Lewis Black delivers escalating angry rants with yelling and finger-pointing. Inside Out puts his familiar belligerence to good use: Anger’s short fuse comes with a concern for fairness, and other voices get a say.
Fi1m perspective
In Inside Out (2015), Lewis Black’s Anger has to share the control room, which is a useful arrangement for a performer so practised at getting louder. Amy Poehler’s insistently cheerful Joy and Phyllis Smith’s hesitant Sadness give him temperaments to push against. We laughed at these discussions because Black, Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling make the competing feelings sound like a family trying to settle something. Pete Docter gets good ensemble work from a voice that could easily dominate. Black’s short fuse is funny, but the concern for fairness beneath it makes this casting more than an obvious joke.
His familiar method is to build a complaint into a rant, with shouting, pointing fingers and a body that joins in the protest. Theatre work preceded his move to full-time stand-up in the late 1980s; the recurring Back in Black segment on The Daily Show followed in 1996. There are live-action roles too, including Uncle Ben in Accepted (2006), but the casting of Anger makes particularly direct use of his established persona. The animated part gives that familiar delivery a job within a group.
The weakness of the rant is repetition: once the volume starts rising, the next step can be easy to guess. Casting him chiefly for that familiar belligerence does not help. This is why the company in Inside Out matters: Hader’s Fear and Kaling’s Disgust add to the discussion, and Anger cannot be the whole conversation. Docter occasionally slows the film down with explanations. The cast’s competing temperaments are a more enjoyable way of making the feelings understandable.
Kelsey Mann’s Inside Out 2 (2024) brings Black back as Anger in a sequel we found kind and funny, but too close to the first film’s map. Our reservation is with the repeated story, not with the idea of bringing this voice back. There is less here to recommend than in Docter’s film, even if the familiar casting still makes sense. Start with the first Inside Out, and pay attention to how welcome Smith’s quieter delivery becomes among the louder voices.
Biography
Lewis Black is an American actor and stand-up comedian. He was born on 30 August 1948 in Silver Spring, Maryland. He studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received an MFA from Yale University.
Black is known for voicing the character Anger in the Pixar films Inside Out (2015) and Inside Out 2 (2024). His other screen credits include Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Jacob's Ladder (1990), Accepted (2006) and guest appearances in series such as The Big Bang Theory and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
