By Nick A. Zaino III Globe correspondent, Updated March 20, 2024, 6:22 p.m.
There are few things you can count on in life. Death. Taxes. And Lewis Black eventually playing a theater near you, no matter where you live. Black, known for his rants on “The Daily Show” and as the voice of Anger in Pixar’s “Inside Out” franchise, has kept a grueling touring schedule for 35 years. This year, he’s giving it one last push with his “Goodbye Yeller Brick Road, The Final Tour.” He plays the Wilbur Friday and again in September before he finally takes some time to relax and pursue other projects.
That doesn’t mean he won’t do a few theaters again sometime in the future, or that he won’t pop up as a guest on someone else’s tour. It does mean that his days as a road dog, spending most of his time traveling and touring, are done. “I’m gonna do less shows,” he says. “A lot less shows. More than likely what will occur is, a number of times a year I’ll hopefully do ‘The Rant Is Due’ as kind of a live show in many places.”
In his “Daily Show” editorials, onstage, and in his “Rantcast” podcast, Black has made a career out of ranting about everything from politics to the weather. On the latter topic, he once joked about experiencing five seasons in four days during a February in Boston. “It was 30, it was 60, it was 90, it was 12,” he yelled. “On the last day, there was thunder, lightning, and snow — together. And I hadn’t done drugs.”
The “Rant Is Due” segment is a portion of his show in which he reads rants sent to him by audience members. A book based on those rants is just one of the projects he’s thinking of once the tour ends. His alma mater, the University of North Carolina, has a collection of his writings, including books and plays he hasn’t read in years, and he plans to comb them for ideas.
