The Boondocks

THE BOONDOCKS

Airing Sundays at 11 p.m. on the Cartoon Network

The Cartoon Network would insist that we refer to it as Adult Swim, a "sister network," when talking about the animation it dishes up, late-nightly, to "adults and men 18?34." Doubtless, some branding team at Turner Broadcasting Systems made a fine case for this decision, but I do not get it. If you are an adult, or even a man, given to spending the witching hour in front of "Futurama" reruns and "Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law," the fact that you have flipped on something called the "Cartoon Network" to do so cannot possibly be an insult to your self-image.

The channel's latest offering is "The Boondocks," an adaptation of Aaron McGruder's syndicated comic, a frisky strip exiled, in some papers, somewhere op-ed-ish on account of its politics. Set in the leafy white precincts of a Chicago suburb, the strip concerns a family of angry black men. Huey Freeman, a bitter and militant ten-year-old with a vast flame of Afro, has a brother named Riley (imagine Bart Simpson besotted with thug life) and a cranky grandad named Grandad. Four panels at a time, Huey wisecracks a world-view that is hard-left, anti-Bush and, when in doubt, rudely contrarian. It is not always what you would call PC. McGruder infamously did a 2003 strip in which Huey and Riley, believing that the fate of world depended on the sexual healing of Condoleezza Rice, drafted personal ads on her behalf: "High-ranking government employee with sturdy build seeks single black man for intimate relationship. Must enjoy football, Chopin and carpet bombing."

Its TV incarnation, however, is about as amusing as Prince Valiant. Slightly less edgy, too, despite a carpet bombing of the N-word so heavy that it seems transparently designed to pique the ire of the "moral guardians" of the "black community." Of course, the volume of time involved in producing the show's manga-influenced animation surely limits its chances for topicality, but what is the point of a satire with no satirical content?

The show's debut episode, titled "The Garden Party," finds the Freemans invited to the kind of upper-crust soiree seen only in fiction and, perhaps, Fairfield County. Whenever Huey attempts to outrage the preppies in attendance by speaking some crackpot truth to power, he is duly patronized-"You are such an articulate young man!"-which is good for a smile. And I do believe I chuckled when a drunken black valet, resentful that the Freemans were attending this party as equals, seized a microphone to improvise a number called "Don't Trust Them New Niggahs Over There." Otherwise, the show's jokes are stale or obvious or standard bits of sitcom backtalk imbued with a Garofalonian streak of reflexive liberal bushwa. I mean, taking on The Passion of the Christ? Who wants yesterday's funny papers?