Jerrod Carmichael Says Slave Joke Was Taken Out of Context: “It Has Nothing to Do With Sex”

Jerrod Carmichael is addressing criticism he’s received over a joke made in his new HBO series.

In a recent episode of the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, the comedian said:

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“My boyfriend, he makes me smarter, he makes me read. I have so many books. Realistically I’m not gonna read all those books. He knows that. But the fact that I bought them says I love you. They’re little monuments around my apartment, just like, ‘Look at this book from Amazon that I’m never gonna read.’”

He then added, “I sometimes joke to him that our relationship is like that of a slave and a master’s son — who, like, teaches me how to read by candlelight.”

In the episode, which was during a live stand-up show, the joke seemed to fall flatter than Carmichael expected, with some people in the audience groaning and hissing. “Yeah, he groans too ’cause he’s a good person,” he replied, about his boyfriend. “He doesn’t like that fucking joke. I like that joke. That’s my burden, I think that shit’s hilarious!”

Carmichael then saw backlash when some viewers called out the controversial idea of race-based sexual slave play.

During an appearance on The Breakfast Club with DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious and Charlamagne Tha God that was shared on Tuesday (below), Carmichael clarified the joke, which he said was covered from the punch line on and missed the setup.

“I really don’t like that,” he said on the morning talk show. “It made it seem like I was talking like I’m into some type of race, sexual slavery role play with my boyfriend, which is untrue. It’s so false.”

He continued, “It has nothing to do with my boyfriend. It has nothing to do with the sex that we have. It has nothing to do with sex. It’s something people have been reporting on. It’s about my boyfriend reading so much, he makes me feel insecure about my level of reading.”

Carmichael said that, because he has a white boyfriend, people try to create some “crazy story out of that.” He noted it’s a small group, including some “gay Black men” and “some Ku Klux Klan members who don’t like that I have a white boyfriend.”

He added, “He’s a human being. He deserves respect. I deserve respect. I don’t appreciate things being misreported or said about him in that way. It’s completely false, so I don’t like that.”

When Charlamagne Tha God pushed back and noted it was still not a good joke, Carmichael said that he’s been a comedian for a long time, and he thinks it’s funny.

“I’m talking about my own personal insecurity. I’m an educated person. I’m usually the smartest person in the room. He reads so much, it makes me feel like, ‘Oh, do I even know how to read?’ That joke works if I had a Black boyfriend. If my boyfriend were Black, that joke actually works better.”

Later in the morning show, the Reality Show star also apologized to Dave Chappelle for calling him an “egomaniac” in his Esquire cover earlier this month. In that interview, he said he felt the comedian was “smarter” and “deeper” than his jokes about trans people and “has more interesting thoughts.”

Carmichael told Esquire that his comments were meant to offer constructive criticism to Chappelle, but that they weren’t taken that way. “He took it as, ‘Fuck Dave Chappelle,’ because he’s an egomaniac,” Carmichael said. “He wanted me to apologize to him publicly or some shit.”

On the Breakfast Club episode, Carmichael addressed the comments further and expressed deep regret over them.

“I want to say that I’m sorry for that because, one, I’m a huge Dave Chappelle fan,” he said on the morning show. “I think he’s brilliant. I think he’s a bright light in a dying industry. I think he’s more important now than ever before because comedians are now just posting clips of them doing crowd work online and calling it art, and it’s not art. Dave Chappelle is an artist. He’s one of the few artists that we have. And I care deeply about the work that he makes.”

He said that his comments about Chappelle’s jokes weren’t about the jokes themselves, but rather about his desire to see a comedian he loves go beyond telling the same jokes over and over again.

“The criticism that I had had nothing to do with the morality of the job and nothing to do with the ethics of the job,” the Carmichael Show star said. “The criticism I had was that of a fan, someone who respects him so much that I want him to focus his genius on a wide range of topics. I think that it started being really really focused on one thing.”

Moving forward, Carmichael said he would reserve any future comments he has about Chappelle for a conversation he has with him directly, on the phone, as opposed to in interviews or public comments.

“I’ll never do it again. I do apologize for that. I’m man enough to say that is wrong. I don’t need it. I don’t want the attention. It has gone on way too long,” he concluded. “There are so few artists, people actually doing art — not doing podcasts not doing like crowd work videos online — actually doing the art. He’s one of the few. I have a deep respect for him. And that’s all I’ll say.”

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