Lewis Black Endorses Bernie Sanders, Tells Bill Cosby to F Himself

I wish this were a funnier interview.”

You can’t exactly fault Lewis Black for reverting to pure discontent when discussing the big news of the day. Last Friday saw the release of Pixar’s latest masterpiece Inside Out, in which he suitably voices the red-hot emotion of Anger. He had never expected to be tapped for a Pixar summer flick.

“Not in this lifetime, at least,” he tells The Daily Beast. “Mostly, it was shock that they wanted [me]. I was stunned.”

But in the time that he’s been helping to promote the film, the 66-year-old comedian was—like so many others in this country—busy following the news out of Charleston as it unfolded on live TV.

“I was utterly appalled. When does it end?” Black says. “It reminded me of the bombings of the churches I saw on the news [when I was a kid]. You watch that on TV on a regular basis, it has an effect on you. And to see it again on an almost even more primitive level, or on its basest level? One kid, walking in with a gun, and sitting with them,” says Black.

“It’s almost easier to accept, ‘Well, he wants to kill these people. He’s gonna go in and shoot them.’ Not sit down with them! At a prayer meeting. Talk about a level of detachment from reality and empathy. That’s the bitch of it: Just when you think [America is] over this kind of shit, we’re not.”

Cosby would always talk about how the use of profanity for a comic was cheap. So my reaction to that was, ‘Go fuck yourself.’”

Black can vividly recall the days of his youth when he did what little he could for the civil rights movement in radical 1960s America. One summer during his time at Yale, he and a “number of other very white, very middle-class kids” would regularly form a human barricade in front of the Black Panthers’ New Haven headquarters, just in case the cops swung by to harass the Panthers.

The Panthers would always come out and yell at us,” Black wrote in his 2005 memoir Nothing’s Sacred. “The idea behind [that summer in New Haven] was that if we could appeal with simple intelligence to the American people about the war, civil rights, and economic justice, we could change their minds... Yep, obviously we were nuttier than fruitcakes.”

After all these decades, Black is still trying to talk to—if not bark, swear, and yell at—the American people about civil rights, war, and economic justice. But now he’s a world-famous comedian who moonlights as a “voting rights ambassador” for the ACLU.

In the waning years of the Bush administration, he embarked on a comedy tour called, “Red, White, and Screwed.” He feels we’re all in similar shape today.

“At some point, some adult somewhere in the room has to stand up and say that this kind of nonsense has to stop in terms of the amount of time and money we spend electing people,” Black says. “This is nuts. For a country that doesn’t want to spend money, we want to spend an awful lot of money watching a group of idiots learn how to become presidential in front of us.”

Black sees himself moving further away from the process each election cycle because it “pushes [him] over the brink.”

“Yeah, I can write funny about all these guys. I mean, I don’t even have to write funny about them, because they’re going give me the stuff. They’re gonna hand it to me,” he says. “‘Donald Trump is running for president.’ That’s already a punchline. That’s the joke! The joke’s done!”

Anyone who has listened to Black do stand-up knows he is not one easily enamored by politicians or presidential candidates. One of his old jokes, after all, goes like this: “A Republican stands up in Congress and goes, ‘I GOT A REALLY BAD IDEA,’ and the Democrat says, ‘AND I CAN MAKE IT SHITTIER!’”

And he never really caught Obama Fever, either. “Nobody makes a better speech,” he says, “but I don’t think he spent enough time down there dealing with those jackasses in Congress.”

But at least for the 2016 election, he does have a candidate he might be able to get excited about: Bernie Sanders.

“I’ve said from the beginning that I’m a socialist,” Black says. “And now I have a candidate running: Sanders is running for the Democratic nomination, which is a little upsetting to me, because I wish he’d just say, ‘Fuck ‘em.’ But that’s the way of the world.”

Black recognizes that there’s “this big fear of socialists taking over the United States,” but he says the worry is “a form of dementia.”

“We have no party. There’s like seven of us. I’ve got no meetings to go to. So I’m excited. I’m mostly excited that he’s just stating stuff that needs to be reiterated that the [Democrats], basically, don’t reiterate. And it’s in terms of financial inequality,” he says.

More here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/23/lewis-black-endorses-bernie-sanders-tells-bill-cosby-to-f-himself.html