I recently had the opportunity to see a live performance by one of my favorite stand-up comedians, Lewis Black. If you haven’t seen Mr. Black’s work before, he’s a brilliant comedy veteran; he’s had a long and successful career showcasing a unique style of dark observational humor and sarcasm that seethes and bursts with rage in the most endearing way possible. I’ve always been a fan, and I’m still a fan. At 80 years old, he’s still got the wit and timing to deliver a rant like no other old man with a grudge against the world. In fact, his angry voice is so famous he actually voices the character “Anger” in the Disney-Pixar movie Inside Out.

When I learned Mr. Black was coming to my neighborhood, I jumped at the chance to buy tickets to his show. My experience at the show prompted the following little “rant” of my own. (I’m not as funny as Mr. Black, though. Sorry!)

Typically, when I write about political content in the media, I’m talking about that which is produced by mainstream news outlets. But to paint a more holistic picture we have to remind ourselves that anger, paranoia and self-importance are proliferative (just look around Facebook and X), and people will use whatever platforms they have to share their passions and pain. The bigger the platform, the more demonstrative the player. The more demonstrative the player, the more fans and wealth and significance they accumulate. They take sides, exude passion and give the people what they want. They embellish to make a point. They deliver the ammunition to quash counterpoints and those who espouse them. A source is a good one as long as it supports the narrative. Each time the media machine serves up the hot, fresh narrative of the day, these entertainers and influencers put their own unique spin on the recipe and dish it out to you, their fans, just the way you like it. Cognitive reinforcement, cooked-to-order, and recipes ready to try at home.

Comedians being no exception, and the majority of all entertainers being liberal (or canceled), when a comedian performs, I am prepared to hear Trump jokes, MAGA jokes and insults at the expense of those identity groups considered fair game to the left. Mr. Black did not disappoint (nor did his opening act, who sadly had no redeeming talent to compensate for her bias…) And he was pretty funny. Like I said, he’s a talented guy. But there were several glaring issues with the show and reactions for which he either fully intended or didn’t prepare.

It should be noted that I bought tickets to the “Lewis Black – Goodbye Yeller Brick Road” stand-up comedy show. I didn’t buy tickets to a “Roast of the Republican Party and all Conservative Americans”. While prior to the event I had mentally prepared myself for a set of political jokes at the expense of my elected representatives, Fox News journalists, and divisiveness in general, what I was expecting was a set or smattering of jokes. In my personal opinion, unless you bill yourself a political comedian, you shouldn’t spend more than 25% of your stage time “joking” about politics. Advertise honestly. I gritted my teeth and buckled up at the start of the show when he warned us the MAGA people might get upset. Then he talked about his audience from the night before in another Florida town who didn’t care for his political jokes. He, of course, blamed it on the backwoods redneck town in which he performed that night. They didn’t even know when to laugh… (and he knew which jokes they should’ve found funny, because he knew which jokes left his typical audience in stitches).

That’s why I ponder whether he was truly unprepared for audience members turning on him or he fully embraced the provocation. Perhaps he believes his last tour will leave a positive impact on the country, and anyway, the people who voted for Trump deserved to feel uncomfortable.

What makes it worse is that much of the material was shrouded in contempt for Trump voters, like me, who composed a small but significant portion of the audience. Of course, hopefully we’re the ones with a sense of humor. When Black quipped at the start of the show that Trump voters are way too protective and would probably be offended by what’s to come, we laughed. I agree. Trump voters are overly sensitive to the TDS-inspired jokes, even if they’re funny. People tend to put him on a pedestal and defend him at all costs. And NO U.S. President is beyond reproach and/or needs us to defend his honor… least of all Donald Trump! But we were there and paid for our tickets too. And we didn’t feel like mentally defending our choices, hearing one half of the debate on the stage while we were forced to sit quietly and take our medicine. If it’s funny, it’s funny. But Black’s gig did become less funny and more cringey after a while when it was clear it would be one-sided and contemptuous, and the contempt was aimed not at the politicians, but his fellow citizens sitting right there in front of him. I made it a point to grab a little something with alcohol at halftime- err, intermission.

There’s an enormous divide between the New York and LA entertainment community and the everyday Joe. You think there’s a divide been Massachusetts Democrats and Alabama Republicans? This is that on steroids. Lewis thinks that when he stands up and says the country can be divided into “people who see reality and people who don’t”, that every sane person in the audience agrees the leftist perspective is “reality”. He joked that some people would look at the thing behind him and see a curtain while others see the bottom of a giant woman’s dress. Obviously, he thought he didn’t have to explain the implication that the conservatives are the folks seeing a dress (which is ironic…). And, of course, the audience knew what he was implying because we understood the direction the vitriol was going to fly. But his humor contains an underlying sense of doom. All we can do is laugh, so we don’t cry – because these crazy people are going to be the end of us. We are all screwed. Not enough people are voting; that’s the problem. It can’t be that these “people” who voted for Trump speak for most Americans, because they aren’t even smart enough to understand the world for what it is. What scares me is I think some of these entertainers are getting to Third Reich levels of feeling half their fellow countrymen are subhuman. When these are the kind of people “entertaining” us, they are absolutely widening the divide. It’s social propaganda.

Please don’t take this to mean I think Lewis Black is colluding to promote a White Christian Holocaust. He’s not evil, just oblivious. He, like all the others, thinks there are good guys and bad guys, ideologically speaking, and he’s on the side of the righteous. Hitler’s lackeys thought that too. He doesn’t see that (a) he’s wrong about this (because ideology is not morality, and morality is not objective, and the oligarchical American media is not an impartial source of good and bad); and (b) he’s actually spreading the mis/disinformation he so vehemently despises, on behalf of mother government. I’m not saying he’s wrong about all his complaints. Although he’s unequivocally misinformed on many fronts, he’s right to question things that anger him; after all the Republican party lies too. And he has the right to think the way his friends, family, neighbors and colleagues do, and of course he doesn’t understand people with whom he’s had no interaction – aside from seeing them applaud from 50 yards away. He has the right to think that none of those people know what’s good for them. But he’s been weaponized like The Manchurian Candidate, destroying the credibility of the weak to protect the powerful. Breaking the will of the people through shame and coercion. He has no idea. He’s just a comedian.

I should say it again; this is not about Lewis Black. This is about the comedy industry. I’m just using Mr. Black as an example and I’m actually feeling a little guilty about it, because it’s not just him and he is certainly not the worst of them.

Comedians need to keep on top of things to keep their acts fresh. This means research! I laughed out loud at Mr. Black’s joke about research, but not for the reason he intended. He said something along the lines of, ‘These people I’m talking about did research, but don’t expect to see anything like this anymore! <wink, wink>’ He went on to say that [because of Trump] you can say anything, and it’s true just because you said so.

“It’s not “disinformation”, it’s lying.” I’ll buy that, Mr. Black. But to which disinformation are you referring? One man’s research is another man’s disinformation. I would imagine Mr. Black might be receptive to believing both (a) evolutionary research refutes creationism, and (b) a woman can be born in a man’s body if you believe in that kind of thing. A right-wing “liar” might believe that (a) biology refutes the “gender spectrum”, and (b) God exists if you believe in that kind of thing.

Inevitably, after ~30 minutes of political ranting some of the audience became restless and frustrated. Some walked out. It was during a particularly lengthy build up to a joke about Ukraine and Russia that a man in the audience finally stood up and yelled out in an exasperated voice, “We came here to laugh!” A little banter took place, Black scolded the man and repeated his warning some people couldn’t handle his act.

Some of Black’s “non-political” observational humor was about Christians and gun owners. The best material he gets, says Black, is from Tennessee. Indeed, he had a great headline from Tennessee about a guy who shot his wife during a gun safety seminar. That’s good stuff! But he would have us believe the stupidity of the Red South knows no bounds, and the rest of the country is just smarter – ergo, not much material. I was thinking, as he made that comment, that he might widen the scope of news sources he uses in his research and find that’s not true. Just a few days earlier a member of an Oregon mental health advisory board identified turtleself as a turtle and declared turtle a pronoun. That’s a least a little funny, isn’t it? (Or does that make me turtle-phobic?) I mean, isn’t that kind of like seeing a dress instead of a curtain? Isn’t declaring the word turtle a pronoun pretty much saying something is true just because you say so? Aren’t these the things, Mr. Black, that you insist only MAGA people do?

The interesting thing about comedians’ “set ups” is that they are based on some tangible event or phenomenon in a true context. Jerry Seinfeld, the king of observational humor, springboarded off the simplest everyday occurrences and truisms, because we could all relate to every premise. “Don’t you just hate it when…?”; “Why do they call it…?” I doubt many people walked away from a Seinfeld show scratching their head and thinking, “Where did he hear that?” or “Did he just make that up?” We knew it to be true, and we related.

You can’t use a 2025 “news” headline as a springboard, even if you’re 80 years old and you remember when CNN used to be credible. (Although some of the more outlandish headlines could actually be used as punchlines.) Here’s an example. Black contended, in a “set up” to a joke, that DOGE erroneously fired all of the staff at the National Nuclear Security Administration guarding our nuclear weapons. As I mentioned earlier, he stressed several times during his show that unlike the right, he does his own research, and here we can see that by golly, CNN told him so. I would like to think some people in the audience that night realized that our nuclear arsenal was not left entirely unguarded by Elon Musk. Had his researchers read the whole article, as of today (often they correct their “errors” after the fact), CNN hilariously left in their estimate of 300 people fired “according to four people familiar with the matter” in the first paragraph of this article, but a few paragraphs down, added that the actual energy department spokesperson corrected the rumor: 50 people were dismissed, all of whom “held primarily administrative and clerical roles.”

More concisely, DOGE got rid of 50 secretarial jobs across the country, and CNN convinced its readers, including Mr. Black, that our country’s nuclear weapons stockpile is sitting unguarded in a desert somewhere because Trump and Musk are dumb, and we’re all going to die.

That was the setup heading into this joke. Not the punchline. The setup. The part we’re all supposed to accept as “truth”.

Lewis Black had a brilliant career. He talked about stuff that made people angry or annoyed, to which many/most of us could relate; he showed us caricature of our irritation. His tirades made us feel better because we could relate to each other that way. We could give each other a knowing look as if to say, “yeah, I get it too!” And maybe the next time we got caught in traffic we recalled that tirade and it brought a smile to our faces. His rants actually connected us and were at no one’s expense – except maybe that fictitious policeman, or generic schoolteacher. If it was anger at a politician, it was at something a politician said or did, it wasn’t contemptuous or directed at a specific group of people. At one time, we could go to a comedy show and laugh together at ease. We didn’t try and guess who the show was really meant for. The only chance you took when you bought the ticket is the comedian might not be funny. You just don’t see that in comedy anymore. It’s almost as if we don’t know how to feel connected if someone else is not distanced. We don’t know how to feel healed if someone else is not hurt.

Laughter even sounds different when couched in anger and disgust. It is strained – almost forced – it’s louder and it lasts longer, but not because the impetus was so funny we can’t control ourselves. If you really think about it (pay attention next time) when your friend makes a joke about “the orange menace”, do you really feel like you want or need to laugh? Do you feel it in your belly like when you’re watching your favorite sitcom? Or are you consciously starting the laugh and matching the tone and longevity of those laughing around you? When you type “LOL” in response to a provocative meme, are you really laughing to yourself? Are you even smiling? Or… are you considering only how it makes others feel? Maybe an ally gives a nod to your virtual laughter while an opponent feels the intended sting. Maybe that’s what’s important.

We laugh loud and long to send a message to the people who aren’t laughing. Laughter is a weapon, and comedy – once an escape – is now just an expansion of the battlefield.