the wake of World War II:
“Your
father calls from six thousand miles away, wondering if I’m still ready
to marry him or if he should just roam around the globe. Yes, yes, of
course, I say, yes, I have no fingernails left. I need him. He arrives
home to tickertape and bride-to-be. Everybody’s doing it. The whole
world is getting married and having babies. In the greatest celebration
of life I’ve ever seen on my own block. We ache for life, hoping to
flood the world with innocent children, replacing the smell of death
with baby powder. ...
“We tried to share that dream with you, our children, but the smoke had cleared and you couldn’t smell it.”
“Boomers,” Black tells me, “felt an urgency to marry and make money”
and have it all — but many didn’t necessarily inherit their parents’
deep sense of commitment.
“To me,” Black says of the mother’s speech, “it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.”
***
Black’s
2010 Warner Theatre run has wrapped, and his crew is moving efficiently
to get on the road. Parked behind the venue is the physical hub of it
all: his tour bus, a gleaming Prevost.
Being on that bus, Albanese
says, “is really cool — the closest I’ll ever come to living like a
musician.” There’s Black’s big bedroom in the back, plus bunks when
needed for others, including tour manager Benjamin Brewer and driver
Frank Moreno, an ex-Army Ranger who once worked for the Grateful Dead.
“I think he loves that bus more than anything on the planet,” Madigan
says of Black, who is on the road about eight months of the year. “Those
guys ride along like an old family of misfit toys. ... It’s the happiest little moving place on Earth.”
“On
the ground, you see stuff — unlike flyovers — so you don’t feel so
disconnected,” Black tells me. “I’ve got a laptop, a big-screen TV.” (An
Emmy winner for his NFL rants on HBO, he’s a Redskins and Orioles fan.)
“I’ve got a refrigerator, have a wine at the end of the day. I’m
lucky.”
The wine has replaced that recreation of many a musician’s tour:
drugs. Black says that his generation has squandered the opportunity to
leave a great collective mark, that its best last hope is to legalize
marijuana. “The medicinal factors we are pissing away is epic!” he
rails. But Black says he no longer partakes: “I may smoke it once a
year, but it’s too much for me now.”
Black’s main drug on the road is golf: “It’s a vacation from my brain.”
“Once
we were playing in Florida, and Lew threw his 7 iron into an area
marked ‘Snake and Alligator,’ ” Madigan says. “Now, Lew is afraid of
squirrels, but he wanted to go in there to get it, he was so angry. I
said: ‘Lew, a trip to the emergency room is $500 minimum; your club is
$140. ... But if you’re willing to trade a prosthetic limb for a 7
iron.’ ”
It’s after midnight now, and Team Black is congregated
around a large table in a back room at Old Ebbitt’s Grill. Spirits and
esprit de corps flow. Jeannette and Sam are there, too; he smiles, she
chats. And never forgotten is Ron Black; when Jeannette mentions him,
his memory and spirit fill the room. This is Lewis Black’s family, the
hearth of his comic genius.
Lewis, juiced on post-show adrenaline and love, is enjoying himself.
In
the middle of the meal, a young Grill employee steps up to meet Mr.
Black. He and the missus are both fans, he says. “My wife and I got
married because of you!”
“Well,” Black replies, not missing a beat, “don’t blame
me!”
Then he swings toward me, index finger jabbing the air, and mock-bellows: “Well,
that’s your lead, you f---!”
I laugh. Because he’s right. Unless, of course, it’s the kicker.
Michael
Cavna writes the Post blog “Comic Riffs.” His last article for the
magazine was a profile of Richard Thompson, the “Cul de Sac” comic-strip
creator. To comment on this story, send e-mail to wpmagazine@washpost.com.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-09-20/lifestyle/35497813_1_lewis-black-civics-lesson-coat-and-tie
