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Jerrod Carmichael is responding to the backlash he received over his "slave play" joke.
During Tuesday's (April 16) episode of "The Breakfast Club," Carmichael confronted host Charlamagne The God after he named him the "donkey of the day" for making a joke about how he and his white boyfriend perform race-based role-playing.
Carmichael claimed the viral clip of the joke was taken out of context.
“You played a clip of my stand up, but it started at the punchline, and it like completely erased the setup of it,” Carmichael told Charlamagne. "I really don't like that. It made it seem like I was talking like I'm into some type of race sexual slavery role play with my boyfriend, which is untrue."
"It's so false, and I expect that type of thing from TMZ, ‘cause they have no humanity. They don't care about the people that get hurt when they report these sort of things. But you’re a friend, so I really didn't like that," he continued.
Carmichael made the controversial joke on an episode of his HBO reality show. The comedian called out Charlamagne for only watching the viral clip of his joke and not the full show.
“Yeah, but I need you to watch the show! And anybody who watches the show knows it's not what I said,” Carmichael 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.”
Carmichael clarified that the joke was "about my boyfriend reading so much that he makes me feel insecure about my level of reading."
The joke started with the comedian talking about his relationship.
"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,’" Carmichael said on his show.
"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," he quipped.
“Yeah, he groans too ’cause he’s a good person,” Carmichael continued. “He doesn’t like that f---ing joke. I like that joke. That’s my burden, I think that s---'s hilarious!’"
Following widespread backlash from the joke, Carmichael said on "The Breakfast Club": “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," he continued. "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.”
Charlamagne still believed Carmichael's quip was "not a good joke."
“Well that’s on you,” Carmichael said. “I evoke provocative imagery sometimes in my jokes. Some people are very sensitive to that. That's your right. You don't have to laugh at that. You could like, hear the word slavery and completely shut off. That's completely fine. But don't misconstrue what I said and don't make it into something that it's not, because that's where I start to get offended.”
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