 So, this script has actually been written for nearly a week, but I didn't feel like I could shoot it because I was just missing something. This microphone. I had to buy this microphone. When Gerard Carmichael came out to the audience at City Winery on January 16th, I'm not sure how many of us realized what had happened. I didn't realize it until months later, April 1st in fact when most of the world found out, because it wasn't presented to us like it was new information, just another part of a joke about his issues communicating with his parents. When I bought a ticket to see his first live performance in two years, a work in progress tentatively titled Alone, I didn't really know anything about him as a person. I had seen the Bo Burnham directed Eight as well as the special he directed for Drew Michael, but that was as far as it went. And in Eight there's really not that much about himself, though it does end on an interesting note and one that seems to have formed the basis for Alone. Final joke is, the only thing weirder than finding out that your father has a second family is finding out that you guys are that second family. That moment never happened to him, but it did happen to his dad. I know a lot about his dad now, probably more than I know about most of the dads I've actually met in my life, and I know how he feels about the fact that I know that he doesn't want his son to talk about him on stage because he thinks his son is mean. We were promised a work in progress and we sure got it. Carmichael had a notebook that he'd refer to at times and there was no real structure and certainly no satisfying conclusion, but that hour was captivating nonetheless. It was also shockingly personal. Eight put you mostly at a distance, he talks about his thoughts, only sometimes his feelings. And when he's talking about, say, getting and then getting rid of a dog because it didn't make him feel as warm as he'd hoped, it's hard to know if any of that is true. His first tape special, Love at the Store, was much the same. It's a very specific type of observational comedy, but it's observational nonetheless. And so this time, observation is replaced with experience. It gets personal immediately and stays there. He talks about his family, his feelings, his sexuality, his family's feelings about his sexuality, but I didn't realize at the time how much that was new. When I recounted some of the jokes to my girlfriend later that night, I took it for granted that everyone else knew he was gay and that the only reason I didn't was because I never bothered looking at his Wikipedia page. Well, did I know I could have been the one to add that fun fact to his bio? In retrospect, though, that revelation is likely a big part of why this special has seemingly the fastest turnaround time in comedy history. Hello, by the way, and welcome to the week air of view. My name is Alec. And today I am talking about Gerard Carmichael's new HBO special, Nathaniel. For clarity, Nathaniel is the final version of the show that I saw less than three months ago. Most of the material in Nathaniel was there in January, but it has been stripped to its core. Setups were changed, ideas were excised. You may have realized, for example, that his dad's comment about how mean he is didn't end up on HBO. And in general, it became more focused. Like, alone was arguably a comedy show. But Nathaniel is comedy with an asterisk. All of those people who complained about me immediately calling inside a comedy special instead of watching the entire video and letting me clarify that thought, I'm gonna fucking love it. And not just because Bo Burnham serves as director and editor, but you may not be shocked to learn that virtually no part of Carmichael's life experience tracks onto mine, so I connected to Nathaniel more intellectually and artistically than I did emotionally. I'm sure a lot of people felt that way about inside. It's okay. But Nathaniel is exactly the opposite of inside. Inside is highly polished and carefully crafted. There is no improvisation, no mistakes, and authentic point is made inauthentically. And for people like me, that is great. And I have an hour of my own talking about why. But Nathaniel is pure authenticity. This is the realest, rawest comedy question mark that I have ever seen, a gay black man punctuating his discussions of intergenerational trauma with an occasional laugh line. This is especially true of the last 15 or so minutes when the pre-written material is largely dropped as he struggles with how to connect with his true audience. It's not the people in that room. It's not even us, your average home viewer, though you would be forgiven for thinking it might be. It's a really cool video by Comedy Without Errors that breaks down its production and specifically notes hot takes that were written by people who attended taping and were deeply confused by what they had seen because Carmichael would repeat jokes at different points in order to get it exactly right or aim certain jokes directly at the camera instead of engaging with the audience. He was making a show less for people at the Masonic Temple than for the much, much larger group of people who would be watching it later. Nathaniel is being performed for just a handful of people and really maybe just one. That final 15 minutes is for his mom. And when you realize that, suddenly the entire show feels like it is. Alone featured other family members much more prominently than Nathaniel does. We still get some things about his father and brother, but it is so much more focused on his mother. And nearly every cut that was made to the content of the show emphasized that. The one real counter example is in the highly shortened bit about his brother where he mentions how much more money he makes. That was originally in the context of discussing his mother's relative feelings about her sons. Much of this recent trend of comedy but is it, though, results in what feels like a rhetorical therapy session. One working their way through shit on stage, but in a way that's scripted and polished. Perhaps it's what they wished they had said to their therapist on that first session. But therapy isn't scripted or polished. There's a lot of silence as someone grasps for the right words to articulate their feelings, occasionally prompted by a question that hopefully pushes them towards enlightenment. Which is to say that the last section of Nathaniel is therapy. And I think it's probably worth noting that Carmichael is in therapy himself. I don't believe he mentions it here, but one of the jokes they got cut was about how he spent more money on therapists than sneakers and how that seemed like a step in the right direction. This is all stuff that he's definitely talked through before. And frankly, he's probably been asked the same questions on a couch that the audience asks him in that chair. The main difference is that his mother is going to hear his answers now. And so when he says that he feels he may need to cut her out of his life because it's likely too late for her to change, that's for her. She will hear it. He knows she'll hear it, but he says it because he needs her to know it and it's probably easier for him to say it when he doesn't have to look at her. I've gone back and forth on the audience participation aspect of the show. It's part of Carmichael's thing. He always invites the audience to speak and right at the start of Nathaniel, he makes clear that he needs everyone to feel comfortable and even like family if it's going to work. There's a thoughtfulness to the way that he has these interactions. He rarely claps back. He takes the time to mull it over. And sometimes he makes a joke and other times he's serious. He's also not having a real conversation with them. They speak, but he's not interested in the people doing the talking. And to be clear, that's fine. I'm not going to throw stones from a glass house. Plus, crowd work really ain't my thing. Sure, there was a real wild story I heard at Taylor Tomlinson's performance at the Beacon Theater on the night that Nathaniel hit HBO that ended with literally bowing at the altar of this woman's pettiness asterisk. But to hear that story, we had to get through some straight up homophobic bullshit from someone else. So that wasn't great. This homophobia in the audience at Blue Note Jazz Club, just as there was the city winery, you can hear it in the reaction, some of which Carmichael calls out and some of which he just lets go. At my show, someone killed the night with it. He had finished with what he knew he wanted to say and started looking through that notebook to see if there was anything else worth bringing up. But then a woman near the front shouted that she could totally switch him. Most of us groaned. If you didn't close the notebook, looked at her, said he would give her his dad's number and then walked off stage. And like it's good joke, a perfect callback to much of what he had talked about with us and some of what he talked about with Blue Note. But the context in which he felt compelled to make that joke. Not great. Homophobia and its relationship to masculinity looms large in Nathaniel. He talks about kissing his boyfriend, but feeling compelled to say no homo in the process. How his women friends have been incredibly supportive while the men in his life haven't. And it makes me wonder a bit about the solid chunk of love at the store when Carmichael talks about how he would come out if he were gay, which of course he said he wasn't. But if he was, you know, here's some thoughts on it. He tells us now that he never intended to come out. And that reminded me a little bit of that letter Lil Nas X wrote to his younger self about how he promised that he'd never come out, but why it's important that he did. But Carmichael was in the closet much longer. He wonders aloud if it was too long, if he missed the chance for acceptance from the people in his life who now see him as a liar. Apparently not thinking about how a statement like, I feel like I got tricked into having a gay best friend might justify not coming out in the first place. Khadija Embo has a video about how coming out isn't and shouldn't necessarily be a thing for everyone, especially those who are marginalized in other ways. But that is something that I don't get nor want to have an opinion on. But he's not really here to unpack anyone's damage but his own. And it takes time. Carmichael has this tick where he rubs the back of his head and neck when he's thinking. He does it in every standup I've seen. And it seems to be his way of filling silence with motion instead of sound. And since Nathaniel features so much silence, there's a lot of that motion. The silence is deafening, really. It's probably why so many people feel like they have to speak, especially in that final section, because silence is uncomfortable. But we, as the viewers at home, have an even more intimate vantage point. You don't realize that comedy rarely features true closeups until you spend most of a special staring at one. Close enough that the camera has to move every time Carmichael does to keep his face in frame. You really feel like you can see the gears turning in the clockwork of his mind and it emphasizes that authenticity. Like, if this is fake, do you deserve a fucking Oscar or Emmy or whatever award they give for these sorts of things? I don't know. As with previous Burnham collaborations, the shots are long, too. Many stories play out mostly or entirely without edits, only cutting when the subject is changed. And I wonder if this will have more of an impact than it did because of the way it seems to have hit the zeitgeist. I wanna believe that it could create a ripple effect, pushing comedians to think harder about the venues in which they perform their specials and the way that they use cameras and editing to help tell their stories. Because there is so much more that can be done than basically anyone who wasn't involved in this specific production seems to take advantage of. I'm grateful that I got to see how this show changed in such a short time, that I got to hear more details about his parents' sex tape and his willingness to die for his nieces, even if it would ruin his entire family's financial security. There were a lot of great jokes that didn't make it into Nathaniel. But I appreciate the show even more because I see how he sacrificed guaranteed laughs for thematic cohesion. This is not the funniest version of the show. But it's the fucking best. 9.5 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, my cat, Cat Saracota, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I'm the sword, Maddie Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Tatled Indice, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, great. If not, don't care. If you want to see more, please subscribe. Hope to see you in the next one. This was such a dumb purchase.