Jerrod Carmichael: Don't Be Gay

A hysterical, sometimes deeply uncomfortable, but beautifully blunt journey. .... In this “Rothaniel” follow-up, Carmichael has never seemed more confident. A master storyteller. .... Once again, the comedian has mastered the beauty of standing directly in his truth.

This hour feels like a reset. .... Getting to peer behind the proverbial curtain of fame and fortune (it’s quite something to hear a comedian reveal themselves to be a multimillionaire!) feels more special when the famous person isn’t dropping a lot of names, just truth bombs.

His new hour has more laughs per minute than his recent work, and his attention-getting premises, among them children’s funerals, aren’t as sad as you might think. But conventional stand-up alternates now with confessional long thoughts, about the details of being in an open relationship or the cultural meaning of D’Angelo. There’s more comedy in the former, and more freshness in the latter; still, he hasn’t entirely figured out how to fuse them.

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.