Black Dynamite' creator talks race and humor, police brutality and 'Freaknik'

• Adult Swim
• Carl Jones, executive producer of Adult Swim's Black Dynamite

When it comes to cutting-edge humor, Carl Jones jumped over the cliff a long time ago. It's been a week since season two of his animated Adult Swim series "Black Dynamite" went out with a bang. The "Wizard of Watts" parody episode was so extreme [watch bootleg version here] it made the "The Wiz look like The Wizard of Oz." But the timing of the police brutality-themed ep. was also totally coincidental, says executive producer Jones.

A high-school dropout and self-taught artist who used to fall asleep at night listening to the likes of Richard Pryor, Rudy Ray Moore, and Eddie Murphy on his headphones, Jones life-long dream came true when he moved to L.A., where he randomly bumped into Aaron McGruder on Sunset Blvd., and began contributing to "The Boondocks" comic strip. When McGruder got the TV deal, Jones became a writer/director and eventual co-executive producer of "The Boondocks" TV show.

In a recent interview, Jones talked about the challenge of infusing racial politics into "Black Dynamite" when reality is more absurd than fiction. He also helped us to read between the lines of the leaked Sony email about Aaron McGruder, and we went back in time to talk about his 2010 special Freaknik: The Musical.

I really thought that The Wiz couldn’t be any blacker, but you’ve got James Brown as the Fairy Godfather and flying junkies instead of flying monkeys. How in the hell did you come up with this idea?

Man, it’s hard to describe the process because in my opinion it’s a little bit of magic that happens. It’s about having the right energy in the room and the right people. Fortunately for us, at the beginning of the season we were able to put together a small writers’ room. I grabbed some guys that I really admired and worked with in the past on “Boondocks” and other things. I laid out the story and we just started going through it and finding where all the big jokes were. The story, for the most part, was already there because it’s a parody of The Wizard of Oz, but once I decided to make the story about police brutality, and being that it’s set in the “Black Dynamite” universe, it gave us a lot of different places to go. We decided to take advantage of the ’70s and the iconic figures of the ’70s and we just started playing with some words, man. Like the Rodney Munchkings, the Land of Oz-Watts, the Fairy Godfather. It was weird how all of these things kind of magically fell in place.

The other thing about it is who would’ve known that this episode would speak to what’s happening right now all over America with police brutality and the situation in Ferguson. Sometimes I don’t even know how to explain how it happens. If you bring the right elements together, somehow the universe conspires with you and it happens.

You mean to tell me that you started working on this police brutality episode before a lot of this blew up last year?

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This idea was actually conceived during the first season of “Black Dynamite.” It was going to be the season finale for the first season and we just didn’t have enough time to do it the right way. It felt like a much bigger episode and it was heavy. When you’re dealing with a subject matter like that and it’s a comedy it really takes some attention because you have to make sure the tone is just right. So we just didn’t have enough time to get it to where it needed to be for the first season. Coming to the second season with that in mind, we were able to put some energy and thought into it. And yeah, we had no idea that it would land right when all this stuff was happening.

With the amount of unarmed killings by police reaching such a level of absurdity last year, did that in any way make your job harder since exaggeration is usual the main ingredient of satire?

They say that truth is stranger than fiction — and I think more so nowadays than ever before. Things are really weird in real life sometimes. And it does make it a little bit more difficult to satirize it because … how much room do we have to exagerrate? In that regard, it is a little challenging sometimes. Also, because of the sensitivity of the situation. This is really affecting people’s lives in real time so you you have to be careful. The main thing I try to focus on is just the honesty of the story that we’re telling. It speaks honestly to how the majority of people feel — not because we’re trying to cater to the way that they feel, but because it’s an honest look.

It’s the same way hip-hop has been a tool to help contextualize our experience in certain communities and environments. It’s music but at the same time it’s a look into a culture or our socioeconomic disposition with some understanding as to why the attitudes and aggressiveness that you see in our neighborhoods and in the music are there. I try to focus on motivation and making sure that it’s very clear what we’re trying to say with the episode so that it does provoke thought.

Is comedy usually the first place you go to in your mind when you consider the kind of social ills highlighted last year, or does it take you some time to bring out the funny? Do you start off just pissed off like everybody else?

I focus really hard on not buying into the propaganda, because a lot of times there’ll be something that affects our community that has been going on for a long time. It’s just that because there was no spotlight on it people didn’t react to it. But this is an epidemic in our community. This is not something that just happened. And unfortunately, I feel like when Obama got elected two things happened: 1) Black people had this feeling that there was no more racism and that we made it. 2) And a lot of white people felt like they lost their country — so much so that I remember they bought a bunch of tickets to Mars.

So when that happened, I think a lot of us just went to sleep. It’s like when you have a fever. You take some type of Tylenol to reduce the fever so that you feel better, but the virus still exists. And what we don’t realize is that your body needs that fever in order to know that it needs to produce white blood cells to attack the virus…. I look at the way that we respond to these situations as the fever. People need to reach a certain point where they choose not to tolerate a certain amount of behavior in their communities. If you look at a community like Ferguson — where they have 70 percent black people in Ferguson, and there are only 3 black people on the police department — the fraction of people involved in civic government out of that 70 percent is very few. I’m not saying that’s the end-all, be-all solution, but this is a way to circumvent some of these things from happening. If you control that much of your community, then you also should have the power to elect and put people into office that will represent your best interests.

A lot of times we fall asleep and think everything is ok when something like this happens until the media begins to boost it up. If you see this stuff enough it is going to spark an emotion that we should’ve had a long time ago.

Let’s talk about your time on “The Boondocks,” which served up some of the most raw racial and social commentary ever. What was it like putting that show together week to week?

It was fun, man. And it was also really challenging. It was a difficult show to produce, partially because of the style. We went with this animé aesthetic and we decided to, in some cases, have both main production and pre-production done overseas. So a lot of the storyboarding and artwork was done by Korean studios — people that speak an entirely different language and have no connection to the culture whatsoever. “Boondocks” was about a subculture — a culture within a culture — not just “black culture.” We took a lot of things that were very micro and made them macro. And that was really difficult, explaining some of this stuff to the studios. For example, if we had a scene with A Pimp Named Slickback, I would have to act out all of the lines so they could understand how the character feels and talks when they deliver a certain line. It was hard, a lot of back-and-forth, a lot of Skype calls. Answering questions like, ‘How come Huey doesn’t ever smile?’ They didn’t understand any of it. That was the most challenging thing. Other than that, it was a great experience. I had a lot of fun working with Rodney Barnes and Aaron McGruder. And I learned so much from Aaron in terms of writing.

Your description of that process seems to explain why so much time stretched between seasons. But what did you think of the leaked Sony email about Aaron McGruder in which Sony Pictures head Steve Mosko said "fuck em" regarding the studio's decision to run the final season of "The Boondocks" without McGruder's approval?

It’s always kind of a love/hate relationship between the studio and the creator. As an artist, you don’t want to create in a vacuum, but at the same time it’s a business. The studio has to do its job as a studio and put deadlines on you that you may not necessarily want to subscribe to but you don’t have a choice. They’re paying for it. You’re not just painting pictures in your room and giving them away. It’s a business. So I understand it from both sides. I get when you’re an artist and you need more time and you need more resources and you want people to get off your back and leave you alone. And I also understand the studio needing what they need.

As far as the emails go, that whole thing is kind of funny to me because who doesn’t talk shit in their emails? That’s just people; people do that. We’re not robots. If you hacked into everybody’s emails, the whole world would be mad at each other laughs. And it was never a secret to us how Sony felt, and vice versa. I’m sure if they hacked into Aaron McGruder’s emails, they’d see all kinda “bitches,” “motherfuckers,” “these niggas.” You know what I mean.

• http://clatl.com/atlanta/ImageArchives?by=1223504
• Freaknik: The Musical, 2010

What did you think about the reaction to Freaknik: The Musical full link a few years ago? It seemed like it was all over the map — from people who were calling it coonery to people who loved it and wanted it to become a regular series.

From my point of view, I didn’t really see a whole lot of negative response. I think I woke up the next morning and Steve Harvey was saying some stuff like if he sees me on the street he’s gonna fight a nigga or something like that. But as far as that goes, I understand where it comes from. I get it. We don’t have many outlets. It’s not a whole lot of outlets for African-American stories. So what happens is anytime you tell a story and it’s about black people there’s this feeling that everyone wants you to present an image to the world that is something they would like to see. But the reality is that’s not every side of us.

If we really look at what Freaknik was, it was a big-ass traffic jam where people got up on top of their cars and danced. For some black people that’s a part of our culture that we would not like to shine a light on because we’re not very proud of it, but it’s real.

The thing I also wanted to do with the special, although there was ass shaking and vulgarity, the story was really about a group of friends that were trying to make it. And they went through all these trials and tribulations to get to this contest so they could win a record deal and get a lifetime supply of money, clothes and hoes. Now, you can argue the morality of that or if it’s politically correct to say. But the truth is, a lotta niggas like money, clothes, and hoes. Now, is that all niggas? No. But what I’m saying is that we always have that responsibility of projecting that positive side of our experience and it’s not honest. I don’t really give in to that. Because if you watch it, there’s so many layers to it. People get fixated on one thing. It’s just like with “Boondocks.” There were people who just got fixated on the word “nigga,” and would miss everything we were saying with the episode just because they couldn’t get past the fact that we used the word “nigga.” That happens all the time and it’s so unfortunate because you can get so much more out of it. It just depends on what you’re looking for. And there’s no way you’ll please everybody. So the only thing you can do as an artist and as a writer is tell the story you’re passionate about, make sure that it’s honest, and whatever happens happens. And worst case scenario, people are on the Internet talking about it and arguing. But at least they are talking about it. I’m not saying that just because it’s good for show ratings; I think it’s good for society that we have shows that can touch hot buttons and taboos. Maybe through this conversation we can get to a point where we can remove some of these ills in our community or find a higher state of consciousness to achieve through talking about some of the problems we have with our image. So I’m cool with it when it happens. I think it’s good for us and we need it sometimes.