If you haven’t been living on Mars these last years, you know Lewis Black as the caustic, bile-spewing, savagely funny stand-up comic, actor and Daily Show commentator. He’s the one with the manic moves of a Joe Cocker who’s spent too much time obsessing about our politics.

I love Black’s obsessions and his style which, according to a Wikipedia entry, “is that of a man who, dealing with the absurdities of life and politics, is approaching his personal limits of sanity.”

His Saturday night HBO special, “Red, White and Screwed” was full of rage and cursing–I counted 46 “fucks”– and some of his best routines.

“This last year has been the toughest time I’ve spent as a comedian. Can’t keep up with all this shit. Who can keep track. I don’t even have a ports of Dubai joke and we’re on to immigration. You tell mehow we’re going to catch eleven million people… How we’re going to build a wall thousands of miles long and we couldn’t build levees in New Orleans.”

“Bring it on,” Black said, was the “dumbest thing ever uttered by anyone anywhere.”

“I know what a neocon is. Someone who watches ‘The Matrix’ and believes it’s real.”

Black’s hilarious routine about performing at the Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner ensures that he will never, ever, be invited to do a routine at the White House Correspondents’ gig. Guaranteed.

Hear some funny, novel ideas about how we should pick our next president. (It has to do with American Idol.) Learn why we should consider nominating a dead person–(“no one will fuck with us for quite some time…” ). Listen to Black explain how much his parents hate Paul Wolfowitz, why Bush is nuts, and how he never believed a president, in his lifetime, would be elected who didn’t believe in evolution.

Black’s solo show is on HBO throughout the summer. Watch it.