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Rules Of Enragement

by

Lewis Black

 
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Rules Of Enragement
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Avg: 4.5 (85 ratings)

  • We Say...

    Review by Bill Wasik

    Those who know Lewis Black only from his "Back in Black" harangues would do well to sample one of his full-length albums. For the uninitiated, Black is a 50-something former playwright who in the past decade has emerged as a wildly popular road comic; in "Back in Black," his recurring gig on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, he screams his way through a eyeball-popping, pox-on-all-houses retelling of the day's news. Considering how Rules of Enragement was recorded in mid-2003, Daily Show fans will be unsurprised to hear vituperation against the Bush administration ("a crackerjack group of fuckers") and executives in the then-recent corporate scandals ("the greediest people who have ever lived on the planet").

    But unlike on his televised bits, Black has space here to show his range more; the outrage (and the screaming) punctuates longer thoughts, so they seem less affected and more earned. While his long bit on the Iraq war is rambling and weak, the bit on corporate scandals ("Greed") is genius; referring to Enron, Adelphia and Tyco, Black proposes a new law: "If you have a company and it can't explain, in one sentence, what it does... it's illegal." Much of the non-political material on the album is also great — make sure not to miss the opening tracks on Minnesota, and particularly the long track on "Ireland and Health." The former, he notes, "did something no other culture has done," namely "brought together religion and alcohol"; on the latter, he points out that "there's no such thing as soy milk" — because there's no "soy tit."

  • They Say...

    Review by Mark Deming, All Music Guide

    It's hard to get the full effect of Lewis Black's gloriously bitter comedy if you're only listening to him -- watching the man work himself up into a lather with jowls shaking, beads of spittle flying from his lips, and his eyes bulging from his sockets as if his head is about to burst open from sheer pent-up rage adds immeasurably to the effect of his barbed, pungent wit. But at the same time, the intelligence and reason behind his wrath often projects better through repeated listening on CD than it does by watching the man threatening to erupt on-stage, and 2003's Rules of Enragement captures Black at the height of his powers both as a high-pressured comic and as a incisive political satirist. While Black's rants about winter in Minnesota, the evils of soymilk, and how the Irish brought alcohol and Catholicism together are reasonably standard stuff, they're also smart and exceptionally funny, and Black's unceasing barrage of bad karma gives even his most mainstream material a fierce edge. It's when he moves on to deeper matters -- America's failure to keep its water supply clean ("We buy bottles of water from Pepsi and Coke, because if ANYBODY knows water, it's Pepsi and Coke!"), political and corporate corruption ("If big oil gave anybody in this room 31 million bucks, you'd be THRILLED to be big oil's bitch"), and various varieties of post-September 11 malaise ("How do we bring democracy to Iraq? What do we do, give 'em our civics books? 'Read this, it's crackerjack material!'") -- that Black proves he can be every bit as funny while dipping his toes into provocative material that sadly few contemporary comics would have the courage to touch. While not the full-on flamethrower of David Cross' epochal Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!, Rules of Enragement is a similarly powerful bit of no-holds-barred standup comedy that proves the furious provocation of Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, and Richard Pryor is thankfully still alive in American humor. Or at least it's still alive until Black gives himself a stroke.

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