Comedian Jerrod Carmichael is walking back his recent criticism of Dave Chappelle.
Carmichael had previously lamented in a GQ profile that Chappelle’s “legacy is a bunch of opinions on trans shit” and called that “an odd hill to die on.” After Chappelle demanded that Carmichael publicly apologize to him, Carmichael doubled down, telling Esquire that the controversial comic interpreted the comments “as ‘Fuck Dave Chappelle,’ because he’s an egomaniac.”
Addressing those comments during an appearance on The Breakfast Club on Tuesday, Carmichael said, “I deeply regret saying anything about Dave Chappelle to the press. Honestly, from now on, any thoughts I have for Dave will be directed in a phone call to Dave.”
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“I’ll never do it again—I do apologize for that. I’m man enough to say that,” he added. “I don’t want the attention, it’s gone on way too long.”
That being said, Carmichael said he still feels that Chappelle talks about trans people too much in his standup. “The criticism that I had had nothing to do with the morality of the joke, had nothing to do with the ethics of the joke, that’s something that’s also been misreported,” he said.
He continued: “The criticism I had was that of a fan, someone who respects him so much that I want him to focus his genius on a wide range of topics. I think that it started being really, really focused on one thing. I’ll say this, I’m also a big fan of Jay-Z. If Jay-Z made three albums about trans people, I’d be like ‘Hey, what’s going on with Jay?’”
Chappelle wasn’t the only one who had publicly criticized Carmichael’s comments about Chappelle. The Breakfast Club host Charlamagne Tha God called Carmichael out last week on the show’s “Donkey of The Day” segment, saying Carmichael should “show Chappelle or any comedian grace because at some point, you will offend.”
Charlamagne gave the example of a controversial joke that Carmichael recently made on his HBO series Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, where the comedian said of his white boyfriend, “I sometimes joke to him that our relationship is like that of a slave and the master’s son who teaches me how to read by candlelight.”
During his Breakfast Club interview on Tuesday, Carmichael took issue with the fact that Charlamagne hadn’t included the setup to the joke, where he prefaced the slave comment by saying, “He makes me smarter, he makes me read. I have so many books. Realistically I’m not gonna read all those books. He knows that. But the fact that I bought them says I love you. They’re little monuments around my apartment just like, ‘look at this book from Amazon that I’m never gonna read.’”
In any case, the aforementioned snippet quickly circulated on social media, where some users questioned whether his show was a “danger” to the Black community. “Your legacy is a bunch of opinions on role-playing slavery with your white boyfriend,” Charlamagne opined on his show last week.
While addressing the squabble further on Tuesday, Carmichael explained how the joke was taken out of context. “It’s something that people have been running with because I have a white boyfriend, so people try and create some type of crazy story out of that,” he said.
“But he’s a human being. He deserves respect. I deserve respect. I don’t appreciate things being misreported,” he added. “I’m a human being and people can get hurt. There are actually real lives at stake with the things that you say. Come after me, that’s fine, but don’t come after my boyfriend.”
