If you’ve been despairing the dearth of “Chocolate News” since David Alan Grier’s Comedy Central show of the same name went off the air earlier this year, perk up:

The former “In Living Color” star’s first book “Barack Like Me: The Chocolate Covered Truth” brings some back.

Although it’s organized around vignettes about last year’s presidential election and inauguration, the book mostly avoids direct politics. Instead, we’re regaled with stories about having to follow Obama’s victory speech at a Century City election night party (“I am not about to follow the first black president. I’ll be like those Swedish acrobats who followed The Beatles on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’”), engaging in a full-scale panic attack when he and his wife cross the country to attend the inauguration only to find that his coveted Purple Tickets don’t seem to have met them in the lobby as planned, his remarkably canny decision not to follow the crowd that ended up in the Purple Tunnel of Doom, and fantasizing about an invitation to name his own Cabinet Post (“Secretary of Mirth,” of course).

These stories are heavy on the bliss, that dreamy hope-and-change buzz that literally millions of us floated on as 2008 gave way to 2009. You remember, right? The giddiness that prompted an election-night crowd to cheer a tough-talking comedian who wept copiously instead of giving a congratulatory speech. The “JOY…as pervasive and powerful as a scent, a sweet aroma that overtakes you and dominates the air, virtually becoming the air itself” while walking around Georgetown the night before the inauguration. The sudden, solid sense of community that made it seem natural for a woman separated from her husband and sons during the ceremony to ask Grier, “Would you be my family?” — and him to respond, “Absolutely.”

On “Chocolate News,” Grier breaks down things that white people should be prepared to give up in light of Obama being elected president:

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Giving it Up
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Yeah, it all seems a little fuzzy now. Quaint and practically antiquated. Grier acknowledges this straightaway in the preface: “When I handed in this book back in April 2009, Barack Obama was riding high and I was a happily married man. Now it’s more than six months later. Barack’s approval ratings have fallen and so have mine,” the latter evidenced by the recent divorce proceedings between Grier and his wife. The contrast between his heady in-the-moment prose and today’s significantly more dreary conventional wisdom, though, just makes me all the more glad that he wrote it down when he did. “I’m here to bear witness” he says — partly to remind himself that his fully obstructed view isn’t a total loss — and in so doing, doesn’t let us forget where we’ve come from.

Other stories, threaded through his inaugural escapades, take the same tack from the opposite angle and remind us where we came from before that. He remembers growing up in Detroit, marching at the age of eight with 200,000 of his neighbors and Martin Luther King Jr. in a rally whose most memorable moment was a blessed three ice cream cones at the end. He talks about getting mercifully and summarily rejected by the Black Panthers after a timid knock on their bullet-riddled front door, then an about-face in his teenage search for identity to become Jimi Hendrix. (Well, “To be honest,” he says, “I am not just Jimi Hendrix. I am also his guitar. … He is the baddest (er, dude) in the world. And he is black. There is no better combination.”)

There are heavier stories, too: learning of a half-white great-grandmother and his own grandmother’s difficulty in explaining just how that came to be, back when “a woman of color had no choice”; or the time a Birmingham, Ala. bus driver gives his favorite auntie the choice between stranding her in the middle of nowhere and shutting her in the luggage compartment after a white man booted her out of the last available seat.

The clearest contrast Grier presents between where we’ve been and where we’re going comes in a chapter called “Death of the Angry Black Man,” positing that the years of idolizing Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X and Linc Hayes from “The Mod Squad” have given way to a kinder, gentler vision ushered in by Barack Obama (one that might someday convince white people to stop hitting their cars’ automatic lock buttons and flooring the gas every time they see a black man on the street). But it’s the chapter’s very existence that’s the testament: in it, he describes his parents’ divorce, which began with his psychologist father moving to San Francisco to have a midlife crisis and ultimately coauthoring his own first book, “Black Rage,” a 1968 bestseller published after the assassination of King and the subsequent riots.

That his son could pronounce that rage passé a mere four decades later with even a modicum of truth is an impressive example of progress. Does Grier really think we’ve made that much progress? “Yeah, I do,” he said by phone from California. “For a lot of reasons. Before Barack Obama, I think every Democrat had to go through that black political generation the came up through the civil rights movement. ... But he represents a new generation, someone who’s more after the civil rights movement. And this represents a great stride ahead.”

This new climate made it all the more heartbreaking when “Chocolate News,” Grier’s own show on current events presented from a black angle, got cancelled barely two weeks after the inauguration. What’s it going to take to get black news into the mainstream media? “I do not know,” he said flatly. “It’ll take the owner of a network to get into it. The ratings, that’s all there is in the entire television spectrum. So it takes a commitment from the network.” But even that explanation seemed a little mystifying — black people watch plenty of TV, and the show did plenty of talking about the hottest seller in all of media, which was Barack Obama. “We joked that we should have just renamed the show ‘Obamaville.’”

Toward the end of the book, Grier’s stories lean less on this arc and focus more on his acting career, from a lackluster beginning at the University of Michigan to getting discovered in New York City via an exhaustion-inspired song and dance on top of an ice cream parlor counter to turning down “In Living Color” repeatedly until a Wayans sister made the offer in a tone that included a definite “…or else.” There are plenty of tidbits for the true fan, like an appearance by Mike Tyson that reveals the boxer doesn’t have much of a stomach for self-deprecating humor and also that he doesn’t just bite ears, and the painful irony of getting a colonoscopy and having your TV show cancelled on the same day. There’s some foreshadowing that the bliss is rapidly edging into oblivion — heck, the last chapter is titled “This Is Gonna End Badly” — but these stories feel a bit wedged in, as though Grier wanted to paint a sweeping picture about race and progress but couldn’t resist using a minute on the platform to tell us why he freaked out at reporters after getting canned from “Dancing With the Stars.”

Still, Grier could retype the phone book and make it funny. And the only thing better than reading his stories is sure to be hearing him tell them, which we’ll get our chance to do when he comes to the Ann Arbor District Library at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 18 to read from and sign “Barack Like Me.”

Can’t make the library event in the afternoon? David Alan Grier will also stop by the University of Michigan’s Arthur Miller Theater in the Walgreen Drama Center at 10 a.m. on the same day for a presentation aimed at students of his alma mater — but it’s a free, non-ticketed event to which the public is welcome.

Leah DuMouchel is a freelance writer who covers books for AnnArbor.com.