Tuned In

Chocolate News Tops Comedy Central's Vanilla Sundae

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Tonight, Comedy Central debuts David Allan Grier’s Chocolate News, the melanin-enriched newsmagazine partner to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, attempting three years after Chappelle’s Show to launch a counterpart to the aforementioned, more-vanilla news satires. First, the good news. The following monologue, in which DAG exhorts America to “vote for the white half” of Barack Obama—and argues that the McCain-Palin ticket is the “blacker” choice—is hilarious:

The bad news: unless it was edited in at the last minute, this bit is not actually in tonight’s series premiere, as sent to critics on DVD. The episode we will see has its moments, but—in the spirit of Grier’s Obama rant—it’s mixed.


Instead, Grier’s inaugural rant tees off on hip-hop, and how it’s gone from what Chuck D called “the black CNN” to a materialistic, sex-crazy black Home Shopping Network. “What the hell happened to you, hip hop?” he demands. “When did ‘Fight the Power’ become ‘Wait ‘Til You See My ____’?” It’s a good enough riff, and Grier shows a rant-comic’s preacherly intensity, but it has the feeling of something that’s been in the can way too long. It’s the sort of “My people! My people!” monologue that we’ve heard before—repeatedly from Chris Rock, for instance—and could have been done any time in the last decade or so.

Hopefully, this is just a symptom of the need to wrap a pilot well in advance and future episodes will be able to play off current events better and more freshly. (If Obama wins the election, and maybe even if he loses, DAG could be riding a zeitgeist tsunami.) The first episode follows up with a scripted report on “Phat Man,” a rapper who produces a series of age-inappropriate “educational” videos for the No Child Left Behind program. (Think of alternative meanings for “behind,” and let your imagination take over.) The sketch could have used cutting even if Grier’s takedown of hip-hop hadn’t already rendered it redundant.

Much better—if a little rarefied of a reference—is Grier’s dead-on impersonation of Maya Angelou, composing inaugural poems for Obama and McCain, respectively. I’m not sure how many Comedy Central viewers will be familiar enough with the cadences of Angelou’s poetry to see how well Grier gets her. But the skit works regardless, and I like the show’s willingness to be specific: to make references and do satires that not everyone will necessarily get, and to do black-culture-specific jokes (like the “brown paper bag test” in the Obama video above).

In all, not a great debut, but one with potential, and it shows off Grier’s versatility well. The test of the show will come in how well it can keep itself timely. For now, as DAG says in his Obama monologue, half will have to do.