Kumail Nanjiani unfurled his eyebrows for comedy on Letterman Friday night. It’s interesting how every standup comic who’s not black or white starts with a joke about his ethnicity. Nanjiani didn’t riff off it too much, slowed down his set and kept it clean for primetime.

Letterman’s intro was a touch awkward. He seems like he’s walking on eggshells with desi guests, afraid of being insensitive.

New Music from the NYGz: ‘Ready?’, produced by DJ Premier.

With the world in recession, Legacy Recordings do what any sensible record label would do and release a 52 album box set of Miles Davis albums costing almost $400.

Jazzy Jeff speaks on the unlikelihood of a tour with old pal Will Smith. In other Golden Era DJ developments Marley Marl is back on 107.5 WBLS in New York.

Kumail Nanjiani, who plays Gitmo Guy on The Colbert Report, gives you advice on the latest new drug cocktail (at 4:40). He’s on Comedy Central tonight at 11pm ET / 8pm PT as the warmup act for ‘Live at Gotham.’

He began performing at open-mike nights eight years ago at the Cubby Bear in Chicago, where he had moved after college, took a writing class at Second City and wrote what became his breakthrough work, an autobiographical one-man show called “Unpronounceable”… in which Mr. Nanjiani described how coming to America both strengthened his relationship with his family and deepened his ambivalence about his Muslim upbringing… “It was very controversial with Muslims…”

From there he did a stint as the opening act on Mr. Galifianakis’s national tour last year… That led to his selling NBC on an idea for a sitcom that he would write and star in. “It’s basically about my marriage and my family — a Pakistani living in Brooklyn with his Southern wife…” (NBC has paired Mr. Nanjiani with John Pollack, a writer of “Community,” to develop the script.) Though he finally has a significant paycheck — a deal like what he has with NBC probably pays in the neighborhood of $100,000 to write a pilot episode — he still does not have a future he can count on; a fully booked week of stand-up might bring in $700 or $800. [NYT]

It’s a hell of a sea change when a guy with an accent can hit it big in the comedy biz, not making his ethnicity the focus of his act, except on Colbert. A guy named Barack is president, and Nanjiani isn’t doing Yakov Smirnoff.

Guess what was reportedly the first buy at the business centre of the Mumbai Film Festival (which is known as MAMI but is actually the MFF)? Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Meanwhile, on IMDb, Antichrist’s popularity fell by 71%. Sharmila Tagore, who heads up the Indian Censor Board, must feel like she’s just eaten crow. Just months ago, she had said that she didn’t think Indian audiences were mature enough for Antichrist. Recently, she reiterated that there was no way in hell (I paraphrase) that she would let Antichrist have a commercial release. Enlighten Film Society buying the home video rights isn’t a commercial release but hey, the point is that an Indian company decided that there was money to be made with distributing this film.  It isn’t entirely surprising. Everyone knows that 99% of the people at film festivals watch foreign films for their uncut sex scenes. But from the sound of things, Antichrist isn’t quite what you turn to when you can’t access Savita Bhabhi. On the other hand, there was uproar and minor violence across Maharashtra because actors in Wake Up Sid said “Bombay” instead of “Mumbai”. So von Trier’s twisted brand of attention-seeking chauvinism that brands the woman as Antichrist and prescribes as a cure some slicing in the nether regions (with a rusty razor) is ok. Colloquialisms, however, are not allowed. Who needs The Onion when you have true facts like this floating around?

When The X-Files started airing on tv, I remember a grand aunt of mine told us very solemnly that watching paranormal activity on television attracts ghosts, ghouls and other supernatural creatures. Since you like watching this stuff on tv, they figure that you want them in your home too. Having spotted a suitable habitat through a family’s taste in tv programmes, they would slither their way in through the smallest crack and the thick glass of the tv screen was no protection against them (I was having good fun imagining ghosts careening towards the screen and going splat like paintball bullets). Fear and horror were an insidious thing, she said.