In a Black mood

NEW YORK -- Lewis Black is calm. It's a few minutes before the start of "The Daily Show," and after a pleasant chat with the makeup woman, he asks host Jon Stewart about his impending fatherhood. Black leaves the building, and, out on the sidewalk, reads over his script, even smiling at a couple of fans who say "hi" as they pass. He returns to the studio, where things change quickly. Black sits behind the mock news desk in uniform -- the dark suit and loosened tie that he believes turns him into "the guy at the end of his rope." On camera, he barks out his lines, fed up, disgusted. Friendly Lew is gone.

On this night, the comic takes aim at celebrities who he says are where they don't belong. That goes for Bob Dylan doing a lingerie commerical, Sharon Stone appearing with the Dalai Lama, and Quentin Tarantino on "American Idol." It's light stuff, but Black treats it as if it were the fiery, political, and profane material that forms the centerpiece of his club act.

He doesn't accentuate, he attacks. With his sarcastic smile and shouts that punctuate his lines, Black exudes a disdain that burns through the screen. And then there are his hands, which drive the commentary. This is Black's most distinctive physical mannerism, fingers jabbing almost violently, as if to puncture any pretentions. The pointing began unconsciously, with Black not realizing he even did it until one day when, as he went up an escalator, a few people going down on the other side offered an exaggerated imitation.

"You know what's weird?" he shouts, after a clip of "American Idol" runs. "I think Tarantino's actually damaging Ryan Seacrest's credibility."

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. That comes only a few weeks after Black filmed a pilot for ABC, tentatively titled "Educating Lewis," in which Black plays a high school principal. He's even talking about trying to score a semi-regular gig in Vegas.

The angry man Black's style grew from the antiauthority, intellectual comedy of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Bill Hicks, the gimme-a-break rants of Sam Kinison, and the absurdist humor of Bob Newhart. His stage act does include some boilerplate material of the modern-day stand-up -- complaints about the weather and health clubs -- but Black's strength is talking politics. The comic, a self-described socialist, rejects both major parties and takes aim at everyone. John Kerry, George Bush. Corporate pigs. And it's on this subject, during a performance, that he boils over. He's baffled as he tries to explain why former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski needed a $15,000 umbrella stand. He shouts. He swears. He can barely speak. Enter the angry man.

Jon Stewart lovingly describes Black as "Lou Grant, if he were funny," but he also offers a tongue-in-cheek warning: "It would be scary if that was the guy in the cubicle next to you and you heard his mumblings under his breath," he says.

The angry man has become such a commodity that Black, a drama school graduate who has written 40 plays, has begun simply performing his "Daily Show" segment over the last year. He leaves the writing to Stewart's staff.

"I was angry," Black acknowledges of his younger days. "What took me a long time was to play the anger rather than be angry."

Theatrical dreams 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.' "

Comedy connection Black always stuck with stand-up. And in the late '80s, after almost a decade in New York, Black made the leap from theater rat to full-time comic. Two events precipitated this. First, Olsen got into a fight with his business partners at the restaurant. They kicked him out, and along with him Black. At the same time, Black and Magee went to Houston to stage a production of a musical they had written, "The Czar of Rock & Roll," about an Elvis Presley-like figure in the Soviet Union.

The Alley Theatre made promises about bringing in New York actors and putting Black up in a hotel while the musical ran. In the end, he found himself paying for a room. And "Czar" bombed, with the Houston Chronicle calling it "an extended sketch, going on 30 minutes too long."

Still wanting to retool the musical, Black went across town to a comedy club. He asked if there were any openings while he was in town. He took the stage. He killed. The club rented him a car to get around town. It paid to put him up. That was the end of Black the playwright.

"When he left here, he was an established stand-up comic," says Olsen. "What's that about? It's about rejection. There's a lot of bitterness there in how the American theater's treated him."

Or is there? After taping his "Daily Show" piece, Black heads back to the West Bank Cafe. Olsen owns the place again after suing his former partners, and he renovated the kitchen and the downstairs theater. It remains Black's home away from home, where he held a gathering for his younger brother, Ronald, who died of cancer in 1996.

Richard Hunnings, a friend, tells Black he loved the commercial for his upcoming HBO special.

"I've got a poem I've got to send you," he says. "It's about a slut."

Black nods and heads to a table. He orders a steak. He talks about the future. He says he has made peace with the realities of the theater world. In fact, in 2002, Black served as MC at an ART goodbye party for Brustein. He also devotes part of each summer to teaching drama at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. He even imagines going back to Chapel Hill and teaching theater.

For now, though, he's glad to be thriving on the comedy circuit.

"It's a stupid kind of life, you're never home," he says. After a pause, he adds, "It's not a bad life."

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.