Aaron McGruder moves his satire of contemporary African-American life from comic strips and animation to live actors with “Black Jesus,” his new series for Adult Swim, beginning Thursday night. It’s a looser, baggier, less pointed show than “The Boondocks,” his sometimes-brilliant cartoon that has occasionally popped up on Adult Swim over the last nine years. And it has a comfortable, which is to say familiar, feel, recalling comedies from “Chappelle’s Show” all the way back to “Sanford and Son.”

But as you’d expect from Mr. McGruder (working with the Canadian writer and director Mike Clattenburg of “Trailer Park Boys”), it’s pretty funny if you give it some time. Slink Johnson, an imposing actor with a suitably beatific expression, plays Black Jesus, who may be the son of God or may just be a big-talking con man with an unusual game. The show’s central joke is that these two options aren’t all that different.

Wearing brown robes and a permanent crown of thorns, Black Jesus walks the streets of Los Angeles with his Compton posse, a small, mostly useless band of apostles. He encounters unbelievers — Latino gangbangers, cops, a churlish apartment manager (Charlie Murphy of “Chappelle’s Show”) — and he dispenses homilies on forgiveness and faith. He also serves as the wheel man on a trip to buy a pound of marijuana. “All you need me to do is drive the car and watch over all your guys’ good graces?” he asks.

Weed takes the place of loaves and fishes for this 21st-century holy man. He has a bad habit of bogarting other people’s joints, and a running story line involves his efforts to turn an abandoned lot into a community garden whose vegetables will feed the people as well as hide the marijuana plants. As he clears trash from the lot, he sings to himself, “This little light of mine/We gonna grow some pine.”