Jerrod Carmichael is responding to the backlash from his ‘slave play’ joke, which he says was taken out of context: ‘It has nothing to do with sex.’ https://t.co/HXNEiUajRW
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) April 16, 2024
In a stand up routine on the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, Carmichael joked about his relationship with his boyfriend.
“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.’ 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.”
Carmichael received backlash when the last part of the joke was posted online without context, with users calling him a “danger to the Black Queer community.”
The comedian defended himself on the Breakfast Club, saying “anybody who watches the show knows it’s not what I said. It’s so false, it’s so untrue, and I don’t like that because it’s like… 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 that people have been reporting on and I really really don’t like it,” and that the context of the joke was “about my boyfriend reading so much that he makes me feel insecure about my level of reading.”
“Look, I get it. It’s something that people have been running with because I have a white boyfriend, so like people try and create some type of crazy story out of that. And it’s a small group of people. I read all the tweets and it’s like, some gay Black men and some Klu Klux Klan members who don’t like that I have a white boyfriend. They agree on that, so congratulations. But he’s a human being. He deserves respect. I deserve respect. I don’t appreciate things being misreported… I’m a human being and people can get hurt. They’re actually real lives at stake with the things that you say. Come after me, that’s fine, but don’t come after like my boyfriend.”
