Word: blackness
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...Kureishi himself. For a quarter-century his films, plays and novels have captured the motley qualities of post-colonial Britain - its Karachi-born taxi drivers, jack-booted skinheads, coked-up admen and firebrand mullahs. His latest work, now playing at London's National Theatre, dramatizes his 1993 novel The Black Album. Set in 1989, during the furor over Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, it follows a British Pakistani college boy torn between the delights of sex and Western culture and the lure of Islamic fundamentalism. The book is a fresh and funny bildungsroman, capturing an antic '80s London. Sadly...
Back in the early 1990s, when Kureishi first started going to extremist London mosques for research for The Black Album, scribbling down notes at Friday sermons was weirdo stuff indeed. Today, with London still scarred from the 2005 bombings by British-born terrorists and the far-right British National Party winning seats in recent European parliamentary elections, the novel seems spookily prescient. Though its themes of radical faith and alienation endure, Kureishi's mosque visits didn't. One Friday, he recalls, the mullah at a mosque in London's East End warned that "there are spies and journalists...
...kind of sexual shenanigans that Clinton did, he mused, because Michelle wouldn't stand for it: "She would impeach him herself!" Obama's election victory was inevitable the minute Oprah Winfrey endorsed him: "There's nothing bigger than Oprah. Oprah can do anything. 'Betcha can't make a black man President.' 'Watch me!' " The joke isn't Obama himself; it's the cultural shift - and the country's reaction to it - that he represents...
...mostly to execute a deft pivot - like a bit on John McCain's befuddlement at how to combat his Democratic foe during the presidential campaign. "How the f___ am I losing? I'm a war hero!" he imagines McCain thinking. "He came this close to saying, 'He's black!' " Ted Alexandro gets a big laugh by harking back to white America's old fears of blacks moving onto their turf: "Not only is Barack Obama our first black President, but it's the end of white Presidents forever. Because you know what they...
...racial angle has also provided good fodder for African-American comics like Kyle Grooms (who does one of the better Obama impressions) and Larry Wilmore, the Daily Show's "senior black correspondent," who also talks about Obama in his stand-up act. Yet Wilmore's jabs are directed, as usual, mostly at the country's reaction to Obama ("that is a very comfortable level of black") rather than the President himself; the worst he can do is lampoon Obama's habit of giving long-winded answers to even simple questions...