Connect with Fast Company

This could get ugly. It's 10 a.m. and Lewis Black needs coffee. He pops his head in the kitchen of the West Bank Cafe, a fixture on Manhattan's West Side (and his unofficial office). But the place is dead, so the only thing here that's bitter and steaming is Black himself.

"Perfect," he groans.

Heading back outside, he squints at the sun as if he wants to stub it out like a cigarette. Then he marches grimly into...Starbucks.

Starbucks actually inspired the title of one of Black's CDs: The End of the Universe. In Houston, he encountered two of them across the street from each other--a violation, apparently, of the natural order: "If there was a just and loving God, he wouldn't have allowed that kind of s--t to go down!"

Fortunately for the baristas, it's early. Black is still in lowercase mode, his voice a raspy, venomous rumble. Grande latte in hand, he shuffles back to the West Bank, leaving the Starbucks intact--for now.

In the world of stand-up comedy, Black is the reigning rage-a-holic. On Comedy Central's The Daily Show and his HBO specials, his persona is Man on the Edge of an Aneurysm, a seething, gutter-mouthed, pop-eyed venter who's equally offended by duplicitous politicians, greedy CEOs, and endemic stupidity. You may have seen his spittle-spraying tirades, the way he STABS his WORDS into the EYE of the CAMERA, cursing as if he gets paid by the F-bomb. He's all spleen.

Black, 58, has established himself as a proxy for the rank-and-file citizen. He suffers--and explodes--so we don't have to. "My life," he says, "has boiled down to this: Get me there as soon as possible so I can start to bitch. It's sad."

But cathartic. After all, for every customer-service superstar, there remain a thousand (ten thousand? a million?) losers. Day-to-day service is a string of bad blind dates, an endless series of humiliations; Black, who does 250 stand-up gigs a year, lives a life of canceled flights, long lines, and missed hotel wake-up calls. "Three dollars a minute for technical assistance for my computer? If I'm going to spend that kind of F--KING money, I'd just as soon have phone sex."

As he likes to say, "There's not enough deodorant for this conversation!"

But it's a conversation that clearly connects with the country. Black's rage is all the rage: His latest HBO special, "Red, White & Screwed," hit the airwaves in June, a month before the paperback version of his best-selling memoir, Nothing's Sacred, was published. Barry Levinson's Man of the Year, starring Robin Williams and costarring Black, opens in October, one of four movies he'll appear in this year.

“The beginning of the end" of customer service, Black declares, "was when they took the simplest service of all--'Hi, I need a phone number'--and put a machine in. You're a phone company, F--KER! I mean, I'm really sorry they divided AT&T and all that, but C'MON! Just tell me, 'One of our representatives will be with ya in a minute.' Don't have this machine that you're refining and refining until it can guess every voice in America."