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A Pimp Named Slickback

Remember Don Imus? He was this corpse-looking cowboy who used to have a radio show before saying racist comments on the air causing everyone in America to take a serious look at the country’s race relations (for two weeks). He was ultimately fired. I bring up Mr. Imus to illustrate what audience size allows one to get away with on the air with or without the masses calling for your head. His reach was millions (tens of millions?) whereas The Boondocks, which airs Monday’s on Adult Swim, maybe attracts one million viewers. The difference? No one is going to complain about The Boondocks, because most people in America, and certainly not those people with the power, even know the show exists. More after the jump…

Here’s the thing, this past week’s episode, which I just caught this morning, might have been the most uncomfortable 22-minutes I’ve sat through in ages. Here’s the premise: “Articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guy” Tom loses his white wife to Usher (Yeah!). To help him act more like a man, Riley and Grampa Freeman hire a pimp named A Pimp Named Slickback to teach Tom how to keep his woman in line. From this point I’m sure you can imagine the direction things go.
Of course I must stress the surgeon-like levels of satiric precision used by the series to convey these ideas of sexism inherent in hip-hop culture. That being said, it’s kind of hard to watch despite being achingly funny. The closest comparison would have to be some of the sharper sketches on Chappelle’s Show, though that work always tended to lean more to the absurd. The Boondocks is animated and thus is much more capable of detaching itself from reality, but the way its drawn and the characterizations of the main cast almost make it more realistic than any live-action counterpart.

But back to Imus. What one realizes when watching The Boondocks is that it very much is a matter of “It’s OK if we say it,” though the question then becomes “is it OK for me to laugh?” Something seems slightly unsettling about the fact that this show, which is biting in a way rarely seen anywhere in mainstream media, airs on Adult Swim, a programming block typically enjoyed by young, white, male potheads. But like I mentioned earlier, the audience size is small enough that few, if any, waves are being created.

What Imus marketed was hardly cutting edge and generally mean spirited, making the outrage expected if perhaps over the top. The Boondocks is extremely smart and boundary-pushing. The two hardly compare, though what strikes me is the notion that it is much easier to give an idiot a big microphone than to give that same microphone to a genius. The Boondocks can’t have a mass audience because most people wouldn’t see the satire in it — what’s the old saying, a person is smart people are morons? McGruder can get away with just about anything knowing hardly anyone is looking, and the show is better for it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Adult Swim, Personalities, The Boondocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.