Black to the Future

Lewis Black brought his trademark sputtering outrage to Broadway’s Marquis Theatre during the height of the 2016 presidential election cycle. For a comic whose entire career is built on yelling about the slow degradation of American sanity, the matchup between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump provided an overwhelming amount of fuel. He frames the cultural mood with a poll showing that a massive chunk of the electorate would prefer a giant meteor strike over either candidate, a sentiment that anchors his frantic search for any remaining logic in modern life.

Rather than offering partisan finger-pointing, Black aims his frustration at the sheer absurdity of the political theater, mocking Ben Carson’s bizarrely sleepy cadence and questioning how any comedian is supposed to compete with the surreal reality of a Trump-Palin alliance. He breaks up the political anger with winding anecdotes about a trip to Scandinavia, America’s failure to handle mental illness, and a bizarre news story involving a German woman wielding breast milk during a pharmacy robbery. The set ends with a live Q&A session, where he reads audience-submitted rants.