'The Boondocks' delivers sharply drawn satire
''The Boondocks" is a warm bath of a show -- if you don't mind sharing the tub with a plugged-in radio.
Aaron McGruder's TV adaptation of his comic strip is a cozy family comedy and a fierce racial satire at the same time. It's a cartoon with the visual innocence of ''The Flintstones" and the sweet coming-of-age tone of ''Everybody Hates Chris," but then it's also charged with the kind of racial skewering that hasn't generally been seen on TV since the 1970s, outside of a rare, unfrightened cable series like Comedy Central's late ''Chappelle's Show."
Indeed, ''The Boondocks" premieres tomorrow at 11 p.m. on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, but it could easily fit in on Comedy Central, somewhere in the vicinity of ''South Park." It has the same kind of ''from the mouths of babes" humor, where cute little cartoon kids deliver brutal, unadulterated opinions about politics and pop culture. In this case, the kids -- 8- and 10-year-old brothers Riley and Huey Freeman -- have been moved by their well-meaning ''Granddad," Robert Freeman, from the South Side of Chicago to the suburbs. In their ritzy vanilla subdivision, they are surrounded by racial caricatures, including rich white people who are so insulated from reality they applaud brainlessly as Huey militantly lectures about how Jesus was black and Ronald Reagan was the devil.
The show goes after white people who are clueless and white people who think they have a clue, including a rich white kid who portrays himself as a gangsta and partygoers who say, ''I think the n-word is OK if they say it." At one point, Granddad tells the kids that bourgeois white men are magically rendered docile by fancy cheeses -- and he is later proven to be correct. But then ''The Boondocks" also gives black people a hard time in a way that white-produced comedies cautiously avoid, notably a butler who despises ambitious blacks such as Granddad. It is the kind of spiky TV built for viewers who don't reflexively reject ''politically incorrect" humor, and who can even find cultural catharsis in it. It has already stimulated disapproval from the likes of Bill Cosby, who dislikes the way it portrays African-Americans.
Huey and Riley are given sweet little voices by actress Regina King, and their generation-gap conflicts with Granddad are breezily familiar. But the kids are sophisticated enough to see the cynical realities that Granddad, with his old-school romanticism, can't. In the second episode, Granddad falls under the sway of a money-grubbing hooker, who is scamming her pimp (whose name is A Pimp Named Slickback). As Huey says, ''Granddad was trying to turn a ho into a housewife," and the boys wait out his obsession as the kids on ''Malcolm in the Middle" might wait out Dad's new lawnmower obsession. Granddad is trying to save the boys from the wrong crowd; and, unexpectedly, they're trying to save him from the same.
''The Boondocks" takes on racism the way ''All in the Family" did, by sending up ignorance and extremism rather than moralizing about them. It asks us to laugh at our hang-ups about race with fearless glee. And underneath its humorous hyperbole, it has a lot of heart, just in case you're of a mind to dismiss it all as pure farce.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. 
