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A few years before comedian Lewis Black hit it big on “The Daily Show,” he auditioned for a TV pilot in which he was to play a cantankerous high school teacher and Joy Behar was to play the principal.
Black says the show was essentially based on his act.
“They based it on stand-up written by me,” he says.
And yet … he didn’t get the part.
“They said my TVQ wasn’t high enough,” Black says.
TVQ is a television trade term for how instantly recognizable a celebrity is.
Black’s TVQ is considerably higher these days.
He’ll perform Sunday at Embassy Theatre.
Relatively late in life, Black, 61, has become one of those rare megastar comedians whose celebrity is on par with that of a pop singer. He accomplished this by doing what Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks did before him: making anger funny.
Comedy was not Black’s career of first choice. Black started off as a playwright.
Asked what sort of career he envisioned for himself back then, Black says “probably a career where I would have made the same kind of money a crack whore makes.
“I thought I’d end up teaching,” he says. “My idea was that I wanted to teach at a small southern girls’ school where they’d never met a Jewish man.”
Black co-created a cabaret in New York City called the West End Cafe where he was playwright in residence. His work was seen in proximity with that of Alan Ball (“Six Feet Under” and “True Blood”) and Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”).
Black also emceed the shows and eventually a stand-up act grew out of that.
At first, Black’s stage persona was somewhat understated.
Then a fellow comic named Dan Ballard took him aside after a performance.
“He said, ‘I’m angry, and I’m yelling onstage. You’re really angry and you’re not,’ ” Black recalls.
So Black pumped up the volume.
What a lot of people probably don’t understand about Lewis’ anger onstage is that it’s mostly an act.
That’s not to say he isn’t genuinely angry about many of the topics he discusses. But by the time he takes it to the stage, the rage has been leavened with shtick.
Black says actual displays of anger don’t work as entertainment.
“I get angry sometimes, and it crosses some sort of line,” he says. “I can’t be angry. I gotta act it. That’s why I don’t drink before I go on.”
During his formative comedic years, he used to cross all sorts of lines he says he shouldn’t have.
“Early on, it was one after the other,” he says. “It was as pathetic as smashing my head against the wall.”
Like Will Rogers, one of his progenitors in the topical comedy game, Lewis gets a lot of his jokes by reading newspapers. He says it usually takes three or four days of mulling a story before he figures out what he wants to say about it.
“The Tiger Woods thing took me three days,” he says. “I had the revelation that he should tell people he had an adverse reaction to Ambien. I mean, when it’s 2:30 in the morning and you’re looking for an excuse, that’s your excuse. And then he can make a few bucks from a lawsuit.”
After President Obama was elected, a lot of TV critics wondered whether “The Daily Show” and its left-leaning comics would be able to find things to joke about. Black says it hasn’t been a problem because “stupidity didn’t flee the country.”
“It’s like a constant,” he says. “It’s part of our genetic structure. To watch a full-grown man, House Republican Leader John Boehner, hold up the health bill and say, ‘It’s 2,000 pages long. What am I supposed to do?’ You’re supposed to read it. That’s your job. It would have been shorter if you’d actually worked on it, so shut up.”
The fact that some people see Sarah Palin as an alternative to recent political orders is “beyond my comprehension,” Black says.
“I understand feeling ineffectual,” he says. “I understand wanting to soothe your pain. Take Vicodin; you’ll be better off.”
Given his varied artistic background, Lewis is clearly capable of quite a bit more than stand-up. And he delves into other things here and there.
But he is too grateful for his success to worry too much about being pigeonholed.
“I’d still like to do some sort of a (sitcom), and I would like to do more films, and I’d like to get some plays done and we’re close to getting one of them produced,” Black says. “I’ve been working on it for five years, and it may finally see the light of day. But if nothing comes of it, I’m still getting away with murder. I’m very lucky.”
The only downside to this largess is that he has been too busy to think much about having a family of his own.
“I travel too much,” he says. “I don’t know how people do it. Probably during Christmas Day, I’ll weep for a while and then get over it.”
