Be One of Jerrod Carmichael’s Beloved Strangers
Comic Jerrod Carmichael will be at Helium Comedy Club Thursday, December 12.
You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.
Jerrod Carmichael has liquid eyes. They flip incessantly between horror and enchanting charisma. In his 2022 HBO special, Rothaniel (Jerrod is Carmichael’s middle name, Rothaniel his given), his eyes ground a high-wire comedy routine discussing his coming out as gay. In the space of a minute, he careens through a joke about not believing he’s earned the audience’s love (“What did I do, suck a Dominican dude’s dick?”) and into suicidal ideation (“I didn’t think I’d ever, ever, ever come out. I—probably—at many points in my life, I thought I’d rather die”). As a performer, Carmichael, who will be at Helium Comedy Club Thursday (December 12; $30–42), is wild, real, and extremely confessional. Everything about his act is raw, which clears the way for only Carmichael himself to shine, his charms saving his own show from one self-imposed disaster after another.
Rothaniel was Carmichael’s public coming out. In it, he also mentions his father’s secret second family. Earlier this year, as something of a follow-up, Carmichael released Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show on HBO. This latest venture is as naked as the matter-of-fact title suggests. In the aftermath of the special, Carmichael invited cameras to follow every moment of his life: his Grindr dates; couples therapy sessions; combative conversations with his friend Tyler, The Creator; and confrontations with his religious Christian parents about his homosexuality. The show prompted Carrie Battan to make this stomach-turning declaration in The New Yorker: “there is still fresh terrain left to be explored in our social-media-addled era of oversharing.”
Autobiographical material is nothing new for comics. But Carmichael is miles past the blurry line dividing onstage persona from private identity. He’s open about the camera’s stabilizing role—as proxy for an outside audience—in his life. Instead of making art that’s uncannily close to his actual life, Carmichael opts to make art of his actual life in real time. He cuts out the go-between to offer the exalted thrill of unfettered immediacy, and receives an unending tap of parasocial energy in return. In the show, Battan goes on, “you can almost feel his family members yearning to be treated like these strangers.”
More Things to Do This Week
books Printed Art Book Fair
10am–4pm Dec 14 & 15 | Landdd, FREE
Printed is an annual book fair dedicated to local artbook publishers and retailers. Held at the Portland- and Oaxaca-based textile studio and shop Landdd, the fair hosts an exceptionally curated bunch. The city’s most focused bookshops represent several specialties within the artbook landscape, including Hi Books (photography), Monograph Bookwerks (artists’ monographs), and Passages Bookshop (all things rare and fine). Also look out for the local presses Container Corps, Broccoli, and Fonograf Editions.
The Dandy Warhols.
music The Dandy Warhols
8pm Thu, Dec 12 | McMenamins Crystal Ballroom, $42–57
One of the biggest bands to come out of Portland—ever—the Dandy Warhols are on tour celebrating 30 years of pushing the iconoclastic agenda set by the underground art god whose name they borrowed. Rockmaker, their 12th album, which came out in March, is as weird and as loaded with references as anything the band’s put out. And it features Frank Black and Debbie Harry…and Slash?
theater Waiting for Godot
Various times thru Dec 15 | COHO Theatre, $15–40
This production of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s monumentally influential work Waiting for Godot sets off the Corrib Theatre’s 2024–25 season. Beckett’s script is famously thin with material descriptions, which certainly adds to its shelf life. In the play, two men named Didi and Gogo wait—and wait and wait—to be saved by their friend Godot, meanwhile imparting the audience with life’s unending questions. However universal the play’s appeal, and lacking its physical character descriptions, it is generally agreed that Didi and Gogo are white. In response, the second play in the Corrib’s season questions how a Black cast would change the play’s dynamics, and the third is titled Godot Is a Woman.
What We’re Reading About Elsewhere
- MK Guth on the social qualities of artworks that would be physically impossible to create alone. (Variable West)
- Why we’re still waiting for Godot. (Portland Mercury)
Share this content:
Author: Hey PDX
Hey PDX Team
Post Comment