Michael Ian Black Is Just Trying to Figure It Out

A handful of other networks have tried and failed to bring Have I Got News for You to this side of the pond. Black appeared in a pilot for an NBC version years ago that never got off the ground. So when CNN came calling, he was skeptical at first.

“I definitely was like, ‘Why is CNN doing this? This doesn’t make any sense to me,'” he says over brunch in New York City a few days before filming the show’s premiere episode. “So I asked that question to CNN. I’m like, ‘Well, this doesn’t make any sense to me.’ They said, which I didn’t know, that they had been airing Bill Maher’s show on Saturday nights in reruns and that it had been performing really well for them. So they saw an opportunity there, and they were looking for something to pair it with to expand their weekend program from just Sunday originals to Saturday originals, and so this seemed like a good fit. So when it was explained to me, I was like, ‘Oh, you’re smarter than I thought you were.'”

Of course, any time a beloved series — especially a BBC staple that’s been on the air for 34 years — gets adapted for a new audience, there are fans worried about how it’ll translate. As one particularly harsh Reddit commenter put it, “Americans do not have the level of self-deprecation, self-loathing or wit required for this.” (“I absolutely have as much self-loathing as I need to do this job,” Black says with a laugh.) But the goal was never to simply replicate the British version here in the States, and Black says CNN has encouraged Wood, Ruffin and him to put their own spin on the 10-episode season.

“They’ve been very respectful of Roy, Amber and I, in terms of just letting us do what we do and never saying, ‘Well, in the British version they do this or they do that,'” he says. “I think they’re very cognizant of the fact that this has to stand on its own two legs with an American cast doing it the way we would do it. So I’m sure the architecture of it, the way the show is constructed and the design and the games that are within it, that’s all lifted right from the British one. But in terms of how we execute it here, they haven’t really given us any notes other than ‘go as far as you wanna go,’ which is the best possible note to receive.”

Watching the easy back-and-forth between the trio on Have I Got News for You, you’d never guess that they’d never worked together prior to filming. But according to Black, they instantly connected when filming a test episode of the show.

“It felt so familiar and so comfortable, and they were so funny. It felt to me like we’d been doing it for years. I was shocked,” he says. “I really was. I think all of us have enough experience in that format — sitting on a stage, there’s an audience, there’s four or five cameras, and you’re just, like, shooting the shit. I think it felt natural for all of us, and a very easy place to sort of fall into. The X factor always is, ‘Well, what’s the chemistry gonna be like?’ So far, so good. I mean, they were making fun of me. I was making fun of them. They were making fun of each other. That’s all that you want. That’s all that I want.”

That said, doing a comedy show on a cable news network is not without its potential challenges. These are undeniably dark times we’re living in, and while HIGNFY does have the advantage of having the similarly toned Real Time with Bill Maher as a lead-in, it’s entirely possible that there will be times when the week’s news is simply too horrific to mine for comedy. Black says he’s unsure exactly how things would play out in that situation, but he’s confident that there’s room for serious conversation on the show as well.

“If there’s some tragedy or something, or I should say when there’s some tragedy or something, it’s entirely possible we’ll be preempted that week, depending on the nature of whatever’s happening,” he says. “And personally I’d be fine with that. I’m not trying to get up on September 13 to joke about September 11. You know what I mean? I think my approach would be to treat events with the seriousness that they deserve. That doesn’t mean that you can’t find humor in them, but then there’s just some things that just are not gonna be funny. And I will not try to make them funny. If a school shooting happens, you’re not gonna see me up there making armpit fart noises over it. I’m just not.”

On the contrary, whenever the disgustingly familiar happens yet again and another kid with too-easy access to a military-grade weapon commits a mass murder, Black is one of the louder voices calling for gun control. His book A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son is a must-read exploration of modern masculinity, inspired by a desire to delve into the root causes of these shootings and explore why 98 percent of the perpetrators behind them are boys and men. As anyone who’s spent any significant amount of time on Twitter knows, these are hot-button issues, and posting about them — especially if you’re a public figure like Black, who has racked up roughly 1.7 million followers on the platform — can attract all sorts of trolls and nut-jobs. 

Black admits that “my block button is in heavy rotation on my keyboard,” but if you follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his Substack, you’ll frequently see him replying to the people who comment on his posts. It’s not always contentious, of course. (“On Substack, it’s just about if somebody’s gonna take the time to read my writing and they want to comment on it, like I wanna respond and reciprocate,” he shrugs. “And it’s small enough that I can do that easily.”) But Black’s not afraid to engage with people on social media who disagree with him.

“On Twitter, I learned very early on that I’m not gonna change anybody’s mind about anything, and I no longer try,” he explains. “I’m not trying to change anybody’s mind. What I’m trying to do is engage with people on the basis of their arguments, not because I’m trying to convince them, but because I’m trying to help people who may feel the way I do but don’t necessarily know how to approach these conversations. And I don’t either, a lot of times. So a lot of times when I’m engaging, it’s not because I’m so sure of my own position, it’s to understand my own position better. It’s to be able to defend my own position, so that if I were to have a conversation with you in real life, and something would come up, I might have an actually informed opinion rather than just kind of knee-jerk liberal response to something.”

It’s not just random people on the internet, however: Black isn’t shy about calling out his fellow comedians, either, whether it’s appearing in the recently released Louis C.K. documentary Sorry/Not Sorry (the trailer for which ends with Black pointing out that “Louis had a whole bit about how the greatest threat to women is men. Louis could still do that bit and say, ‘And I was one of those guys.'”), penning a blog post about the time Andrew “Dice” Clay threatened to kick his ass or writing a piece about Joe Rogan’s lazy use of slurs in his latest special.

“It feels hypocritical of me to call out politicians for shitty behavior and then somehow not call out fellow comics for shitty behavior,” he says. “I didn’t wanna be that guy…Like, in the case of Rogan in particular, he has such a massive platform. He’s such an influential part of the culture that when he releases a special and the punchline to one of his jokes is ‘faggot,’ I’m like, ‘You can do better. And you owe it to your audience to do better.’ Because he knows who his audience is and he knows the influence he has over them, so when he’s giving them moral license to be assholes, they’re gonna take that license.”

“And I don’t think it’s enough when you’re at Joe Rogan’s level to say, ‘I’m just a comic,'” he continues. “You’re not. For better or worse, and whether the term actually applies to you in particular, you’re a thought leader. And I think, if it was me, I just think you have a responsibility there to not make things worse for people. And I know that’s not his intention. I really, in my heart, I believe that. But that’s the effect that it has. And so, Joe Rogan doesn’t give a shit about what I think. Joe Rogan doesn’t know who I am. But I thought it was incumbent on me, just on my own conscience, to call it out.”

“There’s really only two things that are on my mind at any given moment — maybe three things,” Black says matter-of-factly, and if you only know him from TV, two out of the three might surprise you. “Politics, UFOs and poker. Really the only three things I think about with any regularity.”

The poker thing makes sense: He’s a multi-hyphenate in the truest sense. In addition to acting, comedy, writing and podcasting, Black is a skilled poker player who has shared a table with professionals on The Big Game. He’s been playing since he was a kid, he says, and he likes that it requires a totally different skill set than comedy. “It’s a way of applying logic, which I’m terrible at. Psychology, math, which I’m also terrible at,” he explains. “And if you do it well, they hand you money.”

His passion for UFOs is maybe a little more unexpected — until you hear him start to unpack it. What began as a childhood interest when he was growing up in the ’70s was reignited in 2017 when a New York Times article revealed a secret Pentagon program dedicated to investigating reports of unidentified flying objects.

“They’re like, ‘Yeah, we’ve been studying UFOs for decades.’ And you’re like, ‘Wait, you told us that you hadn’t been. You told us for decades that you hadn’t been, that there was nothing to it. And now you’re saying there is?’ So at the very least, that’s a very compelling story,” he says. Regardless of whether or not you believe in extraterrestrials, he argues, what’s more intriguing are all the unanswered questions surrounding the topic.

“The thing that I find so fascinating about this whole topic is whatever the explanation is, even the most prosaic explanation is going to be fascinating,” he adds. “Because the most prosaic explanation is the U.S. has somehow developed tech or somebody has developed tech that nobody else has and nobody else even understands. That’s a fascinating story. Or we are all, the U.S. and globally, the victims of some sort of bizarre global disinformation campaign, which in a way makes less sense than the alternative. Because you have these reports everywhere in the world, Russia, China, Brazil, Mexico, all of Europe, the U.S., Canada, everywhere. So like whatever the explanation, none of it makes sense. And that to me is what I love. I just love the mystery of it. In a way, I don’t wanna know. Like I’m just so enraptured with the mystery.”

Spend a few hours with him, and you’ll quickly find that his natural curiosity extends to just about everything, including more mundane earthly matters. For someone who’s got a new project to promote, he manages to pose an impressive amount of questions of his own to me and everyone else around him during our interview and photoshoot: What’s my favorite Greek diner in the city? Do I have a family? What part of Chicago am I from? What type of music does the woman doing his hair, who mentions her other career as a DJ, typically spin? Is “spin” still the correct terminology? 

It’s all small talk — just being a pleasant person, really — but it can be a rarity in these sorts of situations, and I’m reminded of it again when, a few days later, Black posts a note of gratitude to his Substack a few hours before filming Have I Got News for You‘s first episode where he describes sitting in his dressing room “thinking about the fact that it’s been literal years since I had a steady TV gig, and the fact that I was ready to give up entirely when this thing fell into my lap.”

“Most of us are just trying to figure something out about ourselves and our world,” he writes. “Maybe that sounds high-falutin’, but isn’t that the nature of all art? To cast our line into the wide waters of the world and see what we catch? Isn’t that the crux of being a human?”

Maybe he’ll get a chance to cast that line a little further out with Have I Got News for You. Though he’s quick to make a wry joke about how it’ll “probably be canceled in six to eight weeks,” he’s got high hopes for it. “I would love to have the same kind of cultural cache that Jon Stewart did during the Bush years on The Daily Show,” he says. “That sort of, ‘Did you hear what Jon Stewart said?’ If we could get some of that, I’d be thrilled.”

Ultimately, however, for all the social media debates and all the different hats he wears, he sees himself as more of a professional observer than anything else.

“I’m not an activist, will never be an activist,” he clarifies. “Because I don’t have those kinds of organizational skills. I don’t have that kind of footwear where I’m gonna be out here marching around, holding up placards and shouting, ‘This is what democracy looks like.’ It’s just not me. But I do think I can make contributions the way I make contributions, which is by saying dumb shit on Twitter — or now on CNN.”

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