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When a performer follows a run on “Dancing With the Stars” with a role in a new David Mamet play, you have to admit, now there’s an interesting guy.
David Alan Grier is certainly that. The comic actor — who competed on the ballroom dancing show last season — will appear next in “Race,” which opens on Broadway in December. As Mamet, one of America’s leading playwrights, explained in the New York Times, the play is about “race and the lies we tell each other on the subject.”
Grier also has a new book out that explores politics, culture and race, “Barack Like Me: The Chocolate-Covered Truth” ($24.99, Touchstone). It’s interesting. And amusing. And edgy. And kind of profound. Best of all, it’s unpredictable.
If you’ve read other books by comedians, you know how they usually go: personal anecdote, joke, observation on human behavior, joke, another anecdote, joke, joke, joke. By the time you’re finished, it feels as though you’ve been smacked in the face by the print version of a laugh track.
But Grier, who became famous for his characters on “In Living Color,” wanted to create a different kind of book. “I hope, in a good way, that you don’t sit there and read and, you know, ‘Hey, have you ever noticed when you eat Cheez Doodles, your hands ... turn orange?’ I wasn’t trying to write that,” he says by phone. “I was trying to be honest and, also, in my own voice and my own sense of humor.”
“Barack Like Me” is a candid memoir that describes his years growing up in Detroit’s Boston-Edison neighborhood, his journey to becoming an actor, his experiences at Barack Obama’s inauguration (the view from his crowded spot was blocked by “the Shaquille O’Neal of trees,” he writes, but being there was “deeply, innately uplifting”), and, yes, his stint on “Dancing.”
Some moments in the book are endearingly seen through a young person’s eyes, like the story of how ice cream figures into his memories of being a tired, cranky kid at the historic 1963 Detroit march led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In one chapter, he recalls sitting on his grandmother’s lap and listening to stories from when she was a child in the segregated South. “It was only when I got older and more analytical that I saw her stories for what they really were: sad histories, cautionary tales and, often, horror stories,” he writes.
Even the hilarious, over-the-top section on what happened behind the scenes at “Dancing” has a relevance to America’s continuing discussion on race and culture, according to Grier.
“It was fun to talk about and, in a perverse way, the joke I was trying to make was that, in a very populist sense, ‘Dancing With the Stars’ does represent post-racial America. ... It’s one of those shows where it doesn’t matter what race you are. It doesn’t matter your socio-economic status. Any cheesy person can win that glittery ball,” he says.
Although Grier prefaces the book with the fact that he and his wife (who appears frequently in the narrative) are in the process of divorcing, “Barack Like Me” is ultimately a story of humor and hope.
It’s not about punch lines. “It’s also not me trying to write ‘Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot,’” says Grier, referring to the book by Al Franken.
“It’s just more about that glorious time in my life growing up in Detroit and reliving all that time when Barack was first elected. It was like the country went on vacation for about 48 hours and everybody was happy.”
