Keep laughing, or else: A Lewis Black concert-goer’s diary

Only by attending a Lewis Black concert can you grasp the incisively infuriated comedian’s all-encompassing outreach. And only by these means can you absorb the deepest insights from what he has to say.

As with sporting events, even a full-length viewing from one’s residence is no substitute. I know this having gone to Black’s show this past Friday at the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC) in North Carolina. It was my first high-profile concert or performing-arts event of any kind, and the experience yielded exquisite enlightenment.

Going in, the sights and sounds confirmed the scope of diversity the way only in-person mingling can. Some fellow ticketholders filing into the 2,700-seat auditorium looked young enough to be high-school seniors. Another not-so-negligible (frankly much larger) percentage was AARP-eligible.

One attendee in the lower bowl of the balcony sported a buzz cut, a Pennywise sweatshirt and jeans. Another brandished a beard, glasses, a turtleneck, jacket and trousers. By the looks of it, everyone from the baby-faced student to the seasoned professor had an interest in this show.

Still others from a middle age group showed up in dress shirts. Casual Friday held but sparse sway on this crowd in a college-heavy community.

As people sought their seats, I overheard conversations in more than one language. And everyone was presumably prepared to hear Black’s favorite second dialect: Blue English.

There were, of course, an array of viewpoints filling these chairs as well. Black was apt to acknowledge as much, as he has been through two decades as a household name.

Naturally, there are those whose perspectives present him as biased for one party or another. Such is the life of a political humorist, just as it is for a political reporter or commentator.

Although, it is one thing to don the latter-day Gyges ring and critique him on a comment thread. It is another to leave one’s confines and shell out no fewer than $40 for a live hour-plus serving.

The difference is not unlike what Black cited when faulting TV viewers who keep Dancing with the Stars alive. Parents who do so, he said at DPAC, squander their right to criticize their children’s gaming binges. If nothing else, he noted, the kids are involving themselves with the contents of their screen.

Contrary to any controversy one may raise, Black is what most level-headed observers dub an equal-opportunity offender. But even that label is a tad off the mark. He is more of an equal-opportunity assessor. His assessments simply come with unfiltered candor and creative visuals.

This past Friday, he epitomized this characteristic when highlighting the common threads among partisan cable-news consumers. He likened turning on one’s go-to network in the morning to igniting one’s hair on the stove.

That exaggeration was closer to the mark than any assertion that Black seeks to offend. He merely shares a common collective sense of concern.

The more laughter he draws by expressing that concern, the more hope we have. Even if we are contributing to a given problem, we are not oblivious if we pass his demanding laugh-at-ourselves test.

A year and change after the latest national election, the campaign’s odor inevitably lingers. It was therefore fitting that Black revisited it. He was apt to remind us that 60 percent of the electorate expressly did not care for either major nominee. Yet that collective majority combined with the two parties’ powers-that-be to anoint those candidates anyway.

He elaborated by likening one candidate to “the woman who’s been in your carpool the last 20 years.” To illustrate the foolishness of touting the other nominee’s business record, he cited the failures of three casinos. “Bankrupting one casino,” he shouted, “is a feat!”

Either way, the material for the political portions of his 2017 concerts was bound to come from streams of Potomac rapid-level chaos. It was little wonder he kept insisting he needs to put in for a research team. While prior shows, albums and specials confirm he has been here before, the mill of absurdity never gets less maddening.

Likewise, his admonitions that he is supposedly losing his purpose are getting more repeat. Whenever his reading of a dual headline-punchline didn’t evoke immediate guffaws Friday, he warned against losing one’s sense of humor.

It is safe to trust Black is not serious about quitting. (Leave it to a regal comedian to joke about abandoning jokes as an occupation.) But he is rightly concerned about widespread numb funny bones. Those must thaw if we are to cope with what troubles us in a healthful manner.

Strangely, Black never broke out his trusty “I will repeat that” tactic on this night. Doing so might have helped to stoke the inured ludicrousness detectors in the audience.

A minor omission, to be sure, but he did bring topics that would have called for it. Not the least of those was the report that Americans aggregated more than $700 million in spending on Valentine’s Day presents for their pets.

For that bit, he demonstrated the exclusive beauty of the spoken word. Unlike my vocational variety of communication, his has a luxurious selection of deliveries to drive a given sentence.

Black has always made deft use of those options to fill an ostensibly mundane statement with wholesome amusement. He did it again at DPAC when he calmly, but firmly, reminded everyone, “Your pet doesn’t have a calendar.”

Given the spending figures, some live viewers should have heard that and, however unwittingly, laughed at themselves. And incidentally, the local calendar had some fodder that missed the cut for more assisted self-deprecation.

Black performed at DPAC on the eve of the Raleigh Christmas Parade, which unabashedly took place five days before Thanksgiving. You know, the occasion that he has variously lamented as being reduced to “a comma” or “Christmas halftime.”

The day before he came, the Raleigh News & Observer even had a story to potentially set him up. As reporter Brooke Cain had written Thursday, the parade’s strategic scheduling oddity is “all about shopping. Shocking, right? The Greater Raleigh Merchants Association has always put on the parade, and what do merchants want? They want you to shop.”

That is plainer than dawn on Black Friday. Yet the locals have clearly gone along with it.

Between that and his assessment of the active administration, Black could have reprised his President Santa Claus proposal. Almost precisely 10 years ago, he presented that suggestion on his Anticipation album. At the time, he suggested making Santa a formal aspect of the office since the economy depended on the character.

His reaction to the reaction back then: “And for those of you who didn’t applaud, how bitter are you?”

If nothing else, he found one way to recycle that query this year. He devoted what he considered his obligatory early nugget of good news to the subject of his mother turning 99.

Once again, he deftly gauged a percentage of vocal enthusiasm below 100. Only this time, he asked the silent sector, “What kind of a bitter p***k are you?” It was just the right added pinch of intensity to keep one of his time-honored phrasings fresh.

That speaks to Black’s competence as his own marketing strategies staff. He maintains mugs that we never tire of drinking from, and that fit any fashionable flavor of the time.

In the previous decade, same-sex marriage was his choice of an over-debated issue whose importance ranked behind “Are we eating too much garlic as a people?” On this night, he tacked the same question onto a speech about anthem-kneeling in the NFL.

That particular rant was more improvised; the spawn of a selected fan question/submission for an end-of-show livestream. Black characteristically repressed reservations about appearing partisan to confront the rhetorical inquisitor with determined dissent.

Whether that swayed, or at least propitiated, the submitter is only for that submitter to determine. But this author knows he got his own critical-thinking takeaway from one of Black’s prepared addresses.

Not surprisingly, Black took glee in the findings of a University of Rochester study linking intelligence with cursing. He singled out highlights of the study and articulated his interpretation to an effect only those like him can achieve.

In writing, in particular, I have tended to look down on profanity as a destructive, lowbrow tactic. It tends to correlate with other slang, as well as excessive capitalization and punctuation. Those are the loud, lazy strategies that define comment threads in ways that bode poorly for society.

Even through my years of appreciatively watching and listening to Black’s DVDs and CDs, I have sustained this view. And don’t get me wrong, I still believe profundity is preferable to profanity in most settings and contexts.

But at DPAC, I literally looked down on Black from the balcony and absorbed his refreshed defense of off-color speech. With the backing of the Rochester researchers, he explained how its use can signal a fascination with English.

Now that he has mentioned it, why can’t that make sense? Plenty of people keep their mouths clean while still squandering their civility. One can omit one’s intelligence without using NSFW material.

Surely the inverse can occur. How could I have been so oblivious and swift to generalize?

There was no better messenger for this nugget. The way Black walks the walk validates the notion of a place, however limited, for sophisticated swearing.

Unlike nameless, faceless and frankly gutless trolls, Black thinks his rants through. He throws in the verbal grenades and often laces them with original twists to underscore a situation’s head-spinning nature.

Not that anyone should expect to see print equivalents phase into mainstream editorial boards. But perhaps more compromises can come about in the form of fresh minced oaths. This way, no linguistics lessons go to waste and readers can watch a commentary wink in a you-know-what-I-really-want-to-say fashion.

Even if I pen commentaries for a publication where Black’s vocabulary is game, it will not be my style. But barring restrictions (like those here), I will look critically for a meaningful point behind someone’s speech. It will help doubly when there is a visible person putting that point forward.

And as long as the point is fair, I might even laugh at its expression. At least that is one thing we do the same, with no lingual, generational, ideological or social inhibitions.

Kind of like converging on a theater for a Lewis Black concert.