Who Did People Think Jerrod Carmichael Is? (2024)

A Jerrod Carmichael reality show was always going to generate controversy.

The stand-up comedian is no stranger to causing a stir; his 2022 special Rothaniel, in which he publicly came out as gay, won an Emmy and catapulted him to a new level of fame and critical acclaim. Now his new HBO comedy documentary series, titled the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, is also making waves, but for not quite the same reasons. While the project has earned rave reviews since its March 29 premiere, with major outlets calling it “daring,” “transcendently powerful,” both “riveting” and “risky,” and like “nothing else on TV,” many viewers are having viscerally negative reactions, to the point where it seems like nearly every person on the part of X formerly known as Black Twitter has weighed in on the brewing backlash that a particular episode of Carmichael’s show has courted.

But let’s first take a step back: The Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show is a revealing, if at times painful, attempt on Carmichael’s part to assess all facets of himself as a newly out Black gay man of some degree of notoriety and acclaim. The format—a mix of footage of his material during his stand-up sets and footage from the ever-present cameras recording his private moments offstage—allows Carmichael, whose comedy has always had a maverick-like sense of risk and abandon, to veer into all sorts of touchy subjects, including love, friendship, loyalty, family, work, and his inability to craft good versions of whatever those things are as a partner, a friend, or a son.

The first episode, filmed around the time of the 2022 Emmys, sees him experiencing a heartbreaking low in his personal life as his professional life is soaring into new territory, when his admission of harboring romantic feelings for his best friend, the rapper Tyler, the Creator, are not reciprocated. Then, in the next episode, Carmichael is revealed to be in a new relationship with a white man. There’s audio of a joke from his stand-up in which he brings up the topic of race play during sexual encounters. Later in the episode, in footage from his stand-up, Carmichael makes a joke about his 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,” he says. When the audience groans, he responds that his boyfriend “doesn’t like that f*cking joke” because he’s “a good person,” but “I like that joke, that’s my burden.”*

If that joke weren’t enough to raise some eyebrows, many have observed that, with the exception of Tyler, the Creator, Carmichael doesn’t appear to display romantic interest in anyone other than white men—something that a few eagle-eyed viewers noted critically from the trailer alone. It’s these two things together that have prompted a swift 180 on Carmichael among viewers—particularly Black viewers—after the goodwill that Rothaniel generated for him. The negative responses range from admonishment of Carmichael and his show to accusations that his platform “makes him a danger to the Black Queer community,” to lamentations that “HBO Max cancelled every Black led show on the network so Jerrod Carmichael could suck on white feet” (which he does in the first episode).

Even some of Carmichael’s peers and other prominent Black figures in the media and entertainment industry have criticized him in light of his new show. Comedian Jay Jurden, in a pointed subtweet, wrote that “it is wild to pretend like you didn’t intentionally align yourself which a bunch of goofy straight white boys instead [of] integrating into the queer comedy community in NYC or LA only to have gay 101 takes from 2015 at your big ole age,” while journalist Ernest Owens chided Carmichael with an Abbott Elementary meme about how “Black people can also be annoying” (fair). Sam Sanders, a popular journalist and audio host, criticized Carmichael as “not funny,” writing that provocation just for provocation’s sake is a waste of time.

The negative response to Carmichael is revealing, not least because it illuminates some of the tensions that still surround sensitive topics like race, desire, and sexuality. But the comedian’s offensive-yet-honest shtick that is currently drawing so much ire is nothing new for him. Carmichael—who has released three HBO specials in total, had his own NBC sitcom (also named after himself) for three seasons, and directed the film On the Count of Three, about two friends with a suicide pact—is no stranger to mainstaging vulnerability, awkwardness, and even self-loathing in his creative output. On the contrary, riding the line of honesty between humor and devastating confessional is what he’s best at. Rothaniel turned heads not simply because Carmichael came out, but because his story of coming out was also a story of his family, his inherited lessons of toxic masculinity and infidelity, and his struggle with not being accepted by his religious mother. Not only does it deal in uncomfortable truths, but, as my Slate colleague Cameron Drews recently put it, Carmichael’s work almost deliberately feels like a work in progress—even, or perhaps especially, the final drafts. One of his signature line deliveries is to pause, as if he’s unsure if he should say the next thing, before spilling a ridiculous confession about himself.

Take, for instance, Carmichael’s 2017 special, 8, in which he admits to overcompensating for his impoverished childhood, pretending to care about global warming, feeling unmoved by animal rights movements, and wanting to be a better Black person because he cares more about Jay-Z than Martin Luther King Jr. It’s always self-denigrating. He even goes so far as to make a joke about how he doesn’t choke during sex, though he would like to, because he sleeps “with a lot of white girls.” He was already starting to employ his trick of using pregnant pauses before revealing something embarrassing about himself, making the audience wonder if it was a planned divulgence or off the cuff. The secrets divulged in that special aren’t as heart-wrenching as the ones that would come in the subsequent years, but he laid the groundwork of self-admonishing his own dirtbag status long before he won an Emmy for it.

Carmichael’s material has always been concerned with the self as an unlikeable, or maybe even objectively bad, person. There is no better showcase for that than the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. Choosing to air out your personal faux pas as someone in the spotlight, particularly when you are still finding your footing and battling demons and laughing off therapeutic advice, is a bold move. Carmichael choosing to confront Tyler, the Creator over his love confession in front of cameras, for the voyeuristic displeasure of anyone with an HBO or Max subscription, plays with the idea of reality completely. When so much of reality TV is asking the audience to please believe—or at least to pretend to believe—that what’s being shown is the truth, Carmichael’s show dares you to wonder if it isn’t. As Carmichael’s masked friend (who is almost certainly Bo Burnham) puts it in the first episode, “This is not truth. This is narrative that will be edited. Those will all be choices.” The question is not whether Carmichael’s behavior is inappropriate or detestable, or even whether that’s his true self, but what he is trying to do by presenting himself in that light.

It makes perfect sense that audiences, particularly the Black queer community, would feel upset by Carmichael’s off-kilter joke. It’s also indeed worth calling out Max and other streamers for undervaluing Black creators and deplatforming their work—maybe there should be more Black comedy specials on HBO that don’t involve watching a Black man “suck on white feet,” if that’s not your kind of thing. And, whether we like it or not, the topic of sexual and romantic preferences is always going to be fraught in marginalized communities, worthy of both discussion and, at times, interrogation. But we shouldn’t be surprised that Carmichael has brought us to this precipice with his work. If the joke is realizing he may be a bad person, I regret to inform you that Jerrod Carmichael made it first.

Correction, April 15, 2024: This post originally misstated that Carmichael says he enjoys slave play during his sexual encounters, specifically with his boyfriend. In the episode, Carmichael brings up the topic of race play during sexual encounters and makes a separate joke about his boyfriend and their relationship.