‘Don’t Be Gay’ Is the Next Chapter in the Evolution of Jerrod Carmichael

Jerrod Carmichael knows it’s time to log off, and yet…“It’s so fun,” he tells Vanity Fair. “It’s so fun that I can’t do it anymore.”

This time last year, Carmichael was often at the center of social media discourse thanks to his HBO docuseries, Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. The series set the internet ablaze with its unflinching and often uncomfortable look at Carmichael’s life as a relatively newly out gay man navigating friendships, family, and a blossoming relationship. “I still check Twitter all the time. I check it every day,” he admits. “But I just can’t do it for me anymore.”

If that’s the case, Carmichael may want to go ahead and block his name right now. On Saturday, May 24, the Emmy-winning comedian and provocateur will be back in the spotlight with Don’t Be Gay, his hilarious and vulnerable fourth comedy special with HBO. Taped in one night in New York City and directed by Ari Katcher, Don’t Be Gay dives headfirst into Carmichael’s psyche fresh off his docuseries, which was also directed by Katcher.

“I’m in this generative phase where it’s like, I have a lot to talk about,” Carmichael says.

Don’t Be Gay also marks Carmichael’s first stand-up special since Rothaniel, the Bo Burnham–directed Emmy-winning comedy special where Carmichael officially came out of the closet. “I had been doing stand-up since Rothaniel, and it was this cathartic thing where I would go up with some immediate problem and work it out,” he tells Vanity Fair in an exclusive interview. But Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show itself “became the immediate issue after the show came out. Of course, I got the Google alerts for myself, and I’m checking Twitter, and it’s a rollercoaster.” His up-and-down relationship with the internet “is actually a more volatile relationship than I’ve had with my family,” he tells VF.

As documented in his reality show, that family includes Joe—Carmichael’s father, who had a second family—and Cynthia, his devout Christian mother who’s struggled with her son’s homosexuality. “The relationship has always been somewhat complicated,” he says. But post-docuseries, things with his parents are apparently looking up. “I think our relationship is… good,” Carmichael says, taking a moment to consider his response. “Every relationship—I mean this in a positive way— is as good as it can be.”

While they certainly come up, Don’t Be Gay isn’t really about Joe or Cynthia. It’s about Carmichael navigating his life as a rich, famous, gay Black man and all that entails. “The special is a lot of thoughts around how I’m seeing myself, because the reality show was that,” he says. “I started writing a lot of material about that—about how I see myself, about masculinity, how I see myself as a man.” Now, he’s somewhat anxiously awaiting the results. “I hope it’s funny. I hope you liked it,” he tells me. “I hope you laughed.”

“You know Scarpetta? I fell in love with it during COVID,” Carmichael says. His favorite dish at the tony Madison Avenue Italian restaurant is its classic spaghetti. “The secret is probably just butter,” he says. “But it is very simple, just noodles and sauce, and it’s good spaghetti.”

Good spaghetti—solid, satisfying—is precisely what Carmichael wanted Don’t Be Gay to be. Carmichael tested out material for “a year, a year and a half even shaping it into a show” at spots like The Comedy Cellar and The Laugh Factory, but also lesser known venues like Comedy Connection in Rhode Island and what he calls “one of the best clubs in the world,” Comedy on State in Madison, Wisconsin. Despite performing at venues all over the country, Carmichael insists he’s never been on an official tour. “It’s always so impulsive,” he says. “They would all just squeeze me in for these last-minute shows that we announced.”

That impulsive nature is key to Carmichael’s charm. When he performs live, audience members regularly shout out their immediate reactions to what Carmichael’s describing, leading to off-the-cuff repartee and spur-of-the-moment insights. He also eschews the “stand-up” part entirely.

But while sitting down and engaging in impromptu call-and-response with the audience have both become hallmarks of Camrichael’s, you won’t find either in Don’t Be Gay. “This special feels like the first of its kind for me,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve made anything like this before.”

Between the reality show and acting in Oscar-winning films like Poor Things, it had been awhile since Carmichael performed stand-up. In many ways, Don’t Be Gay felt like a return for someone who established himself through the club system.

But the young man Carmichael once was is not the same man who commands the stage in Don’t Be Gay. “Me and Bo [Burnham] were just talking about that when [I] started my career, [I was] holding on to this deep secret about myself,” he says. “So a lot of my stand-up was me throwing grenades everywhere else—a bit chaotic, a lot of contrarian, cynical thoughts. It is who I was as a person.”

In his first special, 2014’s Spike Lee–directed Love at the Store, Carmichael describes himself as “a young comic coming out.” (But not like that.) “I wanted it to feel like a night at the Comedy Store,” he says. “It was filmed in the original room. Nobody filmed there at the time, and it was really special to me to do that.” Next came 2017’s 8:00, directed by Burnham, which Carmichael says was like “giving a speech” about “a lot of contrarian views on family and the environment.” Then came his actual coming out special, Rothaniel, which won Carmichael an Emmy for outstanding writing for a variety special. “Rothaniel was me contending with something real, dealing with myself now and learning to tell stories,” he says.

Now there’s Don’t Be Gay. “It’s using everything that I’ve learned over the course of my career,” he says. “It does feel like a culmination.” If Rothaniel was Carmichael dipping his toes into what it means to be a queer comedian, Don’t Be Gay find him diving in head-first, with Carmichael divulging intimate details about everything from his open relationship to his teenage porn preferences to his Grindr hookups. (Trust me, you’ll never think of Claire Huxtable in the same way again).

“I don’t think anything’s off limits. There were no rules for this,” he says. “My last special was so emotional. It was something I’d never done before. It was me coming out and doing the scariest thing in the world for me. [Rothaniel] was a lot about the audience, and me being afraid of being seen and facing the crowd. This special is more about my excitement to share jokes and ideas with a crowd.”

The first joke comes in the title of the special. For those clutching their pearls, don’t worry: “The title is a joke,” he says. But like most of Carmichael’s material, there’s something deeper and more vulnerable at play as well. “It also encapsulates an interior monologue that has been with me for a large part of my life,” he says. When they read the title, “some people may think it’s an Andrew Tate video,” he jokes—but that’s just the price of doing business.

“Stand-up comedy is a very masculine performance,” he says. “I almost didn’t realize until I came out just how much stand-up comedy is about gay shit. You’d be hard-pressed to watch any special done by a straight man where a large percentage of the punch line isn’t something gay. A lot of stand-up comedy is like, ‘Well, at least I’m not gay.’ Watch any special. It is insane.”

Thankfully, Carmichael and his comedy have evolved to a place beyond gay panic. That evolution took a lot of work. “I’ve been really on my David R. Hawkins Letting Go, Brené Brown, Ellen Langer, finding-peace-mission lately,” he says. “So I’ve applied that to every area of my life.” When Don’t Be Gay hits HBO and Max, he’ll have his first real test—at least as far as social media is concerned.

“It’s been close to a year now where I stopped seeking myself all over the internet, searching my name and things,” he says. That certainly hasn’t been easy. “The internet is in my pocket. It’s like, ‘how can you not?’ It’s crazy not to look and search for yourself, but I don’t think that I can.” And getting offline isn’t simply a way to protect himself. “The positive comments can also inflate the ego and affect the work,” he says. “For the sake of writing, for the sake of creating, I don’t think that I can, or I don’t think that I should anymore. And it’ll be hard.”

But even the most disciplined person can’t control everything. “I’ll still have friends that’ll send me stuff,” Carmichael jokes. “My friends don’t care.”