As the nation's first black president, Barack Obama means a wealth of material for "Chocolate News," David Alan Grier's fearless spoof of a black-oriented news magazine show.

Grier is having a ball with "Chocolate News," which airs Wednesdays on Comedy Central. The show bills itself as "the only source for pure, uncircumcised realness from an Afro-centric perspective" (in the bombastic words of DAG, the host Grier portrays).

The new series made clear right away that nothing in the black experience would be spared from its lampooning.

In a single half-hour on last month's premiere, it targeted hip-hop culture, the N-word and Maya Angelou (with the chameleonic Grier letter-perfect as this literary grande dame, just one of many impersonations he nails in the show's field reports).

Another report interviewed members of a Detroit street gang to find out how skyrocketing gas prices have crippled urban lawlessness.

"We can't even afford to do drive-bys," groused one thug. "What are we supposed to do — drive smart cars? Ride bikes?"

In many ways, "Chocolate News" is a latter-day version of "In Living Color," the innovative Fox series starring Keenen Ivory Wayans where Grier first proved his skill in sketch comedy two decades ago.

A couple of years ago, he began monitoring TV to see what was missing.

He found an absence of black comedy shows, so he started plotting how to fill the sketch-comedy void left by Dave Chappelle's abrupt exit from series TV in early 2006.

In packaging his own sketch show, Grier decided to parody a "Tony Brown or Tavis Smiley quote-unquote black show — unrepentantly black, and only for black people. I thought that was where the comedy would be: Regardless of the issue, even if it had nothing to do with black people, we would find the blackness in it!"

Then Grier inflated his own soft-voiced, affable manner into DAG's overbearing personality: a program host who's pompous and preachy, full of urgency and pique, yet "above-the-fray in his peach suit."

The show's for-blacks-only masquerade is only part of the comic cocktail, which is also spiked with racial caricatures and satire that, in less capable hands, might leave the audience wondering just whom the joke is on.

Grier leaves no doubt that the joke is on everybody.

"America is grappling with cultural diversity," he says, "and I just want to put a show on that represents the world in which I live."

But he hastens to add that he didn't figure on the rise of Obama.

"I think he may have just started running when we began planning the show," Grier says. "Never in a million years did I think that he would get this far. He was a freshman senator! He was running against Hillary!"

Though an unexpected bonus for "Chocolate News," the likelihood of an Obama administration disrupted the show's production schedule.

"We had planned to shoot all the shows before the election," says Grier. "But once it was clear he was going to be the nominee, we had to take a hiatus so we could respond to his candidacy."

Who knows what "Chocolate News" will have to say this week? Not even Grier, who will guarantee topicality by taping in-studio segments only hours before airtime Wednesday.