On the day of Saddam Hussein’s capture, last December, the left-leaning political weekly The Nation celebrated its hundred-and-thirty-eighth birthday. It was a Sunday night, and the weather was dreadful—forbiddingly cold and wet, heavy snow giving way to sleet—but three hundred people could not be deterred from dropping five hundred dollars a plate for roast chicken amid the marble-and-velvet splendor of the Metropolitan Club, on Fifth Avenue. Jean Stein, a veteran of the liberal party circuit and the mother of Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation’s editor, was there, as were E. L. Doctorow, John Waters, Charlie Rose, and even John McEnroe. Robert Byrd, the senior senator from West Virginia, was an honored guest; Amtrak had been advised of his itinerary, and, despite service delays all weekend, the train got him there on time. Joseph Wilson, the former Ambassador to Gabon, riding a wave of liberal good will since the politically motivated outing of his wife, the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame, attended as well, by special invitation.

Byrd spoke first, and he delivered a generous helping of full-throated Southern oratory. Yes, it was good to see Saddam gone, Byrd said, but he was ever more convinced, what with a “swashbuckling, ‘High Noon’ ” kind of President in office, that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time. “Thank God for courageous institutions like this one,” he said, “which are willing to stand up to the tide of popular convention.” He recited the closing lines of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” and then, finishing up, invoked “the spirit of Longfellow.” Standing ovation.

Toward the dessert (chocolate torte) portion of the evening, Uma Thurman rose to introduce a special guest: Aaron McGruder, the creator of the popular and subversive comic strip “The Boondocks,” who, as it happens, had travelled farther than anyone else to be there, all the way from Los Angeles. McGruder, one of only a few prominent African-American cartoonists, had been making waves in all the right ways, poking conspicuous fun at Trent Lott, the N.R.A., the war effort. An exhibition of his comic strips—characters with Afros and dreadlocks drawn in a style borrowing heavily from Japanese manga, __with accentuated __foreheads and eyes—was on display in the Metropolitan Club’s Great Hall. It seemed to be, as a Nation contributor said later, “his coronation as our kind of guy.”

But what McGruder saw when he looked around at his approving audience was this: a lot of old, white faces. What followed was not quite a coronation. McGruder, who rarely prepares notes or speeches for events like this, began by thanking Thurman, “the most ass-kicking woman in America.” Then he lowered the boom. He was a twenty-nine-year-old black man, he said, who got invited to such functions all the time, so you could imagine how bored he was. He proceeded to ramble, at considerable length, and in a tone, as one listener put it, of “militant cynicism,” with a recurring theme: that the folks in the room (“courageous”? Please) were a sorry lot.

He told the guests that he’d called Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, a mass murderer to her face; what had they ever done? (The Rice exchange occurred in 2002, at the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards, where McGruder was given the Chairman’s Award; Rice requested that he write her into his strip.) He recounted a lunch meeting with Fidel Castro. (He had been invited to Cuba by the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, who is one of the few politicians McGruder has praised in “The Boondocks.”) He said that noble failure was not acceptable. But the last straw came when he “dropped the N-word,” as one amused observer recalled. He said—bragged, even—that he’d voted for Nader in 2000. At that point, according to Hamilton Fish, the host of the party, “it got interactive.”

Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation, was sitting in the back of the room, next to Joe Wilson, the Ambassador. He shouted out, “Thanks for Bush!” Exactly what happened next is unclear. Alterman recalls that McGruder responded by grabbing his crotch and saying, “Try these nuts.” Jack Newfield, the longtime Village Voice writer, says that McGruder simply dared Alterman to remove him from the podium. When asked about this incident later, McGruder said, “I ain’t no punk. I ain’t gonna let someone shout and not go back at him.”

Alterman walked out. “I turned to Joe and said, ‘I can’t listen to this crap anymore,’ ” he remembers. “I went out into the Metropolitan Club lobby—it’s a nice lobby—and I worked on my manuscript.”

Newfield joined in the heckling, as did Stephen Cohen, a historian and the husband of Katrina vanden Heuvel. “It was like watching LeRoi Jones try to Mau-Mau a guilty white liberal in the sixties,” Newfield says. “It was out of a time warp. Who is he to insult people who have been putting their careers and lives on the line for equal rights since before he was born?”

By the time McGruder had finished, and a tipsy Joe Wilson took the microphone to deliver his New Year’s Resolutions, perhaps half the guests had excused themselves to join Alterman in the lobby. A Nation contributor estimated that McGruder had offended eighty per cent of the audience. “Some people still haven’t recovered,” he said, sounding thrilled.

“At a certain point, I just got the uncomfortable feeling that this was a bunch of people who were feeling a little too good about themselves,” McGruder said afterward. “These are the big, rich white leftists who are going to carry the fight to George Bush, and the best they can do is blame Nader?”

He went on, laughing a little, “I was not the right guest for that event. I’ll be the first one to say that. It was one of those reminders that, yeah, I’m not this political leader that people are looking for.”

As a talented young black man who is outspoken in his political convictions, McGruder has grown accustomed to inordinately high expectations. The Green Party called him last year, asking if he might like to run for President. He had to point out that he wasn’t old enough. “I want to do stuff that has a moral center—stuff that I can be proud of,” he continued. “But I’m not trying to be that guy, the political voice of young black America, because then you have to sort of be a responsible grownup, for lack of a better word. And it’s like—you know, Flip Wilson said this, he said, ‘I reserve the right to be a nigger.’ And I absolutely do, at all times.”

Huey Freeman, the hero of “The Boondocks” and McGruder’s supposed alter ego, has not cracked a smile in five years of syndication. From the day he and his little brother, Riley, moved out of Chicago’s South Side to live comfortably with their granddad in the suburbs—the boondocks—Huey, a practicing member of the “church of self-righteousness,” has been treating readers of the funnies page to an unhealthy dose of indignation, paranoia, and hatred. He is perhaps ten years old, in that ageless cartoon way, with an Afro, a high forehead, perpetually knitted brows, and an unnatural familiarity with the precepts of socialist black nationalism. He has roughly equal contempt for Dick Cheney, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Santa Claus.

“Since when are millions of Americans ready to wake up to the rantings of an angry black kid?” Huey’s best friend, Caesar, a dreadlocked, droopy-eyed transplant from Brooklyn, once asked him, in an early installment of the strip. The joke was obvious and boastful; by then “The Boondocks” was appearing more or less daily in some two hundred and thirty newspapers (it is now in three hundred), including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. More or less daily because editors tended to suspend Huey and company from their pages on occasions when the intentions of the strip’s author—to provide “a daily foot in the ass of The Man”—were achieved a little too vividly. (A dozen editors had already expelled the Freeman family for good; still others had relocated McGruder to the op-ed page.)

The Freeman trio—Huey, Riley (a wanna-be thug), and Granddad (a cantankerous skeptic and resigned pragmatist)—represent “three different facets of the sort of angry-black-man archetype,” according to McGruder. He recently published an anthology of the strip’s first few years, titled “A Right to Be Hostile.” More angry books are on the way. “Profits of Rage” is the working title of one, a text-only manifesto fashioned after the works of Michael Moore and Al Franken. “Huey’s Hate Book,” a planned coffee-table volume, is another.

Like the Freeman brothers, McGruder was born on the South Side of Chicago, though he didn’t stay there long. The McGruders—Aaron, his parents, and an older brother, Dedric, who is now a part-time political cartoonist—shuffled around some before settling, when Aaron was six, in the middle-class suburb of Columbia, Maryland. (Aaron’s father works for the National Transportation Safety Board.) Columbia is in some ways the inspiration for Woodcrest, the fictional home of the “Boondocks” characters. It was a planned community—envisioned as a sort of integrationist, post-civil-rights utopia—developed by the Rouse Company in the mid-nineteen-sixties, and featuring an official town “Tree of Life,” and streets and neighborhoods with names like Hobbit’s Glen and Morning Walk and Elfstone Way. (Huey and Riley live on Timid Deer Lane, one block over from Bashful Beaver.)

McGruder’s was a fairly typical, well-adjusted eighties childhood, and he had typical interests: “Star Wars,” Charlie Brown, kung fu. He went to a Jesuit school—“a very strict, very, very white Jesuit school”—outside Columbia from seventh through ninth grade. “Those were the most oppressive years of my life,” he told me. (Huey and Riley, not coincidentally, attend J. Edgar Hoover Elementary.) They were also the years in which he was exposed to his greatest, and perhaps most surprising, comedic influence. “When I was in seventh grade, I discovered Monty Python,” he said. “That shit still kills me. I try to get my friends to watch that and they just can’t get it. ‘No, no, no, it’s funny—the lumberjack!’ ‘Life of Brian’ is, to me, the most brilliant piece of satire ever—it’s just brilliant. He’s trying to write ‘Romans go home’ in Latin and he can’t do the Latin right.” McGruder shook his head. “A lot of black people ain’t up on Monty Python like they should be.”

In tenth grade, he transferred to public school and began, for the first time, really, to hang out with other black people. He listened to a lot of hip-hop music. It was the era of politically conscious rap: Public Enemy, KRS-One (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone), X-Clan. “All that sort of radical, pro-black-nationalist type of music—it was just a fad, but at fifteen and sixteen you’re very impressionable,” he told me. “It was one of the few times, I think, in black history when as a young person you could be cool and intellectual at the same time.” (McGruder, who is proud to call himself a nerd, no longer thinks of himself as cool. “Most cool niggas I know are broke,” he said.)

The first person ever to publish “The Boondocks” was the disgraced New York Times fabulist Jayson Blair, who was then editing The Diamondback, the campus paper at the University of Maryland, where McGruder majored in African-American studies. “We weren’t friends, but he seemed like the brother who had figured out the system,” McGruder recalls of Blair. “It was like, ‘You don’t seem one hundred per cent down, but you’re definitely not a Tom. Somehow you’re making it work.’ ” That was the end of 1996; less than two years later, having found an audience among the largely white Maryland readership, McGruder signed a deal with the Universal Press Syndicate, the publisher of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” and in April of 1999 “The Boondocks” began appearing in a hundred and sixty papers—one of the biggest launches in the history of comics.

Even after the Metropolitan Club melee, McGruder has continued to receive and accept invitations to deliver lectures—at banquets, on college campuses, in corporate boardrooms. The Sony Music Group flew him to New York in February for one such talk, and he agreed to meet me for dinner afterward. He arrived at the restaurant, a small, country-style spot near Gramercy Park, wearing a James Brown T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He is not, in person, imposing or striking or noticeably angry—not the kind of guy you’d expect to be challenging anyone to a fight. He is short, with soft features, a slight goatee, and the beginnings of an Afro. Unlike Huey, he smiles—sheepishly and often.

“Somebody has to sort of translate the drums for white folks, and occasionally they call me to try to do it,” McGruder explained. It was a good hustle, the lecture circuit, he said. In the course of three hours—McGruder tends to answer each question with a fifteen-minute monologue—he returned repeatedly to this familiar trope of cynical entrepreneurialism. People like Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly, he said, were hustlers. “It’s like, ‘The more ridiculous shit I say that’s hurtful and hateful and racist, the more you stupid rednecks will buy books,’ ” he said, in a deep, slightly nasal baritone. “I don’t even get mad at them, ’cause I get what it is. I’m in the same game.”

Larry Elder, an African-American radio host and a frequent McGruder critic, was a hustler, too: “He decided to be the black guy that makes money by saying the things that white people want black people to say.” (Elder, in a recent op-ed column, suggested that an award for the “Dumbest, Most Vulgar, Most Offensive Things Uttered by Black Public Figures” be dubbed the McGruder.)

“I’m always on the fence: do I want to be one of those guys?” McGruder said. “I love Michael Moore”—Moore wrote the foreword to “A Right to Be Hostile,” praising McGruder’s “bodacious wit”—“and I see what he does. He’s got the game down, and that’s not a bad thing. People act like you can’t be a left-winger and be rich at the same time, like that’s some type of hypocrisy. It’s not hypocrisy. You gotta get paid. This isn’t the days of the civil-rights era, where you can change the world with a picket sign. You gotta get your money up.”