Black cartoonist gets ‘Woke,’ but don’t expect a sermon

Lamorne Morris, who was never not funny as Winston Bishop in “New Girl,” has a new show, “Woke,” in which he takes center stage. The show, which premiered Sept. 9 on Hulu, is inspired by the life and work of comics artist Keith Knight (“The K Chronicles,” “The Knight Life”), who created the show with Marshall Todd (“Barbershop”), and it’s a mutually good fit for actor and series — smart, likable, a little weird, hard to pin down.

A largely successful mix of genres and themes — some romance, some wacky cohabitation comedy and some social satire, regarding identity, authenticity, justice, performative rage and real exhaustion — “Woke” does sometimes go just where you might expect, but more often does not. Set in and more than usually about San Francisco, it is timely enough that the novel coronavirus is mentioned — production wrapped at the end of February — but not so timely that more than one person is seen wearing a mask.

The epigram that begins the series, “Inspired by one experience shared by many,” suggests that we are going to see something of broad social import but that “one experience” matters as much as

“shared by many,” if not more. “Woke” is political, but not polemical — a conversation, not a sermon. And if it is a story about race, it’s also one of a more or less reasonable person in a world of knuckleheads, trying to make sense of himself.

Morris plays Keef, the Knight stand-in, creator of a locally published popular comic strip called “Toastn-Butter” that is about to go into syndication. He is ready to move up and move out of the apartment he shares with Clovis (T. Murph) and Gunther (Blake Anderson) and into a condominium with his lawyer girlfriend, and if you have seen television before, you know that this is not going to happen. Home is where the wacky best friends are. Clovis gets by reselling limited-edition sneakers and approaches women with tired pickup lines and absurd lies. As Gunther, Anderson is not far from the spacey stoner he played on “Workaholics,” though he has more dimension here, more plausibility.

Things change. Keef is out posting fliers for a comic convention appearance when a phalanx of police officers surrounds him with guns drawn; he is pinned to the ground for a harrowing minute before the cops determine he is not the Black man they’re looking for and evaporate.

Keef tries to move on, but in the aftermath of the incident, suffering from a sort of PTSD, he finds himself harangued by talking inanimate objects. All conspire to drive him toward enlightenment and engagement.

Notwithstanding Keef being jumped by the police, “Woke’s” focus is not exactly the drama that’s played out in streets across the country these last months but rather the not-unrelated subject of cultural appropriation and dilution in a seemingly groovy city where tech money is driving out the poor.

The strength of the series is that the characters ultimately speak for themselves. They remain individuals, imperfectly aligned even with their own stated agendas. And Morris has an everyman, leading man charm that keeps Keef appealing when he runs off course.