Lewis Black: In God We Rust

If you don't know who Lewis Black is or have seen his stand-up before, then I must give you a few words of warning: DON'T let your young children or mother watch his routine. Now this is NOT because he's not funny--he's hilarious. But, he's also incredibly abrasive and scatters obscenities throughout his act. Now I don't usually care for all the cursing but he manages to use this when talking about things that really do drive us up a wall!

In this installment, he talks about politicians and how they don't know how to deal with terrorists, how stupid and useless cellphones are, meeting Ringo Starr and MANY other things that make his mad...and boy, is he mad! Fortunately, he does warn you when the show begins--he WILL offend you and his language will appall you. But he's also funny. Not as funny as his next comedy special, "Lewis Black: Old Yeller--Live at the Borgata".

This was the first time I had ever seen a Lewis Black routine, and I was riotously surprised. So this review assumes you are like I was: totally clueless about what to expect, other than a vague notion that Lewis Black is that "angry guy".

If you're worried about what politics to expect, put your fears to rest. Lewis skewers all political persuasions equally. So unless you actually believe either party has our best interest at heart, we're fine here.

Lewis takes us through a madman's views on airport security, small towns, getting old, greedy healthcare industries, a terrorist with a bomb strapped to his d---, audience walk outs, and "ABORTION"... followed by a painful pause and then "yeah there's a word guaranteed to bring the crowd to an awkward silence."

Now let's talk about the rage. Again I was initially worried about someone who would spend 90 mins ranting about irritating social issues, but here's where the comedy comes in. Lewis Black's style is, as best as I can put it, bipolar madness. His schtick is to draw us in with an intelligent, controlled, almost grandfatherly setup, then suddenly flip into Freddy Krueger mode. Or for those of you who remember the late, great Sam Kinnison with his spontaneous "AAAAH!!! AAAAAH!", it's something like that, except Lewis Black's resting state is more on the polite side which makes his flipouts even funnier.

I would recommend this to Lewis Black noobs because he spends the first 5-10 minutes explaining his comedy style (or as he puts it, it may be comedy to us, but to him he has to live with it 24 HOURS A F-KIN DAY!) so immediately we are inaugurated into the insane voyeuristic show that is Lewis Black. It's downright cathartic, if not a healthy dose of schadenfreude ("pleasure derived by from another person's misfortune"). And if you take this as my title implies, watching someone who is angrier than you are, you'll have a good time.

I recently watch another Lewis Black show and was quite taken by how it was not what I had expected. Yes he was still the angry personae that I know from bits here and there, but his material was good and he was consistent in his tone and pacing. At the start of In God We Rust, Lewis does a bit where he braces his audience for the show to come, stressing in particular that people should not assume they know what type of comedian he is and not take a bit they saw on Comedy Central as any indication of his style. This segment went on longer than necessary and was not as good as when I have seen Stewart Lee do similar material, but it did seem to confirm what I knew already from the previous show. Except it didn't.

After this, Black plays much more on his angry style than the previous show. This is not a problem in principle for me since I enjoy his targeted and sharp rants on The Daily Show. Problem here is that he doesn't totally seem to have the material. He covers anger at airports, anger at modern mobile phones, stupid politicians (Bachmann and Palin of course), anger at Farmville, and so on. He is playing to a big crowd so perhaps this is why he only once or twice seems to challenge them – and even then he doesn't really present a case so much as push buttons. It is a shame because he can be really strong when building a sort of righteous anger routine which a focus and structure, but here he never really gets to that.

The broad material does still work and I had a handful of decent laughs, but if I am honest it was a bit disappointing in the subject selection and the approach taken.

Lewis Black is subdued and perhaps ill in this video. He looks thinner than normal.It doesn't have the energy of most of his concerts. There are cutout edits in the film that don't appear to be necessary. Guerilla comedy avant-garde editing? C'mon.

Still, there were some very funny bits and if you love Lewis Black like I do, it's worth a little over an hour to get 5 good minutes of Mr. Black. The routine was filmed in 2012, so some of the comedy is dated. Still, the observations are witty and I laughed out loud over a few of the pearls.

You've been warned.