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“I haven’t been home in… a year and a week,” Jerrod Carmichael tells me. Memorial Day Weekend is upon us, but we’re talking about the holidays, the fall and winter main events everyone goes home for, whether they’re on good terms with their family or not. Instead of going back to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Carmichael spent the time with close friends. That choice propelled his recent hit HBO standup special, Rothaniel, in which he detailed his fraught relationship with certain members of his family and made a very public statement about his sexuality for the first time. There are many different ways to come out, and famous people today seem to favor a casual or ambiguous approach. But Carmichael made a declaration, and built 55 minutes of comedy around it.
The special is a treatise on shame, secrets, hypocrisy, brutal honesty and uncomfortable truths under the shade of the Carmichael family tree going back generations. Hunched over on a stool before an intimate crowd in Manhattan’s Blue Note Jazz Club, Carmichael is raw but relaxed, exposed but comfortably loose, deadly serious but disarmingly, mischievously hilarious. It’s a stunning performance of genuine vulnerability, as if Carmichael pulled up a chair by the fireplace to tell the story he’s been building up to for his entire career as a writer-comedian.
He’s more than willing to talk frankly about the fallout within his family–they had what he calls “subpar-ass reactions” to the special– but it’s clearly weighing on him. That weight, and a holiday season away from Winston-Salem, is what drove him to Rothaniel in the first place. He’d been working on a completely different project with acclaimed director Mark Romanek—“I had this whole long romantic music video, like kind of Hype Williams meets My Dinner with Andre,” he reveals as we sip lattes from his favorite West Village coffee shop. “But it went in another direction.” He had “been writing for, let’s say, a year, two years, these very personal things, and growing as a writer, learning structural things. But I didn’t think it was standup… I didn’t know what it was. And then that coincided with, I don’t know… just a kind of need. A lot of urgent things were happening in my life. I couldn’t make this thing fast enough.”
Making Rothaniel meant returning to standup, “this thing I haven’t done in years,” after half a decade writing for and starring in sitcoms and movies, and finding that gear proved fraught with trial and error. “I had to relearn it,” Carmichael says. “I went up at The Comedy Store, and it was really bad, because I was leaning on old tricks and I was really leaning on my ego. It just wasn't true and it didn't match the material. I had to learn how to be myself on stage.”
Bo Burnham, Rothaniel’s director and Carmichael’s close friend, didn’t mince words about the failed field test. “Oh geez, it's crap,” Carmichael recalls him saying. “Let's go on the road and you'll figure it out and whatever.” Burnham, who had just created his own acclaimed special with the Netflix pandemic hit Inside, thought it would take about a year’s worth of road tests. Carmichael cracked the code on the second try. “I found what was true, I guess. I was able to just be honest. We did it at Flappers, and before the set at dinner Bo told me to just have a memorable set—just like, have somebody remember something about this set. It was very vague advice. But I did a set around not wanting to go home for Christmas. And from there, just being able to find that true emotional range and be myself on stage…it was my first time really doing that. But then I couldn't do anything else. After that December show, we taped right after Valentine's Day.”
The special was released less than two months later, on April 1st. So, yes: urgent. “It kind of needed to be,” Carmichael says. “It was all happening for real in my life in real time. This is on my mind. And audiences could feel that, and that's what we were trying to capture. You're going to capture something in a camera, you can't lie to a camera. I mean you can—but it'll show.”
Carmichael had been trying to broach the truth for some time. His 2019 shorts, Home Movies and Sermon on the Mount, almost function as backdoor pilots for Rothaniel, with Carmichael taking a documentary approach to frank discussions about life, race and childhood with the women and men in his family and town. “I've been trying to think about how to even think about my life,” Carmichael tells me. “My instinct is to say that Home Videos was my first true work, the first peek of who I am. And that's so my tone: this pocket of melancholic happiness, the [warm] colors under film grain kind of shit.”
In a conversation with his mother in Videos, he casually tosses out that he’s “hooked up with men,” skating around the subject quicker than Gretzy, almost as if to distract viewers, his mother, and even himself from the significance of what he was saying. “I was scared,” he admits now. “I was trying to dismiss it. I'm looking my mother in the eyes like, This is actually the moment. I was trying to just throw it out like it wasn't one of the most devastating moments of my life, one of the most nerve-wracking, anxiety-building moments ever,” he laughs. “[It was all I was] able to, I think, articulate at that point. That was as brave as I was able to be. For me, it was about my fear more than it's about the thing itself. It wasn't necessarily even about coming out.”
Revisiting Love at The Store and 8, HBO specials from 2014 and 2017 respectively, reveals more hints, including an entire bit dedicated to a friend’s bad idea to come out well past the age when people care. An early cut of Rothaniel planned to reference this moment—“We had an intro that was me, smoking weed [while] watching 8 on my couch, that we cut at the last minute. It was an incredible shot, but content over aesthetic,” Carmichael says. “But yeah, [those old jokes were] definitely the product of hiding in plain sight. Like, maybe if I talk about it, it'll throw them off the trail a little bit. Oh, look at me! I can talk about it, hypothetically, from 30,000 feet. 8 versus Rothaniel is an evolution even just of my own personal comedy. My material was very much from a mountaintop: I feel this way about this and this and this, and blah, blah, blah. The comedian as philosopher kind of thing. Now I'm on the battlefield. Rothaniel is like, I'm pulling up to the beach at Normandy. The explosions are around me. It's of great personal consequence.” If that Home Videos scene with his mother was an Evel Knievel bunny jump, he tells me later, Rothaniel was the great Grand Canyon leap: “We’ll see if he survives.”
Since breaking through in 2014 with the Spike Lee-directed special Love At the Store and a scene-stealing part in Seth Rogen’s Neighbors, Carmichael has established himself as one of this generation’s most thoughtful and intriguing entertainers, offering trenchant observations on race and society’s hypocrisies while eschewing the traditional standup comedian to mainstream star pipeline. Sitting in a faux-European courtyard in an apartment complex, dressed like spring incarnate—cream-colored Kapital chunky cardigan, cream polo, off-white pants and brown loafers, which we’ll later deem a “Carl Thomas-ass fit”—he laughs wistfully as he remembers his early years in New York. “I used to come to the city to avoid pilot season in LA because people that I knew started getting TV shows and would reach out, Jerrod, I wrote this part for you. It's just easier to be like, Oh man, I'm in New York. Before that season of Curb [in season 8, Larry absconds to New York City to escape social obligations in LA], I did that,” he says. “Habitually every January through March–April-ish through casting. I was poor and I would stay on my aunt's floor and take the PATH train into the city to do open mics. I remember having holes in the bottom of my shoes—one night there was a blizzard and the Lucas Brothers let me wait in their car before an open mic, that’s how I got cool with them.” I point out the irony in living this way while avoiding opportunities that would’ve changed his financial situation even if, say, the pilot sucked, and he shoots me a quizzical, You-Got-Me-Fucked-Up smirk, bemused that I’d even imagine such a thing for him: “I don't really call that an opportunity.”
Carmichael’s fingerprints on contemporary culture are visible in all sorts of places. His NBC series The Carmichael Show, which ran three seasons from 2015-2017, was a throwback family sitcom that often cast him as the cynic in frank living room conversations about hot-button topics. Last month he made his film directorial debut with On the Count of Three, a pitch-black comedy about two friends planning to commit suicide together. He’s nurtured comedy talent as a producer on the Emmy-winning Muslim-identity dramedy Ramy, and you can trace Lil Rel and Tiffany Haddish’s paths to Hollywood ubiquity back to Carmichael Show. He’s the narrator on Tyler, The Creator’s Grammy-winning concept album Igor; Jay-Z handed him the reins on one of his most talked about music videos in recent history; and eagle-eyed viewers spotted him in Jeen-Yuhs, soaking in one of Kanye’s impassioned streams of consciousness. He admits he spent a lot of time in Wyoming while Kanye was recording Ye, only choosing to leave once the album was done and influencers and celebs started flying in to celebrate. “Once that happens, I’m on the next thing smoking,” he laughs, before disclosing that he “has a bar or two]” on the album, reciting “the most beautiful thoughts are always beside the darkest”—the very first lines we hear.
The day after Rothaniel dropped, Carmichael hosted Saturday Night Live, joking that he was “probably the least famous person” to ever get the gig; a few days earlier, security had chased him out of the Knitting Factory when he tried to take the stage unannounced to work on his monologue. Now bros are yelling out that they loved his recent appearance on Howard Stern as we walk by. “I don’t hear that a lot of times,” Carmichael says. “I don’t expect anybody to ever be talking to me.”
Our afternoon together spans four different locations chosen for their solitude. Carmichael’s curiosity is insatiable and boundless: He’ll stop himself mid-sentence to remark on a passerby (“Am I straight?” he wisecracks as he stares like Pepe Le Pew at a gorgeous woman), note that people keep passing us with yellow coffee cups that resemble Wendy’s Frostys, or stop a random person to tell her she looks great.
Oftentimes, an insight Carmichael shares about himself leads to a digression about pop culture, like his least favorite song on Kendrick Lamar’s new album (“Purple Hearts”), and before you know it, you’re agreeing Jay-Z’s Vol. 3 Life and Times of S. Carter is underrated and trading bars alongside the West Side Highway. While he’s telling me about the risks of making Rothaniel, a man walks by the stoop we’ve taken refuge on, breaking Carmichael’s impassioned train of thought. “Ooh he’s just my type…just anybody who could be on BiLatinMen.com,” he adds, before I can ask what his type actually is. But wait— what about one of Rothaniel’s funnier passages, when a (presumably) Black woman in the audience audibly groans at Carmichael’s admission he has a fondness for white men?
“People kind of took that and ran with it,” he laughs. “Do I probably need to see more Black people? Yeah, of course. That's some shit rooted in like, the Black guys I would see were like DL and it was just something else. So it's not on some, exclusive [race] thing. But you know what got me about that? I saw some Black gay men say, I turned it off after that. And I'm like, You realize you're my mother now, right? You do realize that dismissing the one part of me that you disagree with is the shit I'm talking about. It's a little hypocritical.”
Still, as freeing as it is to be out, Carmichael admits that “secret sex is the most fun sex, unfortunately. But, no more of that. Now I'm open and able to show emotion or show affection. I don't run from it—I mean, there's definitely still walls and I've still got to figure shit out, but the funniest shit on Raya is the girls that I matched with that I never responded to, a couple of them hit me and were like, Ohhhh, okay. I get it now.”
As for Carmichael’s relatives, he says “it's hard for a family to... just acknowledge the one part that you need acknowledged. My [15-year-old] niece is the only one that really did that. She hit me with a quick text, I see you. I hear you.” Carmichael suspects her age has something to do with that: “I love this generation,” he says earnestly. “I actually fuck with them, and fuck all those comedians that are going so hard against them.”
It’s not hard to guess who he might be talking about. “Look, I get it. Everybody’s got to create a boogeyman to sell tickets. But it's not true,” he says, referring to the much-hyped threat of cancel culture. “Who’s getting canceled for what they’ve said? What does that mean, that people are mad on Twitter? Everybody’s fine. These grown men are fine. I think, a lot of times, people who offer nothing truthful or meaningful about themselves then complain about society at large and create this boogeyman. It's like, listen, that's the most urgent thing in your life? God bless you. I'm tired of hearing it. Chappelle, do you know what comes up when you Google your name, bro? That's the legacy? Your legacy is a bunch of opinions on trans shit? It's an odd hill to die on. And it's like, hey, bro. Who the fuck are you? Who do you fuck? What do you like to do? Childish jokes aside, who the fuck are you? It's just kind of played. But he's choosing to die on the hill. So, alright, let him.”
In the wake of feeling estranged from his actual kin, he’s turned to friends, admitting he was “very needy and clingy” while living with Burnham during a “rough period” in his life. “He’s the friend of my dreams, in a way. I’m really happy that we found each other,” Carmichael says. “I trust him with my life, in all ways. And so a lot of the moments you see in Rothaniel, the reason I was able to go there is because he's directing. It's like my best friend's directing, and I can give everything. I don't have to hide anything, that I can take down any wall. He's the best friend you could ask for. He really protected me.”
He’s confident that they would’ve found each other as friends even without the infrastructure of Hollywood—which can be a weird reminder that they have a business relationship when Burnham say, directs a special and then lawyers and business managers have to get involved. “We would still be going to Six Flags,” Carmichael says. “We go to Universal, Disney. We love immersive experiences, magic shows, plays, and shit like that. I'm really lucky, man, because like my friends, it is like a big-ass field trip. I can hit them to go, truly, anywhere in the world, if I hit my friend Lionel [Boyce] and be like, ‘Man, you want to go Tokyo, because they got these ruby grapes that I really want to try,’ he's totally down.” Carmichael hates to do, say, or even feel the obvious thing—but some tropes are unavoidable. “That's so common: the gay man, chosen family thing,” he says. “It's such a cliche that you find yourself cringing at the word friendsgiving, but then it's just like, Oh, fuck that, man. I'm so happy to have them. It's more important that you choose to have someone in your life. So many relationships are a product of circumstance.”
Our talk turns to what’s next. On the Count of Three, released mid-May to positive reviews, dials the most nihilistic bits of Carmichael’s standup to 10. (In the works since 2019, a “comedy” about committing suicide wasn’t an easy sell—Carmichael says Scott Rudin was the only person to tell him to his face that they wouldn’t be a part of it, and why.) He’s been attached to a handful of intriguing projects, but, he grins, “All those irons in the fire are gone. I love getting rid of irons.” The 48 Hours remake he was writing with the Safdie brothers? Gone, although they’re still talking about new ideas. The Django meets Zorro project he was working on with Quentin Tarantino? Not happening, but “Quentin's a lunatic who I love, and I'm happy that I got to spend the time. We saw exploitation flicks at the New Beverly, he read me scenes that never made it to his movies, that he had typed out, in his kitchen after making fresh-squeezed lemonade for me. It was really special. It's actually an incredible, incredible script that came in from that Django/Zorro that I would love for Sony to figure out, but I realize the impossibility of it. But I still think we wrote a $500 million film.”
Carmichael isn’t one to namedrop, but the mention of Tarantino reminds him of a story he’s willing to share because he was “there for my work,” not “because of a friend”: “One of the greatest moments of my life was Game Night at Leo's house [in LA]. I'm sitting between Leo and Quentin, Leo's passing a joint to me, and Quentin's saying over me [to him], Have you seen Jerrod's shit? And Leo's like, Of course. And then they start quoting shit from 8 and Carmichael Show, back and forth to each other as I'm passing a joint back,” he says. (As for what game the leader of the Pussy Posse hosts at a party that also includes Pacino and Javier Bardem, Carmichael can’t quite recall. “Wolf or something like Village. It's one of those community things where you pretend to be something, and everyone has to guess if you're lying or not. And you’re playing it with these Academy Award-winning actors. I'm like, Well, I don't know. Are you a brilliant actor? Or are we playing a game still?")
Whatever he does wind up working on will likely include standup, in some shape or form. “I hate Jack of All Trades mentality,” he says. “I think you should show a discernible skill and be good at something. I hate when a female singer has a decent voice but they suck at dancing. Bitch, stop moving. Be like Adele, just stand there. Whitney Houston made ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody,’ and she can't dance! But who cares, because her voice was great. I think [standup] is a natural way of communicating for me. I think I probably communicate better, in many ways, on stage than off, and can be more honest.”
The real project Carmichael is committed to working on is unflinching honesty: “I'm not hiding anything, anymore,” he says with impassioned urgency. “So now it's like my 12-Step Truth Program. [Rothaniel] was about the burden of hiding something, keeping the truth away from myself and from the public. And now, it's like, how do I keep [the truth] at the forefront in my own life and in my work? Confronting the things that are there, the things that I would want to push away or push down. Saying what I mean. Communicating my first thought, my first feelings and not my second,” he laughs. “That's the one thing about the special, bro… It’s about being as honest as I purport myself to be. Be who you say you are—or hey, [you can] be a full character… [But] I couldn't handle the purgatory. Like, I'm playing Jerrod Carmichael in my shows, and I'm onstage as Jerrod Carmichael, but I'm not able to fully express myself. It was such a contradiction. It's hell. You build these little hells [for yourself]. Once I knew that I had the power to tell the truth and I wasn't... I had no other choice.”
This is Jerrod Carmichael’s mission going forward: to keep telling the truth, at all costs. With as much earnestness as is possible with a camera recording the action. “There's so much work to be done,” he says, talking about the future creative opportunities his newfound momentum has afforded him—but also talking about himself. “I see the path. Just head down and work.” Describing his mindset post-Rothaniel, post-burden, post secrets, he says “I feel like a man, I guess, if that makes sense. I guess that's what I'm describing. It's made me feel like more of a man. And now, it’s time to work, man.” He will survive.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ryan McGinley
Styled by Ian Bradley
Tailoring by Marius Ahiale at Lars Nord Studio
Produced by Hen’s Tooth Productions
