Lewis Black rants about Trump/Biden replay, retiring from touring

“It’s like your parents telling you the same bedtime story until you’re 30,” he said. “You can’t rewrite this story although the media is trying.”

Black still watches plenty of cable news yet finds the horse race and personality coverage exhausting. He’d rather the anchors address issues in more consequential detail, like explaining how inflation works.

“Why are my bananas costing more?” he said. “You can make it understandable. That’s the job of the news media. But all they do is talk about the people, not the issues. It’s disgusting!”

Onstage, Black said, he shifts around 20% to 25% of his material any given night and he’ll frequently change up how he tells a joke on the fly.

“Jerry Seinfeld is very precise,” Black said. “He writes his routine like a movie or a musical score where every note matters, every pause matters. That’s not me.”

Early in his career in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he tried Seinfeld’s method. But it didn’t work for him. “I spent so much time memorizing it, I was losing the funny,” he said.

Instead, he feeds off the audience and adjusts as he goes.

“I do a long rant about banning books,” he said. “But it changes every night. I’ll move pieces around. I kind of know where I’m going but sometimes I get off an exit ramp and leave everyone behind.”

Black admits that this means he’ll bomb on occasion. “It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “That’s part of the reason why some people show up. They want to watch a joke blow up in my face.”

Black was able to funnel his persona into Anger in the 2015 Pixar film “Inside Out,” a massive hit where emotions such as Joy, Sadness, Fear and Anger were embodied as characters in the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. It took 11 years, but the sequel is coming out June 14 and Black is back.

“I never thought it would happen,” he said. “I didn’t think they could pull it off.”

Though Black hasn’t yet seen the final version, he likes how “Inside Out 2″ explores puberty by advancing Riley two years to the age of 13 and adding an array of additional emotion characters such as Anxiety, Envy, Ennui and Embarrassment.

“We went from being a string quartet to an orchestra of sorts,” he said. “But I still get a chunk of lines.”