Lewis Black

Lewis Black
Grammy Award-winning slapstick comedian Lewis Niles Black - an author, playwright, and actor was born on August 30, 1948. He is recognized for his regular appearances on Comedy Central's The Daily Show in the Back in Black commentary segment, in which he mocks on recent trends and cultural leaning. Currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Black was born in Washington, D.C., to a middle-class Jewish family.

Raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, he graduated from Springbrook High School in 1966. He was exposed to playwriting as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was also a brother of Pi Lambda Phi International fraternity. He earned a Masters in Fine Arts at the Yale School of Drama in 1977.

Initially, his career was in the theater as a dramatist. He served as the dramatist in residence and associate artistic director of Steve Olsen's West Bank Cafe Downstairs Theatre Bar in Hell's Kitchen in New York City, where he worked with musician and rhymester Rusty Magee on hundreds of one-act plays and also wrote the musical The Czar Of Rock and Roll, which premiered at Houston's Alley Theater in 1990. Black's stand-up comedy started off as an opening act for the plays as he was also the master of ceremonies. After a management change at the theater, Black left and began working as a comedian as well as finding work in television and films.

Lewis Blacks style of comedy is incorporated with a sense of wisdom, mocking at day-to-day activities and prevailing political issues also possessing elements with of Sarcasm, profanity, with all the hullabaloo, and trademark angry finger-shaking showing stress on the matter. He describes his wittiness as being on the Titanic every single day and being the only person who knows what is going to happen.

Having a socialist perception himself, seemingly, the major factor covering Black's political mockery is kiss-and-tell both the funny side and misfortune of staunch conservatism, also skepticism about the perplexing combination of haughtiness and pompous attitude of authority figures and elites. Black has a cynical approach towards the Democrats as Republicans.

As a political comedian, Lewis Black is also not without negative response and criticism. Nevertheless, his rage-like humor style often neutralizes potentially difficult situations. In Konocti, California, when a drunken heckler shouted, Three thousand dead children! in the middle of a Dick Cheney rant, he spent ten minutes yelling angrily at her until she left. He said, That's definitely on my list of top 10 weirdest heckles.

In 1998, he featured in his first comedy special on the series Comedy Central Presents and also in two additional episodes of the series in 2000 and 2002. He starred in another special for the network in 2002 named Taxed Beyond Belief.

In 2000, Black and fellow comedian Jim Norton were arrested because of their involvement with The Naked Teen Voyeur Bus, a specially designed bus with acrylic glass walls that contained numerous (18 and 19 year old) teen girls. This bus was to take a round of Manhattan while being broadcast on the famous Opie and Anthony radio show. Unfortunately, management at the radio station failed to inform the O&A show that the route the bus was planning to take on was also the route that the President was taking that same day. Twenty-eight hours after the arrest, Black and Norton were released. Black appeared at a fundraising event for New York Attorney General candidate Mark Green on June 28, 2006, Black talked about how he was unable to make a previous fundraising event for Green because the arrest occurred on the very night of the event.

Since 2003, Black has hosted the World Stupidity Awards ceremony at Montreal's Just for Laughs comedy festival for the three years the awards have been presented.

In 2004, he had an HBO stand-up special titled Black on Broadway. That same year Black appeared in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as a shock jock. He also released his autobiography, Nothing's Sacred, in 2005 and apparently, since November 9, 2005, Black has been making appearances in small segments on The Weather Channel.

Also in December 2005, he appeared in an animated holiday special The Happy Elf, doing the background voice for an extremely tightly wound elf, Norbert.

On April 21, 2006 Lewis performed at the Warner Theatre in Washington, DC for an HBO special, Red, White, and Screwed. It aired on June 10, 2006, and a DVD was released October 3, 2006.

He also appeared in the film Accepted as the Dean Ben Lewis of the school South Harmon Institute of Technology or S.H.I.T.

He also appears in the 2006 films Man of the Year and Unaccompanied Minors. Black hosted Comedy Central's Last Laugh '06.

Lewis received a Grammy award for Best Comedy Album for his album The Carnegie Hall Performance in 2007,