Comedian Lewis Black skewers America: Damned Yankees: Seven Deadly Sins

Lewis Black skewers America

By BILL HARRIS - Sun Media





Lewis Black leads the verbal assault on his homeland in the Just for Laughs TV special, Damned Yankees: Seven Deadly Sins.

Comedian Lewis Black is pretty hard on his home country. It’s a good thing the United States doesn’t have a glass jaw.

But does the frantic Black, who hosts a Just For Laughs comedy special titled Damned Yankees: Seven Deadly Sins this Friday on CBC, ever feel guilty about the verbal abuse he heaps upon America?

“Naw,” said Black, who is best known for his appearances on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. “I’ve never felt (guilty) at all, because everything I thought would get better has got worse.

“(Damned Yankees: Seven Deadly Sins) was a pretty easy show to do. The greed section in particular — I mean, individuals have just got greedier and greedier. What else do you need, putz?

“There’s this whole thing about salary-capping athletes. Can’t you salary-cap CEOs? Who needs $53 million a year? The rich act like they’re crack-addicted whores.”

The concept of Damned Yankees is fairly straight-forward: As Black says, Americans may not have invented the seven deadly sins (gluttony, pride, envy, wrath, lust, greed and sloth), but they have perfected them.


Black taped his segments in New York about six weeks ago, and they are used to set up snippets of standup routines from the Just For Laughs archives, featuring Stewart, Drew Carey, Joan Rivers, David Brenner, Bill Maher, Brent Butt, Norm Macdonald, Greg Giraldo and Sinbad, among others.

Black, who last month won a Grammy Award for best comedy album, has a trademark spastic, sputtering, screaming delivery. Given all the touring he does as a standup and with his various TV projects, Black presumably goes to great lengths to maintain his voice — after all, in terms of strain on the vocal cords, Black has more in common with Robert Plant than Jerry Seinfeld.

“I drink a lot of water, which is half the battle, and I try to remember I have to breathe,” said Black, 58. “If I had it to do over again, and had I known it was going to take this long for me to make it, I would have developed an act where I was lying on a gurney with an I.V. drip.”

Black currently has pilots in the works with both Comedy Central and HBO. And he says he’s writing a book about religion — you know, just another one of those subjects people aren’t too sensitive about.

“That’s when they’ll take my passport away,” Black said of the book. “Then you and I will be saying, ‘Gee, maybe America did have a glass jaw.’ ”

In 2006 Black had roles in the films Man Of The Year and Unaccompanied Minors, but apparently that hasn’t opened up a lot of doors in Hollywood.

“I think the (movie) career’s over — it was pretty quick,” Black said. “They took a good look and that was it. My agents keep saying, ‘There has been a lot of chat.’ Yeah, right. I’m not waiting by the phone.

“But I’m very lucky to have the opportunity to work as much as I do. I have a tour bus, which helps. It has some luxuries. I’m going to go back right now and watch Borat, so life can’t be all bad.”

Life isn’t all bad in the U.S., either, but Black’s incredulity knows no bounds.

“We (Americans) have that f---ing idiot streak, like we’re the greatest,” said Black, who was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Maryland. “You guys (Canadians) have that f---ing inferiority complex. But living next to us over the past eight years, you should feel a lot better about yourselves.

“I look forward to being back in Canada again soon. And make sure, if you could, to please tell Canadians to take care of human rights so we can remember what they are.”

More Black humour skewering the U.S. of A.

Here are some more musings from Lewis Black to Sun Media’s Bill Harris about his favourite (and he feels well-deserved) target:

“From the time you’re a kid, you look around and see, ‘Well, the people who are picking the vegetables live in complete misery in a country that has more money than God. And then you go to other countries and you say, ‘Oh, really ... you try to make sure everybody’s doing okay? Wow.’ We’re insane.”

“When I was young (Black was born in Washington, D.C.), the worst slums in the United States were right behind Congress. How f---ing dumb are you? You’re looking at them! And you’re not doing anything for the neighbourhood. It’s just absurd.”

“Basically, a lot of the people who are in power (in the U.S.) are just so powerful that they don’t really care what anybody says, including myself. People always say to me, ‘Do you ever get any backlash from these leaders?’ And I go, ‘I’m not even on their radar.’ It’s like when Stephen Colbert did the presidential dinner. Those people didn’t even have a concept of who he was. They’re in their own bubble.”