Taming the jokes as D.C. comedy time begins

摘要

Manic comic Lewis Black gets Washington. A local boy who made it big on the Comedy Channel, Black knows that the city loves to laugh-just not at itself. So when he does his routine at the Radio & Television Correspondents' Association dinner on April 6, attended by the vice president and probably the president, he's going to skip the "F" word and be nice. He reasons that if questioners at President Bush's Social Security town halls are being screened, "you have to tread very lightly because they are very thin skinned." Ditto for the other spring political galas, like the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, featuring Cedric the Entertainer. Black, whose new bio, Nothing's Sacred, takes shots at Bush, reviewed one joke with us. Remember Janet Jackson flashing her breast at the Super Bowl? he asks. "I've never seen the Congress, everybody respond so fast-and there was nothing on TV. If you saw a breast, then you should be working for the CIA because your eyes are so super." He adds: "It was the kind of moment a man like me waits for. And I saw nothing."