After 2024, we won’t have Lewis Black to kick around anymore.

He announced he is retiring from “the road” at the end of next year. For the past 35 years, he has been riding a bus around the country going from town to town to yell at the local inhabitants and tell them what they are doing wrong.

For some of the last 10 years, he has been reading rants from his audience at the end of his show. That’s what fired off this bullshit blog of mine. Since Covid, he has consigned fan rants to his podcast.

But the live show rants were the best. Waiting for the Rant is Due each week (Friday and Saturday nights). Anticipating if my little rant would make the cut. Watching the facial twitches and the finger flicks from Lewis’s free hand as he held the iPad with the other… And a few times hearing an audience laugh at my words. (“The planned parenthood on Exchange street is right across from Krispy Kreme Donuts” even made Lewis laugh… “the third world racquet club” only made Lewis laugh and he had to yell his disappointment at the audience for not getting the joke — awesome).

Sure, Lewis said he is going to focus on writing, books, plays and rejected TV shows. He will keep reading rants on his podcast — which is like his stand-up except without an audience. There’s something about those live shows that brings out his fingers. They waggle and wave from the stage to the point where the fingers tell the story long before the words ever come out of his mouth.

Even his bobblehead had to have fingers that bobbled and shook with the head.

So in a sense with this fucked-up retirement, we are not losing Lewis. He will still write and make some appearances. But we are losing his fingers. After 2024, we won’t be able to see those fingers point and shake and fly all over the stage. They were so long you could clearly see them from the back row of the 1200-seat Rialto Theater in Tucson. Now they will be relegated to “keyboarding.” Cramped into the tiny space on a laptop made for regular humans. I imagine watching Lewis type is like visiting the Lion cage at the zoo, way too much animal for the space.

Conflicted

I must admit upon hearing of this “retirement,” I’m conflicted. Do I say “congratulations” or “enjoy your golden years” (in that sarcastic tone that really means soon you will be peeing yourself). Or do I take this change as the personal attack it is…

Goddamnit Lewis, who is booking these shoes. Who skips Arizona in January and February in favor of Chesterfield, Missouri and Omaha Nebraska?

The closest you are coming in 2024 to my home in Phoenix is some random cities in California where I have no friends…

Am I going to be forced to see you in January in Reno with my friend goat-fucking Geno? If I’m flying and buying a hotel to see you, the wife is going to want to come. Geno can’t ever get a sober date, so I’m going to be stuck in the weirdest three-way ever in the Fucku front row seats in what I can only imagine are the third-rate casinos of Reno and having to rent a car and drive 40 minutes to stand in the freezing temperatures to stare out at a Lake that I can see on Google Earth for free. Fuck.

Maybe, I’ll talk the wife into a European vacation and get to catch you in Stockholm or Amsterdam in May. But she can’t travel in May because after her fucked-up retirement from teaching she went back into the classroom to double dip. She has officially retired and gone back 3 times.

She’s done 40 years — the last 5 teaching math to disinterested 7th graders in the ghetto. She keeps saying she wants to quit, but she won’t.

Or you going to do that too Lewis? Am I going to go through this feeling of loss and regret only to have to you clean up the bus and go back on the road when you are 80?

Aren’t you the one who told the story of meeting Don Rickles on a plane when he was almost 90 and on his way to another gig? There was such reverence in your voice, I assumed you would follow in his footsteps.

Based on your parents, I thought I had another 3 decades to decide whether I would see your “last show.”

Did Shecky Greene ever retire? Didn’t Buddy Hackett die on stage at some off the strip club in Las Vegas? I have no idea if those are true and I’m not going to look it up. Like Libertarianism, it feels like it should be true, and I want to believe it no matter what reality says…

But I’m going to say it here — aren’t you a huge disappointment to all Jewish comedians? Isn’t it part of the Arch of the Covenant that these traveling fools raised on the Talmud will entertain the gentiles on stage until their last breath? I think it’s in there somewhere between Kings and the Book of Job, but don’t quote me.

If the guilt of comparing you to a teacher or Don Rickles won’t convince you, I guess I will have to accept that we will see Lewis Black’s fingers on stage no more. Sure, the yelling and the fake anger was different, but no one had those fucking fingers dragging us through the stories and pointing out the punchlines.

So I guess this is a goodbye to the road Lewis. Congrats on giving up the travel and good luck getting your fingers to type out new stories on paper instead of on stage.