Black Humor

PW: Besides the politically tinged comic rants that are your trademark on The Daily Show, your memoir Nothing's Sacred has some heartfelt tributes—to your parents, to a favorite professor, to your late brother, to the exhilaration of being a playwright. Are you a big softie under that angry, finger-jabbing shell?

Lewis Black: I don't think you get as angry as I do unless you have a soft spot. You get sick and tired when you turn on the news and see people just getting run over. You watch those poor kids in Iraq, and you listen to their parents, and you go, "This is beyond belief, that nobody hears them."

PW: You call the 1960s "a hell of a time to be alive." What lessons do the '60s hold?

LB: The '60s were great, but they were all about the triumph of style over content. In 1964, Life magazine had a pullout about a be-in in San Francisco, and everybody was dressed in tie-dye. I saw it as a kid and thought, "Wow, something's going on here." But I found out years later that it was put together by San Francisco fashion designers. It was an advertisement. So when the '60s began—they were already over.

PW: Where does style trump content these days?

LB: Fox Network News, Crossfire. A lot of pundit shows are trying to entertain rather than give any news. A pundit is somebody who helps you comprehend what's going on in the world, and nobody's really helping anymore. Which is why people pay a lot more attention to The Daily Show than they should, because we really are just a comedy show.

PW: In your book you describe several experiences with LSD, some lousy, some fantastic. Do the good trips make up for the bad?

LB: Yeah. But I wouldn't advise it. I'd have to be pretty stupid to do it again. When I was in school, chem majors were making up batches of this stuff in college laboratories, and they paid a lot more attention to quality control than the creators of Vioxx. It is a huge risk, but the good trips at least let me understand what the attachment was to the drug.

PW: Your book also has profanity and teen strippers. Will America's youth be corrupted by it?

LB: No. I'm telling you my story, I don't want you to make it your story. I did this, and let me point out, yet again, this is insane. Inquisitive kids start looking around for stuff that is freaky to them. I went through that period, and I was not corrupted by it. The drug use in the book wasn't meant to upset people, but to show how my point of view, in part, was created. And I am very tired of adults [now] that I grew up with acting as if it never happened.

PW: You defend federal antipoverty programs, but you also rant about stultifying jobs you've had in the post office and the federal bureaucracy. Government—good or bad?

LB: The thing that's always lost when they're talking about government is that government is just people being employed to do stuff. While we're farming our jobs out to India and China, what are the other jobs that people are supposed to have? Government is certainly one of them. People miss the fact that, when they're paying a tax, they're helping their neighbor do something that allows them to go to work every day—and that may, in the end, help.

PW: Besides the politically tinged comic rants that are your trademark on The Daily Show, your memoir Nothing's Sacred (reviewed above) has some heartfelt tributes—to your parents, to a favorite professor, to your late brother, to the exhilaration of being a playwright. Are you a big softie under that angry, finger-jabbing shell?

Lewis Black: I don't think you get as angry as I do unless you have a soft spot. You get sick and tired when you turn on the news and see people just getting run over. You watch those poor kids in Iraq, and you listen to their parents, and you go, "This is beyond belief, that nobody hears them."

PW: You call the 1960s "a hell of a time to be alive." What lessons do the '60s hold?

LB: The '60s were great, but they were all about the triumph of style over content. In 1964, Life magazine had a pullout about a be-in in San Francisco, and everybody was dressed in tie-dye. I saw it as a kid and thought, "Wow, something's going on here." But I found out years later that it was put together by San Francisco fashion designers. It was an advertisement. So when the '60s began—they were already over.

PW: Where does style trump content these days?

LB: Fox Network News, Crossfire. A lot of pundit shows are trying to entertain rather than give any news. A pundit is somebody who helps you comprehend what's going on in the world, and nobody's really helping anymore. Which is why people pay a lot more attention to The Daily Show than they should, because we really are just a comedy show.

PW: In your book you describe several experiences with LSD, some lousy, some fantastic. Do the good trips make up for the bad?

LB: Yeah. But I wouldn't advise it. I'd have to be pretty stupid to do it again. When I was in school, chem majors were making up batches of this stuff in college laboratories, and they paid a lot more attention to quality control than the creators of Vioxx. It is a huge risk, but the good trips at least let me understand what the attachment was to the drug.

PW: Your book also has profanity and teen strippers. Will America's youth be corrupted by it?

LB: No. I'm telling you my story, I don't want you to make it your story. I did this, and let me point out, yet again, this is insane. Inquisitive kids start looking around for stuff that is freaky to them. I went through that period, and I was not corrupted by it. The drug use in the book wasn't meant to upset people, but to show how my point of view, in part, was created. And I am very tired of adults [now] that I grew up with acting as if it never happened.

PW: You defend federal antipoverty programs, but you also rant about stultifying jobs you've had in the post office and the federal bureaucracy. Government—good or bad?

LB: The thing that's always lost when they're talking about government is that government is just people being employed to do stuff. While we're farming our jobs out to India and China, what are the other jobs that people are supposed to have? Government is certainly one of them. People miss the fact that, when they're paying a tax, they're helping their neighbor do something that allows them to go to work every day—and that may, in the end, help.