“Rothaniel,” Reviewed: Jerrod Carmichael’s Vital Coming Out

There can be power in our capacity to make light of personal struggle. We cede ownership of our problems in exchange for companionship, for letting someone else in on the truth within the joke. Jerrod Carmichael’s new HBO comedy special, “Rothaniel,” is a vulnerable offering wrapped inside a virtuoso performance. Prior to the new special, Carmichael, a thirty-five-year-old native of North Carolina, was already one of the most idiosyncratic comics working today. On “The Carmichael Show,” which aired on NBC between 2015 and 2017, he stretched Black Family Sitcom tropes into new and delightful shapes. In projects such as his earlier special “Sermon on the Mount,” he probed questions of family and community and debts both literal and metaphorical. But “Rothaniel,” which, among other narrative pyrotechnics, features Carmichael coming out as gay before a live audience, marks a new high point in his career. The set is a Rubik’s Cube of self-revelation that consistently challenges and astounds, even as it toys with the ways in which seeking laughter can conceal.

Recorded at New York’s Blue Note Jazz Club and directed by Bo Burnham, the special creates an atmosphere of escalating intimacy from its opening frames. The camera follows Carmichael from a distance, walking through the city’s streets on a snowy evening. Shots inside the club reveal a crowd bathed in warm shadows. Carmichael enters, sheds his coat and hat, and embraces the person who collects them. Once he takes his place onstage, lounging comfortably in a chair with a hand on his knee, the stage lights come up, exposing his grin and a bright-red collared shirt. These deft visuals mesh with Carmichael’s opening lines, which situate his audience as confidants, or even something more. “You’re comfortable?” he asks. “This only works if we feel like family.”

“Rothaniel” ’s narrative revolves around the subject of secrets and their toll. Carmichael spends most of the show’s first half letting us in on things that made him feel shame as a child. One was his name: Jerrod is his middle name, given to him by his older brother; his first name, a combination of those of his two grandfathers, was something he tried to hide. Carmichael details the marital infidelities of his family’s patriarchs, and the rifts that grew as they hid their affairs. He refers to “things that are right there hiding in plain sight,” and eventually he divulges the secret he’s been building toward: “I’m gay.” He pauses, letting the words sink in as the silence settles. It isn’t a joke. Then he glances up to meet the audience’s gaze. “I didn’t think I’d ever, ever, ever come out,” he says. “At many points in my life I thought I’d rather die than confront the truth of that.”

From there, the special veers into new territory, as Carmichael seems to grapple, minute by minute, with the work of self-acceptance, and the pain of belonging to a family who loves him “despite.” (As he notes of his brother, “It’s love with an asterisk.”) After nearly every truth that Carmichael discloses, he offers a joke. “You don’t see old ladies looking at a toddler being, like, ‘Oh, look at his cheeks, I bet he’s gonna be a top,’ ” he says. He riffs on his friends’ skepticism toward a white boyfriend, whom he refers to as his “vanilla king.” But there are moments where Carmichael has nothing funny to add. “I’m trying to make jokes,” he says, trailing off. “I wish this moment weren’t so weird, man.”

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One of “Rothaniel” ’s gifts is that it compels viewers to reckon with someone different from whom they expected. Carmichael acknowledges this tension throughout the set, addressing his live audience members directly, until they finally begin to talk back. Their comments are generally supportive, though a few murmurs sound like ambivalence, or thinly veiled disdain. Several people gently challenge Carmichael. Referencing his mother’s reaction to his queerness, one man says, “But you gave yourself so many years—why don’t you give her that time, why don’t you give her some time?” These interjections are unscripted and impromptu, but they hardly come across as heckling. Carmichael simply and proficiently expands his performance to accommodate them. His audience’s response to the show becomes inseparable from our experience of it.

A coming-out narrative, in imprecise hands, runs the risk of sounding reductive. There’s the version in which a queer person is met with immediate, community-wide acceptance: their parents have been covert pride-flag wavers all along, their love interest(s) embrace them with open arms, their credit score instantly soars. Then there’s the tragic opposite, in which a person comes out and finds immediate, unyielding aggression, no reaction short of punitive. Carmichael trusts his audience with the reality that coming out seldom adheres to such binaries, and that the act can resound long beyond the initial revelation. Throughout “Rothaniel,” Carmichael presents himself as a man who is still working out the question of himself. So much of a standup performance rests on the illusion of confidence, but Carmichael shows us his wavering core. Several times, as the stage lights project a nearly divine glow, his voice falters, or he guffaws hesitantly over a joke that he hasn’t yet told. “It’s happening in real time,” he says. “It’s not totally worked out.”

Discussing his mother’s response to his queerness (or, rather, her preference for avoiding the subject), Carmichael says, “Even hate starts to feel like love, because that’s acknowledgement.” The first time I watched “Rothaniel,” I found myself holding my breath. The second time, I cried. The third time, I cried a little less. Since my own coming out, I’ve been very lucky. Like Carmichael, I’ve found friends who’ve become family. But watching Carmichael repeat “I need the love, I need it,” I believed him, because we do. The sentiment is bone-deep. At one point in the show, Carmichael notes that his audience’s warm reaction feels expected: that’s why he lives in New York. But his special is arriving in the midst of calculated state violence against queer folks across the United States, including efforts to ban gender-affirming medical care in Alabama and Texas, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and more than a dozen similar bills being proposed across the country; the C.D.C. has reported that nearly half of all queer kids in the U.S. had considered suicide in the first half of 2021. “Rothaniel” is about both the cost of making oneself visible and the cost of choosing not to. “Sometimes you grow, and you’ve gotta leave people behind,” Carmichael says, then adds, “It’s hard when that person’s your mom.” Later, he says, “I know she’ll see this,” and for a moment he looks directly into the camera.

Carmichael’s show comes in the wake of other recent standup specials, whether by Hasan Minhaj or Hannah Gadsby or Tig Notaro, that upend audience’s expectations with raw or confessional material. But the kinds of self-questioning conversations I’ve had with friends, and with found family and acqaintances and strangers at gay bars, are simply not something I expected to see reflected back when I clicked play on “Rothaniel.” In an interview on Seth Meyers’s “Late Night” last week, Carmichael was still processing his onstage self-disclosure. He said that he’d spoken to his parents on the phone in the car ride to the NBC studios, and as he recounted their conversation he reëntered the zone of “Rothaniel”: searching, unsteady, deeply thoughtful. The conversation went well, Carmichael reported, until his mother told him that “sins” were tearing the family apart. (“It just speaks to the . . . core of the problem—that there’s this insurmountable mountain that we can’t really get over,” Carmichael told Meyers.) Then the driver alerted him that they’d arrived at NBC. “I got out of the car, and now I’m here,” Carmichael said, chuckling at the whiplash, the strange compartmentalization that this new way of being would require. It’s as apt an encapsulation of existing as a queer person as we could hope for.