Jerrod Carmichael Lacks Focus

• In Event: Queering the Everyday: Identity, Sport, and the Minor Improvisations of Queer Life

Abstract

Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show (2024) only appears to search for a clarifying optic to make sense of the comedian’s life since he came out as a gay man in the HBO stand-up comedy special Rothaniel (2022). In his “reality” show, Carmichael recycles plot points from his sitcom The Carmichael Show and revisits themes from his family documentaries, Home Videos and Sermon on the Mount. He resituates old stand-up performances as documentary footage. But these quasi-autobiographical texts now have a different sense, since Carmichael’s queer present rips into and riffs on the heteronormative chatter in his recorded past. Furthermore, the show traffics in different genres of recorded reality: Carmicheal’s cruising on Grindr is a casting call for onscreen sexual partners; online psychotherapy dissects his life in real time; and a visible camera crew interrupts “reality.” Focusing on Episode 4, “Road Trip,” which portrays Carmichael’s journey with his semi-estranged father to the family home in North Carolina, I argue that rifts and riffs in time and disorienting “meta-realities” do not merely conjure an identity in crisis, but also fashion queer, Black life as marvelously out of focus.

Biographical Information

Michelle Robinson is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she teaches “The Ethics of Stand-Up Comedy.” She recently published the essay “Millennial Authenticity and the Stand-Up Comedy Special” in The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy Studies.

Author

• Michelle Robinson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill