Two of the best evenings I've spent in comedy clubs have been spent listening to Lewis Black. The first one was at the Improv in Brea, California. The second one was at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach in the same state. Both were decent-sized venues, big enough to accommodate a top comic but small enough that the comedian didn't get overpowered by the stage he was on.
Last night, I took some friends to see Mr. Black at the new (opened in 2003) Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles. It was the wrong place to see the guy. The Disney Hall is a beautiful structure — I have to go back and just walk around and marvel at the building — and the acoustics are said to be among the finest of any auditorium in the world. Well, maybe they would have been if Lewis Black had been playing the cello. But this was apparently the first time the sound crew there had to deal with stand-up comedy and we all know how difficult it is to set up one microphone.
In fairness, the man does tend to shout a little…but he shouted at the Improv and the Comedy and Magic Club, and I had no trouble understanding him there. I only got about 85% of what he said last night, which is way too low to make for a satisfying evening, especially since a lot of the 15% rendered punch lines unintelligible. And of course, it's also frustrating because so much of what I could hear was hilarious and perceptive and memorable, which made it agony to miss any of the words. (It was also, with the exception of one short discourse on Christmas carols, all material I'd never heard before. Black probably writes more routines in a year than most stand-ups go through in their entire careers. That's another thing I like about him.)
Plus, there was the matter of the stage just being too big for him. It's a beautiful hall and a beautiful stage of unique design. (My friend Carolyn said it looks like someone turned a giant violin inside-out. If and when you'll see it, you'll see she's right.) Put a stand-up in the middle of it all and he looks small and trivial, no matter how great his personality. The building, by the way, seats 2,265 and I think whoever picked out those seats assumed that the Disney Hall would cater mostly to dwarfs.
The whole evening put me in mind of that other great screaming stand-up, Sam Kinison. I used to see Sam at the Comedy Store and other clubs of modest size and he was magnificient. Even with a few hundred folks present, he made contact of a sort with everyone in the room and there was an immediacy to his performances. Later, I saw him on the stage at Bally's in Las Vegas and he was like a magician standing on the 50-yard-line at half-time in the Super Bowl, trying to do a card trick. It wasn't so much the physical distance from Lewis Black last night — we weren't that far away from him — as the fact that he seemed lost on that huge stage.
And it wasn't just him. Another comic, John Bowman, opened for Black and suffered from all the same problems.
I still love Lewis Black as a performer but I think my only hope now is that his career hits the skids and he has to go back to playing smaller rooms. So please don't go see him if he comes to your neck of the woods. He's wonderful but he's more wonderful in a real comedy club instead of an indoor Hollywood Bowl. No matter how beautiful the building may be.