It’s an incredible thing to realize, as you’re watching a performer, that what they’re doing is going to be something big.
Something formative. Something that matters. Something brilliant. Something that’s a big goddamn deal. Something that a silly journalist on a website is going to hyperbolically tease. (Hi!)
It’s impossible to talk about THAT THING, the one that makes this whole Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel special on HBO Max so unmissable, without talking about the thing that took its live audience’s breath away when Carmichael revealed it—and might spoil it for you.
With Rothaniel, Jerrod Carmichael opened a dialogue in a way I’ve never seen.
(Warning: Spoilers follow.)
Name your recent favorites: Eddie Murphy, Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, Wanda Sykes, Louis C.K., Kathy Griffin, Chelsea Handler, John Mulaney, Amy Schumer, Bo Burnham…the ones who we can cite the great jokes from and the performances that elbowed society into a different direction. The sets that did the thing of marrying personal anecdotes, cultural commentary, and great punchlines to make us think about ourselves a little bit differently.
Jerrod Carmichael’s new special does exactly that. But also rejects all of it?
It’s a beautiful, snowy, romantic New York City night as Carmichael’s special, which was directed by Bo Burnham begins. (You can watch it on HBO Friday night at 9 pm.)
There are shots of snow flurries falling in New York’s West Village that, even watching and knowing better from my couch, made me swoon. (They’ll be dirty, melted snow drifts by tomorrow!!!)
When those street lamps and taxi headlights catch the glint of a flake falling down onto the sidewalk, try and find something more beautiful, something that, against all odds, feels just right. It's the perfect, peaceful setting for what will unfold. A Norman Rockwell, bucolic utopia to counter-set the messy reality.
Carmichael’s new special was filmed at the Blue Note jazz club. He sits on a folding chair, and just starts talking.
“I’m happy you’re here. I’m really happy you’re here. I’m happy all of you are here. I have so much to tell you,” he begins. “This only works if we feel like family.”
He’s telling us, his family, that his name, Jerrod Carmichael, is not his real name.
And also that he is gay.
I imagine that the latter bit of information will be trending as soon as the embargo lifts on this special. Carmichael, who Norman Lear has called his successor, who has been a bright light in films like Neighbors 2, and produced meaningful shit, like Ramy, is coming out of the closet.
He is a comedian who knows what this will mean in his community, and, as he takes specific, heartbreaking, and graceful care to outline in the special, for his family.
The following is not meant to be glib, but it is an observation: If you’re a fan of comedy and happen to be extremely gay, you have options.
You can watch the pandering female comedian with her validating jokes. There are the younger stand-ups and their unfiltered sets about butt sex. But I haven’t seen something like Rothaniel.
He talks about what it was like to come out as gay, how people reacted, and how they feel about it. There’s not much joke set-up. It’s not censored. It's not Very Special Episode.
Carmichael simply sat down and told his experience.
He began with his family’s story. “I want to talk about secrets,” he said. “Secrets. You should whisper it, right? I carried so many secrets my whole life. I feel like I was birthed into them. One of my last held secrets is my name. My name is not Jerrod. Welcome to the show, everybody.”
(I spoiled the gay thing. I’m not gonna spoil the big name punchline, too.)
That theme—secrets—was a poignant backdrop to his end goal. He talked about how his grandfathers both had secret families, and that he stemmed from one. “There’s no easy way to say your grandma was a side piece.”
He explored the generational element of that. When he was a kid, he caught his father having an affair, something he forced his parents to reckon with as an adult.
That confrontation came with guilt. Here he was, puppeteering his family’s secrets, while he harbored one of his own. After a long pause during his set, he looks up at the audience: “The secret is I’m gay.”
It’s not the coming out, brave as that is and how eloquently as he articulates it, that is the amazing thing about Carmichael’s special. It is his refusal to let coming out be the end of the journey.
He interrogates his friends’ reactions, his family’s quiet, and his own internal racism about what it means to be a Black comic who likes to suck dick. Excuse the raunch. His free-wheeling candor is much appreciated, because so often we tiptoe around that. But it's not just the bluntness about the sex. It's how he talks about the emotion.
I'm not prepared (freely using "I," because it's all personal now; Carmichael made it so) to discuss how devastatingly truthful his monologue about his mother was.
He understands that there is an audience he has that would probably never listen to a screeching queer talking about what it’s like to come out, and he understands that the said screeching queer (OK, it’s me) would never understand the nuance of his experience with his Black, Southern, religious mother. But he raises the discourse.
The jokes are thrillingly shocking. When the audience applauds, he scoffs at the unnecessary performativity. “I feel like I didn't earn it. It’s like what did I do, suck a Dominican dude’s dick?”
But then he gets into it. The reasons why he didn’t come out. The reasons why he convinced himself he wasn’t gay. The reasons why this was never the life he wanted for himself, even if it makes him happy. “You don't see old ladies looking at a toddler saying, ‘Look at those cheeks. I bet he’s going to be a top. Get that baby some PREP now.’”
Add our personal best friend, internalized homophobia, to the things he has to deal with. But what transfolds in Rothaniel is so much more than that. It is a freewheeling conversation. When Carmichael is desperate for answers about how his family is responding to his confession, the audience earnestly responds, as if by instinct even though they're strangers. That’s how intimate this is.
It is Carmichael trying to figure it all out, in front of an audience that might understand. But if they don’t, he needs them to hear the struggle anyway, what it means to wait until you’re a grown adult to come out of closet, never stop thinking about your family’s unenthusiastic response, and spiral about things like love, history, and death when it comes to resigning to the classics like “we’ll never agree” or “I love the person; not the act.”
He wants to be himself and be loved for it. Damn, don’t we all. And he is explaining, with more generosity than is usually ever given to the other side, why that isn’t possible in his life—and why that might have to be acceptable.
This special is also very funny.
There are multiple times during the special that Carmichael says, “I’m trying to make jokes cuz–I wish this moment wasn’t so weird, man...”
He knows that we’re not equipped to laugh at this. Or that many people will switch the channel entirely the minute the G-word is uttered.
Carmichael is revered in Hollywood, but especially among Black comedy fans. But he did it anyway. He had the conversation. He took it seriously, and was as revelatory as anyone could ever want about this process. (Remember when we used to think “Yep, I’m Gay,” was enough? Carmichael lays it bare.) And, more than all of that, he found a way to laugh about it.
By the way, this wasn’t his biggest secret. That, too, is revealed in the special. It's shocking. And I'll never tell.
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