Lewis Black

Lewis Black, born Lewis Niles Black on August 30, 1948, in Washington, D.C., is an American stand-up comedian, actor, and book writer whose Broadway work spans from 2012 to 2018. He was raised in the Burnt Mills neighborhood of Silver Spring, Maryland, in a middle-class Jewish family. His mother, Jeannette Black, was a teacher, and his father, Samuel Black, was an artist and mechanical engineer. His paternal grandfather emigrated from Chornyi Ostriv in Ukraine and was originally named Leib Blech before changing his name to Louis Black. Black's maternal grandparents emigrated from Białystok in Poland. He had a younger brother, Ronald, who died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 47.

Black graduated from Springbrook High School in 1966 and subsequently attended the University of Maryland, College Park for one year before transferring to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied playwriting, joined Pi Lambda Phi International fraternity, and served in Student Congress. He graduated in 1970. Following graduation, he relocated to Colorado Springs with a group of Chapel Hill-based performers, where they purchased an old log cabin theater and formed the Homestead Arts Theatre, performing at parks, schools, and prisons across the region. Code violations prevented the theater from opening, and Black eventually returned to Washington, where he worked at the Appalachian Regional Commission, wrote plays, and performed stand-up comedy at the Brickskeller in Dupont Circle. He earned an MFA from the Yale School of Drama in 1977.

From 1981 to 1989, Black served as playwright-in-residence and associate artistic director at Steve Olsen's West Bank Cafe Downstairs Theatre Bar in Hell's Kitchen, New York City, collaborating with composer and lyricist Rusty Magee and artistic director Rand Foerster on hundreds of one-act plays. His stand-up comedy developed during this period as an opening act for those productions, with Black also serving as master of ceremonies. Together with Magee, he wrote the musical The Czar of Rock and Roll, which premiered at Houston's Alley Theatre in 1990. After a management change at the West Bank Cafe, Black shifted his focus to stand-up comedy while also taking on bit parts in television and film.

On Broadway, Black starred in Black to the Future and appeared in both Running On Empty and Celebrity Autobiography. He also contributed as a book writer to Broadway productions. His comedy routines are characterized by escalating rants addressing history, politics, religion, and cultural trends. He has cited George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, Bob Newhart, and Shelley Berman as comedic influences.

Black's television presence has been substantial. He has delivered his "Back in Black" commentary segment on The Daily Show since 1996, when the program was hosted by Craig Kilborn. He hosted the Comedy Central series Lewis Black's Root of All Evil in 2008, in which comedians argued, in the style of a court trial, which of two pop-culture figures or topics was more evil, with Black serving as judge. He also hosted History of the Joke with Lewis Black, a two-hour comedy-documentary on The History Channel in 2008, and returned to the channel at the end of 2009 to host Surviving the Holidays with Lewis Black.

His stand-up specials include his first Comedy Central Presents appearance in 1998, followed by two additional episodes in 2000 and 2002, and a separate Comedy Central special that year titled Taxed Beyond Belief. In 2004, he recorded the HBO special Black on Broadway at an undisclosed venue after the Kennedy Center objected to the frequency of profanity in his material. His 2006 HBO special, Red, White, and Screwed, was filmed at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., and aired in June of that year. He received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album in 2007 for The Carnegie Hall Performance. Later specials include Stark Raving Black, filmed at the Fillmore Theater in Detroit in 2009; In God We Rust, filmed at the State Theatre in Minneapolis in 2011; Old Yeller: Live at the Borgata, recorded in August 2013; and Thanks for Risking Your Life, released in October 2020 and filmed at the Four Winds New Buffalo casino during the COVID-19 lockdown. In 2004 and 2005, Black hosted the World Stupidity Awards at Montreal's Just for Laughs comedy festival.

In 2015, Black voiced the character Anger in the Pixar film Inside Out, a role he reprised in the 2024 sequel. His television acting credits include appearances on Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and The Big Bang Theory. He published his autobiography, Nothing's Sacred, in 2005.

Comedy Central ranked Black 51st among the 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all time in 2004. In the network's Stand Up Showdown viewer polls, he ranked 5th in 2008 and 11th in 2010. Black has served as an ambassador for voting rights for the American Civil Liberties Union since 2013 and has been a spokesman for the Aruba Tourism Authority, appearing in television advertisements that first aired in late 2009 and 2010. Since 2022, he has served on the board of directors of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, having previously been an honorary board member for approximately ten years. Black maintains residences in Manhattan and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.