A Six Degrees book signing: thunder rumbles as Lewis Black returns to his hometown

Lewis Black stopped by the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday night for an audience Q&A and book signing. He’s much more low-key when he’s not ranting á la The Daily Show‘s ‘Back in Black’ segment, but he certainly didn’t censor himself just because we were in a synagogue.

He spoke for a few minutes about his new book, ‘Me of Little Faith,’ saying that he didn’t want to do a reading of the book because the chapter he’d choose would be the best chapter in the book; then we’d feel cheated when we bought the book and the rest of it wasn’t up to the same standards.

He admired the synagogue itself – it’s a beautiful building, recently spared from renovation into a nightclub. When he turned to look behind him, he said, “Glad I didn’t look back there earlier – too many bad memories,” and at that exact moment a giant bolt of lightning shot past the large stained-glass window over his head. The entire audience shrieked. You couldn’t have scripted that timing any more perfectly. He spent the rest of the evening glancing around as thunder rumbled.

One woman, a former staffer from Capitol Hill, made the mistake of trying to tell him that the Democrats were helpless during the Republican reign. The Republicans controlled everything, she said, and the Democrats couldn’t vote so they had to watch as the Republicans destroyed the country. Lewis nearly had a stroke on the stage, retorting that if the Democrats couldn’t get the vote, they should’ve gotten into the media and made their voices heard in other ways. It got pretty tense in there when the woman refused to back down. It’s one thing to see him rant from a script, but quite another when it’s live and right in front of you.

Someone asked him about Jon Stewart, and he said, “I had some of those Sea Monkey things. I put them in water, and they grew, and one of them became Jon Stewart. Had to cut his little tail off.” Ha! He said he and Jon had known each other for decades, and he had nothing but respect for Jon.

Lewis is on a whirlwind book tour right now; MsI has been doing her best to keep up with him in our Six Degrees posts. I haven’t had a chance to crack the spine of ‘Me of Little Faith’ yet but it looks like a good read. Catch him live if you can!

EDIT: The Washington Post mentioned Lewis’s performance in the article MsI just posted here:

So a Jewish atheist comic, a Hill-veteran Democrat and a pack of Washingtonians walk into a synagogue. The lady and the atheist comic have been arguing about politics and religion, and suddenly this Old Testament thunderclap rumbles overhead . . .

. . . And Lewis Black gives an exaggerated jump, as if God Himself is punctuating Black’s talk Tuesday night at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue. He’s on book tour for “Me of Little Faith.” The real setup to Black’s current political satire is Iraq. And both political parties. And other culpable culprits. Satire “rose in stature because of the war,” he says in an interview. “This presidency is madness. . . . The media was supposed to go 10 more yards — so was the Democratic Party and Congress.” In an age when all politics is loco, “the only influence I have” is to use humor to get the electorate “to try to [expletive] focus.”