Lewis Black: Red, White & Screwed

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen,

from the Warner theater in Washington, D.C.,

hbo presents Lewis black!

Thank you, and good night.

There is nothing that I can do now

except fuck up our relationship.

We're here in Washington this evening for two reasons.

The first is I was born and raised here.

- ( Audience cheering ) - Thank you.

Well, actually, that's a lie.

I wasn't really born and raised in Washington D.C.

I was born and raised in silver spring, Maryland.

Now come on.

But I tell people I'm from Washington,

because if you say you're from silver spring, Maryland

it sounds like you're a pussy.

I left silver spring

right after I graduated college.

I got the hell out of here,

because as anybody who knows who lives here

you're literally you're sitting right...

There's congress, there's the white house,

it's in your face all the time.

If you watch national news it's there,

local news it's there.

It's constantly barraging you

and I every day would see something

that would just fucking piss me off.

And I... I would jump on the bus

and go down to the white house or congress

and find whoever it was that had bothered me

and run around screaming at him, "fuck you!"

And then I said, "well, man, this is no way to live.

I can't make a living doing this."

- We're also... - ( Audience applauding )

We're also... we're here at the Warner theater

because originally

we were to perform at the Kennedy center.

Whoo-hoo.

And, uh, so...

The Kennedy center thought that would be great,

and then they saw the tape

of my last hbo special.

And they called up hbo and said,

"do you know how many times Mr. Black said 'fuck'?"

And they said, "no."

And they went, "42."

That meant there was some asshole

in an office somewhere

in the bowels of the Kennedy center

watching my performance going, "one fuck, two fucks."

And they said that that kind of performance

would not be a good representation of the center.

And therefore I could perform there,

however, hbo could not say

that I had performed there.

I couldn't say it while I was onstage.

They couldn't even show the front of the building.

So I guess they wanted this show

to be called "Lewis black, live from fucking nowhere."

42 fucks is too many. I wonder what the line is.

40 would have been fine, and then, "oh no!

He's gone crazy!"

But then the folks here at the Warner theater

where kind enough to pick me up,

- and I appreciate it. - ( Audience cheering )

They have an 80-fuck limit here.

I thought it was odd that the center

wouldn't let me say "fuck" there

considering it's named after a guy

who fucked everybody.

Dick Cheney...

And that's all I've got to say.

Isn't it great that we've reached that point?

You don't even have to say "dick Cheney:

The vice president who shot his friend

in the face while hunting."

"Dick Cheney," everybody goes "what?-ha!" And we move on.

He went quail hunting.

Quail hunting!

He went hunting for quail.

You do not use the words hunt

and quail together in a sentence!

You don't hunt for quail.

You might track quail.

You might walk behind them...

Wondering "what kind of a miserable fuck

existence do you have?"

They're this big! They're tiny little birds!

They barely fuck fly.

And they clip their wings! They clip their wings,

so they couldn't fly any higher than 10 feet.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Unbelievable.

And you shoot them with birdshot.

Not like a bb gun which could do the job.

No, birdshot, which is like just a spray

of just fucking metal and shit.

Just... ( Blows raspberry )

And then you got to wait till the dust clears. "Did I hit anything?"

Going quail hunting is like saying, "I'm going fishing,"

going to a goldfish bowl and going, "got it!"

I am not a hunter...

For those of you who probably thought,

"wow, he'd look good in orange."

But I don't hunt because there's a...

I was born and raised Jewish and there's a...

There's a group of the Jewish people

who have no motor or mechanical skills,

and I am one of them.

It's just by the grace of god I can actually wipe myself.

But it seems to me if you're going to hunt

you've got to really hunt, okay?

The bird had to be able to fly around

and you have to have a bullet so you can kind of go, "okay, let's get it."

Or you should have to hunt deer,

something that's moving about. Or better yet,

what you really should hunt is something like a bear,

something that can eat your feet.

They were hunting in a place

that rich people pay to hunt at.

Okay? They actually...

They drive them to where the animals are.

That is not fucking hunting.

There's a fence around the place.

Son of a bitch!

That means they go,

they track the deer, "oh look, we got him in the corner."

They turned a petting zoo into Auschwitz.

But I'll tell you, the hunting party was upset about the accident

'cause the next day they were gonna hunt rabbits with multiple sclerosis.

I don't know much about hunting but from what I can gather

the hunters are generally in a line, okay?

You don't get in a circle and go, "let's get it."

One guy doesn't stand in front

about 20 feet and go, "okay, fire!"

So that means that he's standing here...

And his friend is there.

How do you think it happened?

"I got it, I got it, I got it!" Bam!

You can't say, "I mistook you for a quail."

But I do believe that what happened there

is kind of a really great metaphor

for the war in Iraq.

Now I do.

I think if you can think back to the beginning of the war...

And that may take a couple of days,

you may need to nap awhile...

We were confronted, we were told,

with an axis of evil...

North Korea,

Iraq and Iran.

Now we are never ever

going to attack the north Koreans

because they are the most evil people

on the planet.

And how do we know that?

Because when we get video

and film footage from North Korea

it's always in black and white.

It's not the film.

These people are so evil,

they have no color.

And you don't fuck with that kind of evil.

Your hands are full.

North Korea's the country

that the monkeys in "the wizard of oz" came from.

Then there was Iraq,

a country with an insane leader

and weapons of mass destruction.

Or so we were told by our spy network

who did just a crackerjack job.

"Oh yeah, they... We know...

They're over there."

They kept saying there were weapons of mass destruction,

even though blix told us...

From the u.N... That they weren't there,

folks from the Pentagon told us that they weren't there.

It even said so

on the Iraqi page on MySpace.

And then there was Iran.

Insane leader, just as insane as Saddam,

completely nuts.

Only they actually have access

to nuclear materials

that they are beginning to convert

into some sort of a bomb

that they eventually will put into a missile

and 500 Iranians will throw it at us.

So I believe it went like this.

Iran, Iran, Iran,

Iraq!

The last year and a half

is by far the toughest time

I've ever spent as a comedian.

It's just become more and more difficult.

I just can't keep up with all the shit.

It used to be easy... One or two things might happen in a week.

Now something will happen and I'd read about it

and I'll go, "I'm gonna make that funny."