Jerrod Carmichael Takes Off the Armor
The most striking thing about Jerrod Carmichael’s new special, Don’t Be Gay, is how much it resembles a familiar, run-of-the-mill comedy special. He has made a standard hourlong special before: His 2014 hour, Love at the Store, a relic from a much earlier place in both his career and his public persona, looks and sounds like the competent, does-the-job Funny or Die production that it is. But since then, Carmichael’s work has been distinguished by his investment in messing with the form. He’s committed to refusing or subverting the typical moves of the hourlong special in order to build something artful and occasionally alienating. He has followed a similar pattern in his non-stand-up work, going from The Carmichael Show, an almost perversely old-school multi-cam Fox sitcom, to Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, his HBO docuseries from last year that toys with ideas about transparency, self-examination, storytelling, and audience.
As a result, it’s almost disorienting to hit play on Don’t Be Gay and discover a special that offers a straightforward take on performing an hour of stand-up. It’s still artful — whatever else he chooses, it’s tough to imagine a Carmichael project looking anything other than radiantly gorgeous — but he has turned away from the thick layers of meta-awareness and formal playfulness that have come to define his work. It is a relief, and it is frustrating.
After 8, a comedy special in which Carmichael does everything he can to irritate his audience, and Rothaniel, Carmichael’s immaculately, painstakingly undone coming-out special, Don’t Be Gay is a wonder of conventionality. He stands on the stage at New York’s West Side YMCA in front of a gold curtain and tells well-performed, well-written jokes. They’re “Hey, isn’t this a funny word?” jokes (his boyfriend fucks a guy whose dick has “a lot of heft to it”), “Moms are hard” jokes (his mom is very religious), and “One group is like this; another group is like that” jokes (gay people openly admit to being horny, but straight men have to do things like call Sydney Sweeney “attractive”). The audience is present in a politely distant but receptive way with shots from the back of their heads and an occasional darkened full-theater shot. The camera is more agile and responsive than in most specials, zooming and shifting around at compelling moments and tracking Carmichael with a handheld immediacy, but it’s all still comfortably within the margins of a typical HBO hour.
In its own way for Carmichael, this is a form of coming out, not in the sense of content but of style. 8 and Rothaniel are both daring, experimental projects. They’re full of deliberate moments of discomfort that often force Carmichael to swim upstream against the currents of easy audience approval. Both reveal Carmichael as a comedian and an artist, but those revelations arrive on his terms. In 8, he is defiant, recalcitrant. In Rothaniel, he’s vulnerable, or he’s creating a show of vulnerability, or he’s doing some combination of the two and doesn’t want to reveal which is which. Both are resentful of the audience; Carmichael needs their approval and disdains it at the same time, and any less wary, less studied version of him is hidden underneath a hard outer shell of style and concept.
By comparison, Don’t Be Gay feels almost giddy in how clear and untortured it all is. There’s still plenty of pain and confusion in the material, as the title suggests, but the experience of it is uncomplicatedly pleasurable and comparatively generous to its audience. It’s full of relief valves whenever things get too serious and studded with delightful act-outs. It comes off as a happy-go-lucky, feel-good extravaganza. It also foregrounds Carmichael’s own pleasure, mostly sexual, often via cheerful, enthusiastic descriptions of blowjobs, hand jobs, spitting, domination play, and stepping on someone’s face while wearing a dirty gym sock. Where his previous projects were conflicted and often anguished, this one is celebratory.
Some of that comes from the fact that Carmichael himself seems happy, or at least as happy as he’s willing to let himself be. The title sounds disapproving, but the twist is that it’s Carmichael himself doing the scolding, in a joke that tries to tease apart some of his own instincts about shame and gender. He speaks extensively about how much he loves his boyfriend, all of the ways he enjoys gay sex, his mixed feelings about financially supporting his family, and how much he loves his nieces and nephews. He talks about intimacy and connection. He opens with a section on how difficult it’s been to see the responses to his previous work, and especially to feel that he has disappointed Black viewers, but his jokes arrive at the conclusion that whatever else anyone may think of him, he knows he’s doing okay. He values Black approval, but white approval makes him feel financially secure: “I want Black people to like me, but one white lady from HBO liked me and I’ve been a multimillionaire ever since, so it’s different.” Self-satisfied smile, hand-on-hip pose, end of topic. The gist of that joke returns at the end of the special with a neatly mirrored punch line, but even though the content of that punch line sounds dire — they are both jokes about racism and homophobia — each of them weaves in some clause in which Carmichael has already soothed himself. He’s made money. His boyfriend loves him.
On its own, Don’t Be Gay might be an impressive special from a magnetic comedian, full stop. But from the perspective of Carmichael’s other work, it feels like a special in which the presentation has shifted and the framing has been reconsidered but the subject has lost some of its sheen of novelty. The issue is not that his subject continues to be queerness after exploring that idea in both Rothaniel and Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. It’s that Carmichael’s favorite subject is himself, and in Don’t Be Gay, the totality of that interest starts to feel repetitive. His comedy is a shallow-focus lens, rendering every plane of his self-perception in exquisite detail and losing specificity or texture as soon as that lens pans out toward other characters in his story. In Rothaniel, he speaks at length about his family, especially his parents, and their presence in that special gives so much more context to the portions about Carmichael’s interiority. Some of the most compelling episodes of Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show are about other people, particularly the episode on fellow comedian Jamar Neighbors. Don’t Be Gay is so wholly attuned to Carmichael’s consideration of himself that everything else has been eclipsed.
There’s nothing wrong with that on the surface; most comedians are the center of their own work. Carmichael is an entertaining and observant narrator of his own story, and, ultimately, even jokes about Pop-Tarts or Donald Trump or blowjobs are suggestive reflections of the comedian who tells them. But in an hourlong special, themes work best when they come with variations, and Carmichael’s work increasingly feels like a coin flip where each joke comes up with his head every time. It would be less egregious if the HBO reality show (the second of his TV series named after himself) had not featured so much of Carmichael’s compulsive self-examinations, concluding in a sequence where he watches his own show with a person who obscures his own identity (Bo Burnham) in order to grill Carmichael about why he’s so obsessed with putting himself on display. However charismatic Carmichael can be as a performer, eventually his endless self-portraits start to blur. It’s almost enough to make one long for Pop-Tarts or Donald Trump. No more blowjobs required, however — Carmichael’s got that covered.
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