Lewis Black's Rantcast

Lewis checks in this week from sunny California! As Lewis heads up to San Francisco for a show, he has one question for Georgia Senate Republican candidate Hershel Walker…really? Herschel, REALLY? It’s come out in the news recently that the former pro football player has paid for an abortion for a woman he was having a relationship with. Even though he’s representing a party that is anti-abortion,...

Lewis checks in this week from the west coast for the 101st episode of The Rantcast. Our host discusses Hurricane Ian that ravaged through Florida last week. As Lewis watches the news, he realizes that the only thing to distract us from the usual news stories that are covered constantly in the news (court cases, politics, etc.) is some kind of major catastrophe and/or natural disaster. One story L...

Lewis checks in this week from the Midwest as The Rantcast reaches its 100th episode! Triple digits! A huge THANK YOU to all the fans and ranters for all the support, and of course the rants, as we hit our centennial episode. One of Lewis’s stops in the Midwest this week was in Indianapolis, Indiana. While in Indianapolis, Lewis stops by one of his favorite places, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Lib...

Lewis reports this week from New England on his day off as he’s back on the road for shows in Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont. Our host has had hit with politicians asking for donations. The constant barrage of spam emails for a wide variety of candidates is too much. How much money could these politicians even need? What did these candidates do before email? However, there is a light at the end...

Jeannette Black turned 104 this past week, a staggering age to have reached. How did she manage this achievement? There is no reasonable explanation, though avoiding sweets may be one of her secrets to longevity. On being presented with a Carvel ice cream birthday cake, she proclaimed it to be, “too sweet”. Or it may be her lifelong embrace of sarcasm and negativity, a sensible outlook given that...

The dark prince of distraction and chaos had a day in court this week, and for once one of the crony judges the former leader appointed did his bidding. In a ruling that has been nearly universally derided by legal experts across the political spectrum, the panoply of classified and not classified documents the former president stole from the people's house will be examined by a special master to...

Lewis takes time on his birthday to celebrate with some of the people he loves the most, you the audience. As school has started for many American children, it’s dictionary time at the Rantcast. The word of the week is redacted, which means “edited especially in order to obscure or remove sensitive information”. The FBI has been busy literally redacting the former leader’s ill-kept horde of classi...

The people have spoken, and the rubber chicken has been given a reprieve from being retired back to the annals of comedy history. He lives! She lives!! They live!!! (We will reserve questions about the gender of the rubber chicken for another time.) Much like our rubberized feathered-friend, another public figure with links to the Jazz Age is going back to the people to get their vote. In this cas...

It has come to your host’s attention that some in the audience are upset with and/or annoyed by the rubber chicken. Maybe they don’t understand the importance of the rubber chicken in the history of American comedy, especially on the Vaudeville circuit. Many of those old Vaudeville theatres still exist, and Lewis will be performing at several of them in the coming months including the Paramount Th...

After a week in the wild which included attending a raucous wedding in California, Lewis is back at home, in his personal public access station. The week was low-lighted by the hellscape of the CPAC convention, which featured a speech by Hungarian prime minister/autocrat Viktor Orbán. He said out loud exactly what most in the audience already believe, but may be a bit shy about saying publicly. Li...

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It's always good to travel internationally, as it gives the traveler the opportunity to tune out the troubles at home and embrace the local culture. And this week your host was fortunate enough to visit our neighbors to the north and perform at the Falls View Casino in Niagara Falls, Ontario. With a view of the eponymous falls, the hotel and casino complex lets the American traveler escape from th...

Summertime and the living isn't so easy. So it's time to reclaim the joy of the season and have fun, fun, fun until our collective T-Bird gets taken away, or yet more of our Constitutional freedoms are negated by radical, extremist justices who wouldn't recognize fun if you spotted them the F and the U. The warm glow of summer also gets diminished by the constant reminder that every new high tempe...

Lewis is met with another week of ridiculous news in what seems like a society that's continually going in the wrong direction. But hey! There's maybe some good news... for the people of England. Well, at least we'll get to see a possible court case when they question a fetus on the stand, huh? This week Lewis reads rants submitted from his fans and they have some really important things to get of...

Happy 4th of July! Don't we all feel super patriotic right now? Another day in America brings us another mass shooting at a parade in Chicago while we get the second opportunity to witness folks in the city of where our Declaration of Independence was signed run in fear from more gunfire as the Rocket's Red Glare fills the night sky. As if that wasn't bad enough, airlines are kicking us in the nut...

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it does. We're completely dumbfounded by the lack of leadership going on in the political spectrum right now. From new Supreme Court rulings that are about as politically motivated as can be, to an ineffective government that appears completely broken. Lewis attempts to make sense of it all. The live rants this week come from the Wind Creek Event Ce...

We are now entering the summer of our discontent and Lewis is aware of it, from the latest revelations from the conservative questioned during the ongoing January 6th Committee hearings. But there's no shortage of things to rant about from rapid inflation that continues to ask the working man to make the most sacrifices while your host doesn't have the highest of hopes for the results of the impen...

From gun control to climate change to preserving democracy, the litany of issues not being fully addressed keeps getting longer. And at a time when we desperately need to get on with ensuring a safe and sane future, the larger cultural and political forces in the country continue to stand in the way. Across the political spectrum leadership has taken a holiday, forced by a compromised electoral sy...

The 84th edition of the Rantcast is about guns and gun control and the scourge of gun violence in America and the inability of the large majority of the country to summon the political will to keep our schools, churches, supermarkets, streets, and other public gathering places from continuing to be the sites of mass death. It asks when will enough be enough. It asks how many more children have to...

In this week's episode, Lewis remembers his friend Bruce MacVittie, an accomplished stage and screen actor who passed away earlier this month. Lewis met Bruce through their work with 52nd Street Project, a community-based arts organization that brings NYC tweens and teens together with professional artists to create a variety of works of art. Aside from working with the kids, there was also some t...

In an America where almost anything jurisprudence-related – no matter how unreasonable it seems in the current context – can be justified if you can find a quote from an old, dead Englishman, it's a good time to reflect on the Bard's sentiments regarding the legal profession. Among Shakespeare's most famous locutions, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" (Henry VI, Part 2) can be in...

In this week's episode, Lewis delves into the history of May Day and why in the US we moved the celebration of labor to the end of the summer. Honoring the working class at the same time as the rest of the world was too communal an experience for our nation of rugged individualists, and it was stained by links with socialists and anarchists and by fears of association with the 1886 Haymarket Riots...

In this week's episode, Lewis pays tribute to his friend and fellow comedian Gilbert Gottfried, a foul-mouthed angel who made a career out of finding the line of taste and then crossing right over it. He revived the Aristocrats joke as a way to recover from a post-9/11 moment of comedic transgression, and could make almost anything funny, including waiter’s trays. He will be terribly missed and if...

The rubber chicken is on leave after pumping out an extraordinary quantity of eggs for Easter. And like his coworker, Lewis is also on vacation, enjoying some rounds of golf and some time away from America's work-in-progress infrastructure. The live rants come from the show in Huntington NY on April 3, 2020. The show went so well that Lewis will be back at The Paramount on May 15th to film his nex...

This week's episode comes from somewhere on I-20 near the Georgia/South Carolina border, possibly the bumpiest stretch of road for a locale that doesn't see much wintry weather. The bumps in the road (sorry) is a theme that carried forward from the previous night in Atlanta, where one of the patrons had had a little too much to drink and not enough talk about the current president. The gentleman i...