Lewis Black wants everyone to know that he is angry.
He's angry at the incompetence of leadership, angry at the cold, angry at candy corn, angry at corporate greed, but mainly angry at the stupidity of society. Last night at Spaulding Auditorium, he brought this anger to Dartmouth for the first time, accentuated by too-numerous-to-count expletives.
Black, who has gained national fame through his "Back in Black" segment on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," certainly delighted the audience with his everyman act. Unfortunately, while a five minute segment of complaining on television is bearable, 100 minutes of Black's shtick can get repetitive and even annoying.
His delivery and style rarely changed. Black began a joke with a low explanation of what he terms a "sh--y" situation, then built to the punchline where Black cringed as if facing a difficult bowel movement and stammered and screamed about the stupidity of said situation.
He also conveyed his anger and utter confusion with aforementioned stupidity with a headshake that produced a Porky-Pig type stutter. Add in variations on a certain four letter word beginning with "f" and rhyming with the name of our business school, and there's Black's act.
His comments on the world were, by and large, not particularly inventive either. It is only the manner in which they were delivered. For instance, there is little new to be said about Homeland Security's color coding system that hasn't been said already by someone as generic as Jay Leno.
That's not to say that the entire show was generic -- there certainly were some hilarious moments -- but on the whole if you strip away Black's leather jacket and use of the four-lettered word, there's really not much there.
Black also mixed gross-out humor into the scathing social commentary that lets no one off the hook. He followed a genuine complaint (say, Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco's greed) with a gross-out punchline (Kozlowski's $6,000 foreskin shower curtain). The gross-out humor, however sophomoric, had a better effect than Black's philosophizing.
However, there were several hilarious routines and moments.
Having toured college campuses for the past few years, Black had his fair share of college and Dartmouth-themed jokes. He frequently alluded to his Buddy Holly flight from New York to Lebanon.
"When people get this far away from sh-- they are doing something evil," he said about Dartmouth, questioning how the college could be in the Ivy league if the students were stupid enough to come here.
He went on, explaining how the Bush administration came up with a post-war Iraq plan, to make light of his college habits. This consisted of "waiting until a few hours before a paper is due, locking yourself in a room, reading some sh--, writing some sh-- and footnoting." This was a hilarious characterization of the plan, and an equally apt one of college.
His finest moment was his rant about bottled water, basic material for comics. As he was reading the back of the Evian bottle provided on stage, he said, "Imagine a finger going up your ass," as he then concluded the joke by asserting that Evian's source is really two guys in Nashua bathtub.
Low points of the act included his ravings about the failure of the government regarding the smallpox vaccine and his philosophies on greed.
His greed and conspicuous consumption bashing, when not talking about Martha Stewart's vagina, received claps of agreement from the audience, as if he were a preacher and not a comedian. He really wants everyone to shout "Amen" to his philosophies and view of the world.
One of these, however, did come across as novel and clever. The face of the enemy, Black believes, is one without a sense of humor.
"The price you pay for living in tents? No knock knock jokes," Black said.
Sadly though, Black should have taken more of his own advice and presented less lecturing and more jokes.
