Wyatt Cenac was lapping the competition. He was speaking softly in paragraph-long thoughts about his HBO show, “Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas,” his love for animation and his relationship with his modest fame.
Simultaneously, he was winning an unspoken competition at Buzz-a-Rama, the only place in New York City where a comedian can destroy all takers in a slot car race while seemingly not trying.
Mr. Cenac’s drowsiness is an illusion. “Problem Areas” combines elements of a talk show, an animated show and a documentary series, and is perhaps the most structurally ambitious news-comedy hybrid on television. (The second season will have its premiere on April 5.)
Among the show’s executive producers are John Oliver and Ezra Edelman (an Oscar-winning documentarian), and its writing staff includes Emma Carmichael, the former editor of Jezebel. Mr. Cenac has a knack for choosing talented collaborators.
And also, apparently, for slot car racing. “You’re doing pretty good,” said Frank Perri, as he watched Mr. Cenac’s initial runs around the circular track. Mr. Perri, whom everyone calls Buzz, opened Buzz-a-Rama in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1965.
Now 83, he runs the place with his wife, Dolores. He stayed with Mr. Cenac until 2 p.m., when he had to rush off to host a birthday party for a 6-year-old boy named Rocco.
Slot cars (so-called because their chassis are fitted with nibs that slot into racing tracks) are operated by remote control. The simplest ones, which are about the length of an adult man’s hand, are fairly easy to get the hang of. The fastest can reach speeds well over 100 miles an hour.
Children love them, and so, it turns out, does Mr. Cenac. His earnest response when Mr. Perri showed him some previously operational steering wheels was: “Wow. They’re amazing. Wow. These are great.”
It makes sense that Mr. Cenac, who had a peripatetic childhood, would be taken with model cars. Born in New York, he moved to Dallas when he was a young child and returned to Brooklyn over the summers to stay with his grandmother, who lived in Crown Heights. After a friend moved to Cleveland, he started spending parts of the year there as well.
Frank Perri, center, the owner of Buzz-a-Rama, shows Mr. Cenac the ropes.CreditAndrew White for The New York Times
“When I was very young, I was given a St. Christopher’s medal,” Mr. Cenac said. “I guess he’s the patron saint of travelers.” Now, he wears a pendant with a picture of a bird on it, which he was wearing at Buzz-a-Rama along with a Muhammad Ali sweatshirt and a patch from the Houston apparel company Grits featuring its cartoon mascot Roscrow.
Mr. Cenac, who turns 43 later this month, is single and has lived in his Brooklyn neighborhood for close to a decade. Asked about his personal life, he said: “I don’t think I have much of one. Work kind of dominates everything.”
Episodes of “Problem Areas” consist of three sections. In the first, Mr. Cenac explores topics like energy policy and worker protections, adding jokes and animated bits. The second features comic riffs on civic problems (say, the glut of umbrellas whenever it rains) and solutions (government-mandated retractable awnings on every building).
The final section, which takes up most of each episode, concentrates on a single subject throughout a season. In the first, the subject was policing; the second will feature education.
Mr. Cenac talks about his goals for “Problem Areas” as a journalist might, saying that he is interested in starting a conversation about the issues he has chosen, rather than presenting easy answers. He is less glib about his reporting than his former boss at “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart, who was known to dismiss questions about the dual role he pioneered.
With “Problem Areas,” Mr. Cenac said, “I’m not necessarily saying ‘Oh, here’s the answer for everything.’ But maybe if I show you someone who’s building a staircase you might think, ‘Oh, it’s maybe not as challenging or weird as I thought to build a staircase.’ It’s maybe something worth tackling as opposed to getting caught up in the intractability of ‘we’ll never be able to do this.’”
Several times, Mr. Cenac’s blue car went so fast that it plowed into an orange one he was racing, knocking it out of the slot. He would then get up to place them back on track.
Asked if, in his fifth decade, he ever felt concerned that his peers were passing him by in some way, he responded that he sometimes felt envious of people who had gotten cool new jobs or bought houses.
But, he pointed out: “The only person who’s really keeping score in any way is me. And if I’m keeping that score, is that the healthiest thing for me to be doing?”
He would prefer to think about what his show can do better. He returned several times to the idea of change, suggesting that it should be the goal of any good policy, whether it pertains to policing, education or eradicating the accursed umbrella.
As he continued to race his car, he made his priority clear: “How do you make it actually work so we don’t have to do the same things over and over again?”
