Mad, and a little paranoid

It’s been years since anyone could accurately describe Lewis Black as an Angry Young Man. If truth be told, the tag hasn’t been a snug fit since the Vietnam era. Black is 56 now, and he has evolved -- into an Angry Older Man. And a stunningly successful one at that.

The thing is, somewhere in his curious metamorphosis, the Silver Spring, Md., native learned to make the anger work for him. He took a lifelong mistrust of authority and a tendency toward paranoia and turned it into a vein-popping, finger-jabbing, rant-filled stand-up comedy act that takes him on the road for 250 days a year.

That’s a lot of vitriol to spew, but Black, who targets everything from world-stage politics to the relentless proliferation of Starbucks franchises, has no problem refueling.

“All I have to do is pick up the newspaper or turn on the TV and the material just jumps out at you,” he says. “The other morning I was watching ‘Good Morning America’ on the tour bus and there was a passing reference to the five female Marines who were blown up in Iraq, the most women killed there in one day. But the main story, of course, was the missing girl in Aruba. That’s all anyone wanted to talk about, and that’s the kind of thing I wait for. You can’t make stuff like that up.”

Black concedes that being constantly on the prowl for upsetting information might strike some folks whose mission in life is the exact opposite of that as a trifle odd.

“Yes, it’s a strange way to make a living,” he says. “It’s certainly not what I expected to be doing. That’s why I’m single. A woman would have to be insane to travel and live like I do.”

Black, who was married briefly, indeed has a back story that seems wildly at odds with his current pursuits. After all, how many stand-ups have a master’s of fine arts from Yale? Or spent years in the wilds of Colorado, resurrecting a ghost-town theater to bring original plays to the stage?

But Robert Brustein, former dean of the Yale graduate program, knew that Black was destined for, if not greater things, well, different things.

“He was not that great a playwright,” Brustein told the Boston Globe last year. “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.”

Black continued to work in theater and began taking occasional small acting roles in films and television. He appeared in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” and on TV’s “Law & Order.” But his gift for storytelling seemed to connect with audiences during the periodic stand-up gigs he landed between his theater work. Even then he was able to tap the angst he felt growing up under the specter of the Cold War.

“Communists apparently walked among us like aliens ready to convert us to their heathen ways,” he says in his recent book, “Nothing Sacred.” “I didn’t experience that level of paranoia again until I smoked pot.”

But he also grew suspicious of the constant warnings of an imminent Russian takeover and of the school drills that purported to protect students from a nuclear attack by having them hide under their desks.

“My family came from Russia, and if they were any indication of the Soviet mentality, I didn’t think we had much to worry about,” Black says in the book. “I now know that it was about at this point in time that I began to regard authority with a jaded eye.”

The act grew sharper, and in 1996 producers from Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” (whose current host, Jon Stewart, said of “Nothing Sacred”: “Lewis Black is the only person I know who can actually yell in print form.”) were among those taking notice. Black was recruited to be a regular on the series, where the rants caught on immediately with audiences. There were cable specials, CDs and DVDs, and of course, the nonstop touring.

Occasionally, there were bumps in the road -- like on Sept. 11, 2001.

“I was just preparing to release my CD, ‘The End of the Universe,’ when it happened,” Black said. “I suddenly had to look at the material in a different light and realized that I would have to go back in and change about 40% of it. Some of it had to go because it just seemed too superficial, and I had to talk about how things had changed.

“My brother died six years ago and he worked right where 9/11 happened, and I always wonder how I would feel if he had died there instead,” Black said. “Every year I’d have to be reminded of his death being part of this horrific event, and I’d be incensed by the politicizing of it. It made me angry just thinking about it.”

Black acknowledged that his raw-language act has gotten more political since the attacks.

“I didn’t necessarily support either Bush or Kerry, but after 9/11, I thought, ‘OK, we’ve got to give the administration some slack’ -- but then they choke you with the slack,” he said. “You can’t express any disapproval with anything that’s going on without being labeled anti-American. It’s like the 1950s witch hunts again. And the Democrats aren’t any better. They haven’t responded. They’ve basically fallen asleep.”

Even offstage, the comedian can get a bit exercised during such tirades, but since he’s in the middle of a lengthy cross-country tour, he’s got to pace himself. Black, who famously torched Los Angeles in a cut from his CD “The White Album,” will be in town Wednesday for a concert date at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills. He says he hopes there are no hard feelings.

“I’ve calmed down a little bit, but my difficulty with L.A. is that it’s the center of the entertainment industry, just like Pittsburgh was the center of the steel industry,” he says. “It’s hard enough to do this for a living, but to go to L.A. and be in the midst of all the show business machinery is exhausting. I don’t want to see all the gears.”

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Lewis Black

Where: Canyon Club, 28912 Roadside Drive, Agoura Hills

When: Wednesday

Price: $35; sold out

Info: (818) 879-5016