Comedy star Jerrod Carmichael has come out as gay in his new one-hour special, “Rothaniel,” which debuts tonight on HBO. According to Jason Zinoman’s review in the New York Times, the title Rothaniel comes from Carmichael’s real first name, a conflation of both of his grandfathers’ first names. In the special he discusses how much he hated it, going so far as to have it changed in his high school yearbook, meaning that this special serves as a chance for Carmichael to fully embrace his real self.
In the special, Carmichael reveals his sexual orientation to the audience as a capper to a story about the Carmichael family discovering that his father had been cheating on his mother, a subject he’s touched on in in a previous special. He ended his previous HBO hour, 8, with a joke about it: “The only thing weirder than finding out your father has a second family is finding out that you guys are that second family.”
In his HBO documentary special from 2019, Home Videos, Jerrod Carmichael interviewed his mother, and tells her that he’s “hooked up” with guys before. But Rothaniel is Carmichael’s first time publicly embracing his identity as a gay man. When joking about life in the closet, he says, “Sometimes we’re making out, and just whisper ‘no homo’ to each other.”
According to Zinoman’s report in the Times, Carmichael’s coming out has damaged his relationship with his mom, saying in a recent Brooklyn performance that they haven’t spoken in months. Jerrod Carmichael’s special drops on HBO’s streaming service tonight, April 1st, and he will host Saturday Night Live on April 2nd.