Viacom
“You look nervous,” I tell Michael Ian Black, and he readily agrees.
“I went into this conversation, and continue to be in it, with terrible trepidation and angst,” he admits.
Black usually exhibits a preternatural ability to muse on virtually any topic. As a stand-up comedian, his onstage persona can be best described as “smug asshole” (his words). In Wet Hot American Summer, he played a sandpaper-dry camp counselor. On sketch-comedy shows The State and Stella, he cultivated an absurdist meta-comedy that appealed to media-saturated nerds like him. His latest project, a podcast, is a serialized deconstruction of the 19th century Thomas Hardy novel Jude the Obscure, just to get a sense of his esoteric cultural leanings.
But now, he hesitates. He pauses between sentences. He…
