Jerrod Carmichael Wants Young Men to Have Alternatives to Andrew Tate and Liberal Finger-Wagging
As so many male comedians love to remind us, America is in the midst of a masculinity crisis, and young men are struggling to find role models who aren’t either chauvinist grifters or the living embodiment of a TikTok content filter.
But to any young men with an interest in entertainment, they could do a lot worse than Jerrod Carmichael in their search for a personal hero. The 38-year-old North Carolina native grew up in a poor family, left home to follow his dreams in Hollywood, and, over the course of the last 18 years, grew to become one of the most awarded, celebrated and influential artists in his field. Carmichael is an Emmy-winner, a sitcom creator, a film director and, most importantly, entirely truthful to himself and fully connected to his masculinity.
Since coming out as a gay man in his critically acclaimed 2022 comedy special Rothaniel, Carmichael has continued to explore these themes in his stand-up work, and, in a recent interview with GQ, he offered some insight into how he feels that the current media landscape lacks what young men desperately need.
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In essence, Carmichael wants the next generation of men to become more in touch with the truth, both about themselves and about the world, and to let go of the hyper-competitive need to dominate that drives men to become oil executives, stockbrokers or, even worse, supplement-selling podcasters.
Despite leading what Andrew Tate listeners may call a “nontraditional” life as a gay man, Carmichael says that his identity makes him even more in tune with the truth about masculinity than his heterosexual counterparts. “Gay men know a lot about masculinity, especially the ones who could have hidden for a long time and fooled everybody,” Carmichael wryly observed.
Contrary to how other masculinity-minded comedians approach the topic, Carmichael doesn’t overplay the “crisis” part of the masculinity crisis. “I don’t feel purely pessimistic about the future (of young men) at all,” Carmichael explained. “You say ‘young men,’ I think about (my nephew) Kingston. He has a kindness and a sweetness, and that’s incredible. He has four sisters and loves them very much and takes care of them. So, if he exists, I know there are others that exist.”
“If anything, maybe because of the career I’ve chosen, I worry that young men are not getting the truth or a full story from the media they consume,” Carmichael continued. “Andrew Tate is not showing you vulnerability, like, what’s true about him.”
However, Carmichael observed, it’s not just the far-right end of the media spectrum that’s getting it wrong when it comes to young men. “There’s the other side that’s just a finger wag. I worry that the truth is becoming elusive for young men. A lot of the media they consume, it’s either toxic, processed chocolate shit, or just dry broccoli.”
Looking at the messaging that both sides of the culture war send to young men, it’s easy to see what Carmichael is talking about. While the far-right, Tate-like, Joe-Rogan-listening masculinity influencers sell a hyper-aggressive, rage-fueled and deeply misogynistic outlook on gender, the left has completely lost its ability to reach impressionable teens and twenty-somethings without subjecting them to a lecture about privilege or making them read intro-to-gender-studies-level Twitter diatribes.
Carmichael, on the other hand, just wants young men to search for truth — in their lives and in their art. But, if there's one lesson he can impart, he wants young men “to let go of the need to win. The desire to win can be good. It has built skyscrapers and got us the internet. Tenacity is really good. But I have found growth and fulfillment in letting go of that need in my personal relationships.”
“Letting go of that is very difficult when it has been implanted, especially if you’re from a certain place where you’re growing up without money or something like that,” Carmichael said of his own journey with the lesson. “You really need a W in life. I’m actually realizing that it actually doesn’t get you everything you want.”
Unless, of course, you're Andrew Tate, in which case winning actually is everything — that guy desperately needs to hear a jury say “not guilty.”
