A lot of work goes into getting you to Google, “Who’s that guy?”
Lil Rel Howery, the breakout star and comic relief of 2017’s Get Out, is making good on the years of hustle that led to him being cast as TSA agent Rod Williams in Jordan Peele’s zeitgeist-seizing film. With his first leading role in the studio comedy Uncle Drew, a cameo in a Jay Z music video, and a new self-titled sitcom premiering Sunday night on Fox, the 38-year-old has ensured that, after nearly two decades of work as a stand-up comedian and supporting actor, there’s no need to ask anymore. He’s Rel.
Rel’s work in Get Out didn’t necessarily put the comedian on the map. After years headlining Chicago’s comedy clubs and three seasons on Jerrod Carmichael’s boundary-pushing The Carmichael Show (an underrated sitcom that also served as an alley-oop to Tiffany Haddish’s soaring career), Rel was already there. His presence on that proverbial map, however, has certainly grown considerably.
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So much so that when he began developing a sitcom based on his life and his stand-up material, big names came calling. Rel, as Howery prefers to be called, met with Peele, J.J. Abrams, and James Corden about show ideas before, one angst-ridden morning while appearing at New Orleans’ Essence Fest, he made a stressed-out call to his old friend, Carmichael: “Hey man, will you please E.P. my show? We’ll do it together.”
Carmichael agreed, to Rel’s relief. “He’s the Norman Lear of our time,” he says, a sentiment Lear himself has shared with us. He praises the way Carmichael uses the multi-cam comedy format, which had for a time been considered hokey and antiquated, to meaningfully and provocatively explore cultural, social, and racial issues. (Episodes of the series tackled Cosby, the N-word, police brutality, and black support of Trump, among other topics.)
“I had to do it with him,” Rel says of Carmichael, as we talk at the lobby bar at the Beverly Hilton earlier this summer. “He was going to help make sure this thing was my voice. And that was very important to me.”
Rel centers on a Chicago-based comedian juggling the responsibilities of his career with being a long-distance dad and re-entering the dating pool after his wife has an affair with his barber. It’s that latter bit that’s only “loosely based” on his life—though Rel divorced his wife of eight years in 2016, there was no cheating scandal. They’re on good terms and co-parent their two children, though Rel is spending more and more time in Los Angeles. He also has a child from another relationship.
For Rel, whose on-screen career thus far has involved playing sidekicks, best friends, comic relief, or supporting characters, the fact that this show bears his name and is inspired by his life and perspective is a profound moment. It means his story is worth being centered, not relegated to the sidelines or minimized to punchlines because of how he looks or the way he talks.
“I look at Issa, I look at Donald, I look at Jerrod. I just want to be a part of that group,” Rel says, referring to Insecure creator Issa Rae, Atlanta’s Donald Glover, and Carmichael. But there’s an obvious difference between Rae and Glover’s shows—which are highlights of the comedy auteur boom and single-cam comedies that embrace darker, more dramatic tones—and Rel, a multi-cam sitcom filmed in front of a live studio audience whose raucous laughter punctuates every joke.
Rel certainly counts among those artists’ contemporaries. Jay Z cast him alongside Rae, Carmichael, Haddish, Atlanta’s Lakeith Stanfield, and Creed’s Tessa Thompson in his “Moonlight” music video parody of Friends, all but coronating them as Black Hollywood’s new class. So then why go for a more throwback multi-cam format instead of following in a similar vein as Rae or Glover, when multi-cam shows tend to have a (not entirely earned) stigma against them as less mature, artistic, or profound?
“More or less the dream side of it, man,” he says. “Watching like Sanford and Sons, The Cosby Show, Different World. I can name Seinfeld, Frasier. I’m a nerd at this. I just wanted that same feel to it.”
Much like Carmichael, with whom any conversation about The Carmichael Show invoked encyclopedic references to classic TV shows and their roles in shaping culture, Rel is a sitcom creator by way of industry scholar and, really, just a TV fan. Now TV’s biggest fan gets to create his own TV show.
To figure out how to structure Rel’s pilot and set up the show for the audience in an entertaining way, he rewatched the pilot of Frasier and tried to replicate its structure.
He brings up Family Ties, too.
“I remember this episode where I knew Michael J. Fox was going to be a superstar, and actually made me want to act,” he says. “It’s this episode called ‘A, My Name Is Alex,’ when his friend died from drunk driving. It was basically a play, that episode. There’s something we’re writing that’s going to have that tone. There was something unique about that, and honest, and emotional, and beautiful. That made me want to do my own show.”
In fact, few performers can connect the dots between the meaningful pop-culture milestones of their life and the career they have now.
He was 13 when, as he told Complex, he stole a copy of Richard Pryor’s book, Pryor Convictions: And Other Life Sentences. After running home and devouring the book, he started digging into his father’s Pryor comedy albums and soon made his way to Eddie Murphy’s Delirious for the first time. It was then that he registered not just an aspiration to do comedy one day, but that he wanted to do it in this style.
Things crystallized his senior year at Crane Medical Prep High School, when his teachers let him write a few of his own scenes for a school production. The student body, notorious for heckling, reacted riotously to his work. By the time he was 20, he had started working the Chicago stand-up circuit, eventually landing a regular Sunday night set at the famous Riddles Comedy Club: five minutes gifted him by the show’s MC, comedian DeRay Davis, in exchange for helping to seat the audience during the show.
When Davis moved to Los Angeles, Rel took over his hosting gig, graduated up to Chicago’s only black-owned comedy club Jokes and Notes, and eventually became locally famous, with NBA and NFL players nabbing tickets to his headliner shows. In 2007, he made his first television appearance on Last Comic Standing and his profile kept growing, buoyed by YouTube videos of material and character work he’d post online. Then Keenen Ivory Wayans selected Rel to appear in the In Living Color revival in 2012.
Fox’s casting directors had actually been looking at a different candidate’s videos on YouTube when Rel’s clips auto-played afterward. They ended up watching a bunch and called his manager. Though the revival was canceled before Fox ever aired it, it played a crucial role in his career, adding significant buzz to his name and sparking a mentorship with Wayans that continues today. Even his casting itself represented a bit of fate.
When Rel was about 12 or 13 years old, he wrote into a Saturday morning NBC series called Name Your Adventure. Hosted by Mario Lopez, Jordan Brady, and Tatyana Ali, the idea of the show was to make the dreams of teen audience members come true. Young Rel wrote in asking to visit the set of In Living Color. “That was it. That was my adventure,” he says, cackling before he could finish the story. “They wrote me back a letter saying, ‘Sorry. We canceled the show.’ That’s how I learned what canceling a show was. What?! Canceled?”
Rel finds himself in a similar fit of laughter recounting how he landed Sinbad to play his dad on the show, nearly 25 years after The Sinbad Show went off air.
“First of all, every black TV dad you could think of auditioned for my show,” he says. “Watching the audition tapes was the craziest thing. I never laughed so hard in my life.” But none were exactly right. So to continue the search, he and his fellow executive producers Googled “legendary older black comedians.” Rel just about explodes, slamming the table as he laughs. “We literally Googled that! And Sinbad popped up!”
It took a call from Carmichael to woo him, but Sinbad quickly got on board. More, Rel realized that had already known Sinbad’s brother, a manager, for years.
“Everything has lined up in this crazy way, man,” he says. “I don’t know if I be taking this stuff in sometimes. There’s the little kid me who didn’t know that I could do this. I enjoyed this. I always imagined this. But when your imagination becomes a real thing, it’s kind of wild.”
