Lewis Black: Political Correctness is Between Uptight and Stupid | Big Think

Political Correctness is Between Uptight and Stupid

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Lewis Black argues that when it comes to comedy, defying political correctness is categorically different from mean-spirited rhetoric, plus political correctness has no desire to laugh.

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LEWIS BLACK:

Lewis Black uses his trademark style of comedic yelling and animated finger-pointing to skewer anything and anyone that gets under his skin. His comedic brilliance lies in his ability to make people laugh at the absurdities of life, with topics that include current events, social media, politics and anything else that exposes the hypocrisy and madness he sees in the world.

Born in Washington D.C. on Aug. 30, 1948, Black was raised in Silver Spring, Md. Degrees followed from the University of North Carolina and Yale Drama School, with a stint in Colorado owning a theatre with a group of friends in the interim. During his tenure at UNC, Black ventured into stand-up, performing at Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill. Stand-up was a steady presence as he pursued his career in theatre. Black eventually settled in New York City and became the playwright-in-residence at the West Bank Café’s Downstairs Theatre Bar. He oversaw the development of more than 1,000 plays, including works by “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, “American Beauty” writer Alan Ball, as well as his own original works. In addition to overseeing the works on stage, Black emceed every show. He left the West Bank in the late 1980s to pursue stand-up full time.

In 1996, his friend Lizz Winstead tapped him to create a weekly segment for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” The segment, a three-minute rant about whatever was bothering him at the moment, evolved into Back in Black, becoming one of the most popular and longest-running segments on the show for both the Jon Stewart era, and now The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

In 2015, Black joined the cast of Madoff (ABC mini series). Black portrays Ezra Merkin, who, after investing with Madoff and receiving great returns, brought many famous and well-to-do Jewish clients, including Elie Wiesel and The Hadassah Organization, to Bernie’s fold. Black has penned more than 40 plays, many of which have been produced around the country. In 2015, Black notably voiced the character “Anger” in the Oscar nominated film from Pixar, “Inside Out.”

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TRANSCRIPT:

Lewis Black: Political correctness has got no room in comedy. There's no room for political correctness. It implies that you're going to say something that is going to be, it's going to go over the line; it's going to be aggressive; it's going to be upsetting; it might imply something about someone or some group. There's political correctness and then there's just out right hate stuff, bigoted comedy. But political correctness has a tendency to jump the gun before you get to bigotry

Political correctness has no sense of humor, so it doesn't know. I will mention guns in my act, and not that this is politically correct, it's the same sort of thing. I'll say guns and then the audience - you immediately feel the audience get uptight because I've said nothing but guns. They don't know what I'm going to say; they have no idea; they got no clue and they jump on it.

So, what happens in a politically incorrect joke is they hear the first part and they stop listening. So they don't know what the goddamn joke is about. I have little or no time for it. And if you have trouble with that what you do is you laugh – if you think a joke was mean bad or something that was politically incorrect, you still laugh at the joke and you go Ha, ha, ha and then later on you go, “That was bad. I was bad to laugh at that.” Do it on your own time.

I would go to a college campus. The last one I went to was Penn State last year and it may have been even longer ago when Sandusky – they had just gone through the year of Sandusky and Paterno. My opening act had even done Sandusky - jokes about him. And we thought “We can't do that because these kids have just been…” - and when you got onstage you realized these kids are shell-shocked because they're not even laughing at what they normally would laugh at.

Afterwards when we avoided the topic completely the kid who writes for the paper wrote that - the way he put it - we were pussies for not talking about it. So, it doesn't matter which way you go you're going to lose some of the time.

I always take the moment - because when I'm on a campus or I...

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