Lewis Black is having problems with his TV reception. Although he’s a seven-year veteran of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, a Yale School of Drama graduate who’s written more than 40 plays, and an instructor at the prestigious Williamstown Theatre Festival every year, it seems he can’t get his own projects off the ground. Within the past year, he’s had two separate sit-coms rejected after network executives at Fox and CBS appeared to have sealed the deal.

"All of a sudden, after years now, they’re a little worried that ‘he hasn’t been in a sit-com,’ " Black, who’ll be at the Comedy Connection next Saturday, says over the phone from a Chicago hotel. "That’s the kind of mentality that makes America great. That kind of taking a risk."

It’s not that there’s been any lack of TV ideas, from Black himself and from writers who admire the ballistic on-stage personality he’s developed for his stand-up persona and for his "Back in Black" segments on The Daily Show. But something always seems to bollox the projects, and he’s getting sick of it. "I’m in a constant state of negotiation on a bunch of things, and there’s always a bunch of other things that people say, ‘Can we put your name on the project?’ And I go, ‘Sure.’ All of these projects are out there, and none of them seems to come to fruition. But it allows me to go to a bunch of fake meetings and have real lunches."

It doesn’t seem to help even when other writers pitch ideas to the networks with him in mind. In one potential pilot, his character was given to French Stewart after the network balked at Black in a lead role. And that giant milk carton who yells at kids on basketball courts and sings with the elderly in nursing homes in the milk commercials? Well, let’s just say Black’s original version was a bit edgier. He nursed one pilot for CBS into maturity with a team of writers, only to be dropped from the project twice as executives tinkered with the lead role. "They literally say, ‘Lew’s the only one in the running, but we’re going to look at other people,’ " he explains, with a frustrated laugh. "They look at Steve Guttenberg. I’m like, you know, please."

Black will get a respite of sorts from network-executive madness this summer. He’ll return to Williamstown to teach for a week and host a cabaret show at the end of July. A theater tour with Dave Attell is in the works for this fall. And this winter in LA, he’ll see the first production of his new play One Slight Hitch.

In the meantime, he still has a prime spot on one of the funniest shows on television, and he won’t be abandoning the stand-up stage anytime soon. He considers himself fortunate to have other endeavors to sustain him through his television quagmire. "I’m lucky. I don’t really lick my wounds anymore because I’ve got an audience. When the Fox thing fell through or when this other thing fell through, I was flying somewhere to work in front of 1500 people, so it doesn’t get any better than that."

Lewis Black appears at the Comedy Connection at Faneuil Hall next Saturday, July 19, at 7 and 11:15 p.m.; call (617)248-9700.