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Lewis Black at Great Adventure
submitted by: David Ruscansky

I have been fortunate enough to have seen some very memorable Lewis Black shows over the years. I was at his very first show just hours after getting out of jail for his appearance on the Teen Voyeurbus on the Opie and Anthony show. I also saw him at that very same club in the middle of a blizzard a couple years later. He questioned our sanity for coming out to see him on such a horrible night.

Neither of those shows compare to the night I saw Lew at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey. For whatever reason, he was appearing there for free so my girlfriend and I jumped at the chance to see him, since we had season passes for the park. He was appearing in a theater that was basically indoors, but the roof of the building was vinyl, like a tent. We wondered aloud if he would change his material because of where he was appearing and the fact that there were a TON of families and small children in line to see this free show.

Once they let everyone in, the theater filled to capacity in minutes, tons of children everywhere! "This could be interesting" I tell my girlfriend. We are both convinced he will do a Comedy Central friendly performance. There was no opener, and out comes Lewis, and he immediately drops a fuck bomb in his first line! Half the crowd erupts in applause and cheers because they realize it's gonna be a non watered-down performance, and they were probably die-hards like us who were delighted at the fact that he was using naughty words in front of a bunch of soccer moms and thier dingbat kids. He continues his set as normal. Several parents are HORRIFIED. They begin streaming out of the theater, many of them carrying their children COVERING THEIR EARS!! To my amazement, even more parents stayed with their kids. What was funny to me was how throughout the evening, they still trickled out, as if a certain joke was just too much for them to handle.

It gets much more interesting and fun from here...Because this "theater" had a vinyl tent-like roof, much of the outside noise from the park could be heard in the venue. Lewis found this out a few minutes into his set when the enormous Batman & Robin rollercoaster about 50 yards from the theater was launched and the roar of the ride drowned him out. This continued several times throughout the first part of his set, and it was met with his usual razor-sharp wit and rage.

Well after about ten minutes of this, the ride stops. We think the park is doing us a favor but after a few minutes go by we realize why the ride has stopped and we begin to hear thunder. The thunder gets louder and louder, to the point where Lewis was completely thrown off on stage. He tried his best to plow through with his material but at any given time it was interrupted by a huge crash of thunder that he reacted hilariously to every time. After one particular deafening crash of thunder, he nearly jumped out of his skin and threw his arms in the air and began to conduct the thunder like it was an orchestra. It is now also POURING outside and we know this because the rain hitting the tent roof is ridiculously loud. We could hardly hear Lew at this point because the rain was now drowning him out.

Somewhere during this raging tempest, Lewis looks down into the crowd and says "THERE ARE CHILDREN HERE!?!?!?!?!??!?!!?" He had NO IDEA they let kids into the show!! He asks a little boy in the first few rows how old he is and the boy says he's eight. Lew just shook his head and looked down at the floor in shock. He then said "please don't repeat anything you hear me say tonight". To his credit, he didn't alter his set in any way the rest of the night. I guess he figured it was way too late at this point.

So up to this point we have the show being drowned out by a rollercoaster, a severe thunderstorm, and torrential rain, plus the fact that the average age of the audience was 12. What would be the encore? All the rain was too much for the Coleman roof to handle and it began LEAKING on the stage (and the rest of the place for that matter). It's at this point that Mr. Black could take no more, reached into his pocket, and lit up a cigarette. The crowd roared in approval. The Six Flags lady running this cavalcade of comedy and nature didn't approve and she rushes up to the stage and yells at him to put it out because the sprinkler system would go off if any smoke was in the theater. This was met with booing more thunderous than anything mother nature could provide that night.

The storm subsided, the leaking did not, and Lewis finished one of the most memorable sets I've ever seen from any comedian to a standing ovation and I'm sure he couldn't wait to get the fuck out of that place. I'm not sure exactly what the Six Flags folks thought they were getting when they booked him and I can't for the life of me figure out why they didn't warn parents of what to expect before the show started. Needless to say, there hasn't been a comedian at the park since. We get out of the theater to find a completely empty amusement park that's pretty much under water, with tree branches down everywhere. It turns out the park lost power and the theater was running on a generator and everyone else there went home

There is only one person I know of who can take such a bizzare combination of events and make them all hilarious and memorable. Most people would have called it quits and the audience probably would have understood, considering the bizzare circumstances. Thank you Lewis for riding out the storm that evening and giving us an amazing night and providing a lot of kids a whole new vocabulary to share with their friends at school that fall.

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