“You can’t tame the white supremacist power structure with cheese,” Huey Freeman tells his Granddad in the series premiere of The Boondocks. The show, adapted from Aaron McGruder’s syndicated comic strip, is full of slightly absurd humor that satirizes black and white stereotypes, as well as many other facets of American culture that happen to be … well … stupid.
The premise of the show is the same as the comic: the black Freeman family, two young boys and their grandfather, move from the inner city to the suburbs and have to adjust to the culture shock of their new, predominantly white neighborhood. The comic strip is known for its controversial political satire, but due to the greater time necessary to produce an animated show and the fickle nature of political sentiment, the television show focuses more on general cultural issues. The art of the show lies in its portrayal of how the three very unique individuals deal with social situations, like the garden party in the pilot.
Huey, the cynical, politically critical protagonist of the comic strip appears in the show less as an activist and more as a character appropriate to his youth. He is still suspicious of politicians and critical of white culture, but he is also a young boy. He is a strong individualist and stands by his values, but those values are built more on paranoia, stereotypes and youthful na??vet?? than on informed political views, as in the comic. Still, he maintains the strong anti-establishment opinions that fans of the strip are sure to appreciate.
Riley, Huey’s younger brother, is representative of the exaggerated stereotypes of black pop culture. He tries his hardest to buy into the thug lifestyle, despite being a 10-year-old suburbanite. He is very much a little boy, no different from anyone his age, except that he idolizes Tupac instead of Spider-Man.
Granddad, as he is known, buys into the some of the same absurd stereotypes as his grandsons?that class comes only with acting like white people, for instance, or that white people can be manipulated with fancy cheese?but at the same time has a mature understanding of racial issues that his grandsons do not. Having lived through the civil rights movement (though he stayed home for a lot of it) he has an appreciation of what it means to be able to move along in the world at the same pace as white people. Sometimes, however, he tries too hard to rush into white culture, while his grandsons try to avoid it.
In the pilot episode, the main focus is on the awkwardness the Freemans feel as they explore the ways of the “white man,” whom Granddad seems to respect and the boys, Huey and Riley, consider distant and generally up to no good. Though the show deals very heavily with racial issues, most of the negative ethnic stereotyping comes from the black characters, whereas the white characters are largely ignorant of the idea that it should be an issue at all.
Characters of both races display exceedingly stupid, absurd and laugh-out-loud funny behavior while the mainly white public just smiles and blindly takes it all in stride. However, a few select characters (like Granddad) have the presence of mind to realize that idiocy transcends race, and just because one black man gets drunk at a garden party or one white guy shoots himself out a window doesn’t mean that such brainless behavior is inherent in others of the same race.
Though not as politically centered as its comic strip counterpart, The Boondocks provides a very amusing yet pragmatic look at the general stupidity of mainstream America, which will be appreciated both by fans of the comic and perhaps by some who are put off by the comic’s decidedly left-wing tilt. The pilot re-airs Saturday at midnight, and a new episode airs Sunday at 11:00 p.m. on Cartoon Network.
