Interviewing David Alan Grier was going to be great; his show, Chocolate News, was nearly as funny as its partner The Daily Show on Comedy Central. He wrote it, acted it, produced it. The show got great reviews, and now he was coming to Denver for two nights of stand-up.

Instead, the interview was bittersweet. Grier had just gotten the word two weeks before that Chocolate News had been canceled because of the economy. Yes, it had gotten critical acclaim and decent ratings, and, yes, its look at news through the eyes of the black community was the perfect formula now that Barack Obama was president. In normal times, a network would be insane to not stick with it.

But it was a top-notch show — with great writers, performers, production values and the big budget those things require. The economic downturn just couldn’t sustain that. Comedy Central told him it simply couldn’t afford it. When we spoke, the normally gregarious Grier had deep hurt in his voice, grieving over having lost one of the best parts of his career for seemingly no reason. What made matters worse, he said, was that whenever he told friends and colleagues the bad news they thought he was pulling their leg.

I read that you didn’t do serious stand-up until after In Living Color was a hit. Why was that? The path is usually the other way around.
“Yeah. I’d never gone on the road. I’d done it a couple of times, but it was not what I wanted to do. I would do it for fun, to just hang out with my friends. A lot of my friends were stand-up comics at the time.”

Were you too busy with In Living Color?
“No, this was before that show. What happened was when In Living Color hit, within six months colleges called to book me and I had no act. I had five minutes or whatever. I’d do spots. I never went out of town. I thought you did comedy to get on television. . . . Once the show hit so hard so fast I decided to try it, see if I liked it.”

Was it a difficult transition?
“I was just nervous to get 45 minutes of material that I really liked. Like I said, there were 10 killer minutes and the rest was just filler. It took a while for me to write, and I never have people write my material for me so it took a while to get a set that I really liked.”

How much stand-up work are you doing these days?
“As much as I want. I’m doing more because the show’s not up right now. So it’s up to me. I work as much as I want to work and go where I want to go. In terms of venues and cities. For a long time I only wanted to do towns that I actually could hang out in, like Washington and Boston and Miami. Any place where I didn’t want to be there I wouldn’t do. I’d do the same venues once a year. Right now I’m trying to expand my audience and my market and play places I haven’t played before. And go back to places I haven’t played in a while.”

Tell me about Chocolate News. It looks like it has a fairly big budget. Do you have free rein to make the show the way you want it?
“We just got canceled.”

NO!
“Yes. I’m so depressed. (Sighs, then laughs loudly). To answer your question about the show, they did give me a free hand. It was to spoof all those really bad for-black-people-only shows. . . . All of a sudden the Obama thing happened and we had to respond to it, you know? Which was fine, but . . . it was a sketch show. But I wanted to do a higher concept sketch show. Since Dave Chappelle went off everyone went, ‘We’ll just get a black guy in front of a camera, audience. We’ll throw to some sketches of him. It’s going to be a big huge hit.’ And nothing worked because that was uniquely Dave Chappelle’s take. To try and think outside of that and come up with something different. . . . I loved the show. I really got some of the best reviews I’ve ever gotten in my career. The critics loved it. What I was told was we didn’t perform up to what their expectation of the show was.”

Wow. I would think that with the presidency they’d stick with that at least one more cycle . . .
“Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?”

. . . and see what happens.
“Let me put my gun down. (Laughs). Yeah, I agree. I couldn’t agree more. So it’s just been a long two weeks of telling people and getting, ‘Oh shut up, you’re such a kidder!’ ‘No, I’m serious, they canceled the show.’ So we’re trying right now to find a home for it. Try to continue on. Yeah, yeah, I thought that it was a no-brainer. I think people also in these economic times, people are getting laid off. We were talking about changes we wanted to make to the show — not major things, changes, tweaks. That’s just the word that came down.”

What is the economy doing to entertainment in general?
“They, Comedy Central, are looking for lower-budget shows. In these economic times, everybody’s nervous, everybody’s scared, especially in the networks. And that may be one of the deciding things. I can’t read their minds. I did really love working with them on the show because they were great to work with as a network. I’d liked to have had one more year. But that’s what it is. I’m still selling those bootleg Chocolate News T-shirts (laughs). They say when’s the show coming back? I’m saying you know what, it’s going to be late summer (laughs hard).”

The comics I’ve talked to lately say people are still coming out to shows.
“Yeah, they are, especially for me. If anything it’s been greater because of the show and just that flavor that I do on the show I bring to my live show . . . things have been going really well. But if you talk to club owners, fewer and fewer people can do that. Unless you have a show or something it’s just gotta be tough. That’s disposable income, and that’s the first thing (to go).”

Well, comedy is priced better than rock concerts.
“The rock-concert thing . . . that would be awesome if people were paying for $500 tickets for me, for my cheesy act.”

How has the election affected your stand-up?
“I talk a lot about Barack Obama. I went to the inauguration. It’s fun to have a fresh new topic. I’m writing a book that’ll be published in the fall. It’s just . . . I kinda missed the election. It was all exciting and leading up to this whole big thing, was it gonna happen. That was the most exciting election EVER. I’m really kinda still jonesing, like a lot of reporters are. Now it’s not history-making. Now it’s just boring presidential stuff, trying to get people appointed, which is great, but it’s not as much fun. No Clintons going nuts. Now, it’s just normal. I’m sure there’ll be some crazy stuff happening because that’s just the way the world is. Hopefully, it won’t be bad.”

What’s the book about?
“The book is about post-race America. How everything has changed. All the new rules. All the new etiquette of racial identification, awareness. All that stuff seemed to come to a head in the past two years. It seems like the Barack Obama presidency was part of it, but there was so much in society that was changing, you know what I mean? . . . It was like ‘Whoa, what the hell is going on?’ It was all that.

Do you ever run into people you make fun of? Dog the Bounty Hunter is from Denver and you eviscerated him on Chocolate News for his racist remarks.
“Isn’t he on Maui?”

Yes, but we claim him as a local guy.
“Lovely. Dog the Bounty Hunter. Shouldn’t white America have taken him out by now? I mean really. He’s making you all look bad. He and his wife. As a race, I leave it up to you. Dog the Bounty Hunter? (laughs). . . . He’s just the worst. He’s the worst. And he’s back on the air. They need to run him out.”

Is it as annoying being on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire as it is to watch it? Those long pauses?
“That’s a most bizarre question. I loved it. When I did the show it was right after 9/11, it was a charity to raise money for the firemen and the EMS workers, who were all there in the audience with their families. There was the extra pressure. If you (screwed) up, they didn’t get any money. So . . . you chose your charity, like the firemen’s widows charity or whatever. I just wanted to be better than Eve the rapper. It was wild.”

But you look at the clips and Regis Philbin was giving you a seriously hard time.
“In his Regis way, yeah. I like him. I’ve known him for a while. He was very sweet. . . . He and I had lunch sitting together. So there you go.”

I understand you’ve got quite the modern art collection. Tell me about it.
“A lot of the stuff is really abstract. It’s mostly young mid-career artists. A lot of artists now I can’t afford to buy. But I started a long time ago, and that’s how I met my wife, through my art collecting, when she worked at a museum that I patronized. It’s mostly that. All of it is American, a lot of African-American artists. It became a real passion, a real big part of my life, loaning works to shows that travel around the world, befriending artists, patronage of that sort. Frankly, I’m really happy that the art market has bottomed out although I’m unhappy that every other aspect of the economy bottomed out with it. When I started collecting it was right after the crash of the ‘80s, it was really fun. People wanted you in the gallery. Everyone was fighting over paintings, you had to get on a list. Hopefully, we can get back to a sensible living from Wall Street to dick jokes. Wow, I just said something deep there!”

What’s coming up?
I’m working on a new standup special. I don’t know when we’re going to film it, but now I have time. And Chocolate News will return in some other form. We’re just trying to find the proper venue.”

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David Alan Grier
8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Friday and 6:30 p.m., 8:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Saturday, Comedy Works, Larimer Square
$32
Information: www.comedyworks.com