False alarm is perfect timing for Lewis Black’s ‘Off the Rails’ show at Bass Hall

The comedic timing couldn’t have been more on the nose.

The fire alarm went off about three minutes into comic Lewis Black’s set at Bass Hall Saturday night.

A more perfect moment for Black’s “Off the Rails” tour would have to have to been scripted.

As the flashing lights, sirens, and prerecorded warnings to evacuate the building echoed across Bass Hall, Black blithely remained on the stage for several minutes, riffing on the peculiarity.

He immediately joked about those in the crowd of about 1,200 who weren’t familiar with his profane and sometimes caustic act as much of the audience sat wondering if they should exit or ride it out.

“That couldn’t be more perfect,” Black said immediately as a recorded voice started instructing patrons to exit the hall in an orderly fashion.

“Now I know I’m in Texas. All you have to do is cross that line,” Black quipped before a stage manager made it clear that the building had to be cleared before his act could resume.

“What, you think this is part of the act? You think I could afford this,” Black shot at a fan down close to the stage.

Black revealed that the only other time a fire alarm went off during his set was at Knuckleheads comedy club at the Mall of America in Minneapolis.

That night, he said, he performed his entire act with a fire alarm soundtrack.

Not long after Bass Hall was cleared, the audience returned to their seats, and Black was back on stage. All told, the false alarm — which Black told us was thought to have been set off by a censor in a men’s room — delayed the evening by about 25 minutes.

Back on stage, Black lamented that he has been trying to return to Bass Hall for years because he loves the room’s acoustics and that his set would now become secondary in our memories after the fire alarm.

“No matter what happens, no matter how this show goes, you will not remember my act at all,” he said.

That’s not completely true. Black’s 75-minute set was filled with trademarked rants on politicians, immigration, book-banning, and religion and peppered with enough expletives to prohibit much of it from a family newspaper.

“Somebody gets upset every night I perform,” he said early on during a defense of comedy. “‘Oh, I hope he doesn’t swear.’ That’s really the least of the problems.

“If people are going to get upset with what comedians have to say, then pay attention to the comic you’re going to see,” he said. “If you take a kid to go see a movie, you read the review. You don’t in the middle of it go, ‘I didn’t know they killed everybody.’

“Here’s what you have to realize about a joke if it upsets you that much. Once it’s over — and many people in the audience sometimes don’t seem to grasp this — the joke goes away,” he explained. “It doesn’t stay and hang around you, OK? It leaves the room. Why? Because there is another one coming on in. You should know, too, that when it leaves, it goes away completely. It won’t be waiting outside the theater looking for you in order to climb back up your ass.”

Whether he was lambasting books being banned from school libraries (“I would worry more about whether your child is reading than what they’re reading. If they’re reading, I would weep with joy”) or reflecting on his mother’s death at 104 last October, Black mined deep laughs from the mostly older Gen X and Baby Boomer generation.

After his mother’s death, Black got a call from the funeral home director, who told him he had some bad news.

“Worse than my mom dying,” Black asked incredulously. “‘The urn she ordered (years earlier) has been discontinued.’

“So my mother outlived her urn,” he said.

His father lived to 101, and Black argued that they never ate particularly healthy.

“Everything they ate had preservatives; hence, they were preserved,” he joked to thunderous laughter.

Much of his act examined comedy and how for much of the past decade, the news is often funnier than any comedian’s joke.

“I can’t keep up with it,” he said before referencing his opener Jeff Stilson’s joke about Budweiser, which has been trending on social media lately for its support for trans rights and the backlash from certain right-wing-leaning performers such as Kid Rock and Travis Tritt.

“He made the joke about Bud Light. I didn’t even know it happened,” mused a perplexed Black. “Jeff nailed the joke just by saying [Bud Light]. The jokes are coming so fast you don’t even need [a punchline].”

At various points in his set, Black took a story from a file sitting on the stage and read headlines and parts of stories he found enlightening to underscore his themes.

One included a flock of birds that takes a vote on which direction the flock would fly to underscore how democracy can work. Another highlighted the absurdity of gun laws.

“How do you satirize something that’s already satirical? How do I take something that’s already funny and make it funnier? You can’t! We’ve reached the point. I’m supposed to be crazier than what I see. Welp, ballgame over.”

He touched on the pandemic, social security remaining solvent, climate change, and religion.

He named names too — Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan, George Santos, and President Joe Biden — and took shots at both sides for failing to compromise to get things done.

But mostly, he theorized about his job as a comic and how outlandish the daily headlines have become. You’d think it would make a comic’s job easier. Black argued that it’s the opposite.

“Anyone in this room could do their own George Santos joke,” he said. “‘You know, he’s the one that said that he had gone to the moon two years ago, and came back and then was a chef in one of the finest restaurants in North America, and then after that, he worked in Antarctica and talked to the penguins.’ You can say anything you want about George Santos and get a laugh. And he’s in Congress. He’s in Congress. He’s in Congress.

This is a liar, liar, pants on fire situation.

What do you think that tells kids? And we’re worried about kids reading banned books?”

Black closed the show with a somewhat serious appreciation for his audience — not only for those in Bass Hall who dealt with a fire alarm — but for his fans who keep returning to hear his take on the absurdities of our culture.

He reflected on realizing during the pandemic lockdown how badly he missed performing in front of live audiences.

“I realized, tragically, I need you,” he said, which is the title of his newest stand-up special which will be released on Black’s YouTube channel in early May.