Dark Bilious Vapors

in the Boston Globe of comedian Lewis Black--a regular on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart--one of my favorite comedians.

It's a brief but triumphant performance, the cheers typical of the response Black's been getting more of recently. After bouncing around the club scene for decades, Black, 55, has broken through in a business traditionally dominated by comics half his age. Last year, Comedy Central released Black's first CD and a DVD collection of his comedy specials on the network. Black plays 250 shows a year, and not in dives -- he performs Saturday at the Berklee Performance Center. He's also scored a comedy special on HBO, a career-defining notch for a comic. "Black on Broadway" begins airing May 15.

To understand Black is to understand the tangled web of comedic, familial, and social influences that make up his act. He grew up in Maryland, a Jewish kid who quickly realized he didn't buy organized religion. His father, Sam, worked for the government building sea mines but quit his job during the Vietnam era because he got fed up with the war, Black says. His mother taught school and, during the nightly news, talked back to the screen, wondering how politicians could expect anyone to believe their lies.

Though Black claims he has always resisted authority, he was, by all descriptions, an excellent student who, after being taken by his parents to the theater as a kid, decided he wanted to write plays. He went to Yale for graduate school, earning an MFA in 1977. Then he struggled to get his work produced, not realizing that even his mentors, among them Robert Brustein, then dean of the Yale program, later founder of the American Repertory Theatre, didn't hold out much hope for him.

"He was not that great a playwright," says Brustein. "I never actually told him that, but I thought of him as a malcontent. He was clearly dissatisfied and seemed irritable a lot of the time. I didn't know where he was going to go."

Through all of it, Black did stand-up.

He started in the late 1960s while an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A self-described yakker, Black opened shows for his friends, who were in a rock band. He was petrified onstage and, in those days, mainly mocked his inability to lose his virginity. He continued doing stand-up in the '70s, even as he entered the prestigious playwriting program at Yale. During those years, Brustein helped Albert Innaurato, Ted Tally, and Christopher Durang find success in the theater world. Black was a different story. He remembers complaining openly about the way the program was run. When he graduated, he headed to New York City and rented an apartment with a group of friends.

In New York, he met Steve Olsen, who ran a restaurant on 42d Street. Olsen liked Black's act and, before long, he had signed on the comic and a couple of his collaborators -- Rusty Magee and Rand Foerster -- to create a cabaret theater in Olsen's basement restaurant. For the next 10 years, Black was the West End Cafe's playwright in residence. He oversaw more than 1,000 plays, including works by "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin and "American Beauty" writer Alan Ball.

"Lewis MC'd every show," says Olsen. "And occasionally, he'd say, 'Next month we're doing my play,' and he'd get booed. He'd say, 'I read all the plays and mine's the best and we're doing mine.' He'd say, 'You'd have to be pretty self-loathing to be a playwright in residence and reject your own work.'"

Len on 05.05.04 @ 09:23 AM CST