Last night, D and I saw Lewis Black at Mountain Winery. His opening act was John Bowman, who noted that another driver had flipped him off in the parking lot before the show. He then located the driver in the audience, had a brief, playfully insulting conversation with him and his wife, and then ran up the bleachers to give him a not-completely-ironic hug. For an opening act, Bowman was pretty damn good.
More than anything, Lewis Black reminds me of Howard Beale from Network-- you remember, the news anchor who was mad as hell and not going to take it anymore! I'm sure that was the inspiration for his "Back in Black" segments on The Daily Show. On stage, he used "fuck" as a phrase modifier quite liberally. Not the degenerate gerundive construction: instead of "out of fucking control", he would say "out of fuck control". Grammarians may debate which usage is the lesser of two evils.
And, when he finally got around to talking about Dubya, someone near the front of the audience booed, and Lewis actually walked down into the audience to verbally smite the then-cowering heckler at point-blank range. If it was staged, it was brilliant. There's just something fundamentally amusing about an old Jewish man going apoplectic with rage.
NOTE: if you see "RetroBlog" on an entry, like this one, it means it's a post that I didn't finish until well after I'd saved the first draft. That may mean I've had days, weeks, or even months to think about what I was originally going to spew and possibly revise my opinions. I'm annonating these entries so you know what you're getting is not necessarily fresh off the mental grille.
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