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      Janeane Garofalo Never Sold Out. What a Relief.

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      That concept might be the reason her trailblazing stand-up career has been overshadowed; it may also be the reason she’s still so sharp, our critic argues.On a rainy Wednesday night in Brooklyn, after an introduction with a minimum of fanfare, Janeane Garofalo walked onstage at the Eastville Comedy Club and looked out at a dozen people so scattered that calling them a crowd seems like a stretch. She spotted one man by himself who had attended a show of hers a few days earlier and happily pointed him out.Third on a bill filled with young unknowns, Garofalo, 57, settled into her set with supreme comfort, wandering into multiple tangents and digging into self-deprecation. “When someone tells me I can’t do something,” she said, holding the pause with precision timing honed over three and half decades of telling jokes, “I’m grateful.”It was a humble setting to see one of the most consequential comics of the past half century. Garofalo is a pioneer and Generation X icon who for a few years, it was reasonable to argue, meant for stand-up what Kurt Cobain did for music. The only moment during the set that hinted at her legacy came when Garofalo walked out of the spotlight and into the audience. The couple in the front row, already laughing, sat up a little straighter.Later in the set, she turned to her career. “The ’90s were good, but then it dipped,” Garofalo said, adding dryly that she now realized that comedy was not her forte. “You know what is? Filibustering.”Janeane Garofalo performs constantly in New York on bills with other comics, though you might not know it because she has little to no public profile. She’s not on Twitter, Instagram or any social media. She has no website or podcast, hasn’t done a special in years and doesn’t even have a computer, smartphone or email address. She turned down interviews with me twice. If you want to see her perform — and I recommend it — you have to search her out and sit in the room with her. I periodically stumble across her in a show and it always comes as a happy surprise from another time, like discovering a storied zine that only a few people still knew existed.As she made jokes about refusing to go to the doctor and her inability to apply herself, a cringeworthy thought occurred to me: Is this what not selling out looks like?I always found that pejorative phrase ridiculous: Selling out. Isn’t that the goal? It never made sense to me that a band stunk as soon as it signed with a major label. Or that artists should be shamed for making money to pay the rent. But as the stigmatization of selling out has faded over the past few decades, so vanished from the conversation that you rarely hear it used without sarcasm, I confess that I miss it. Something useful has been lost.In his shrewd new book “The Nineties,” Chuck Klosterman argues that nothing defined that decade more than the concept of selling out. To illustrate, he focuses on “Reality Bites,” now considered the quintessential Generation X movie. It also happens to feature Janeane Garofalo as a jaded eye-roller who delivers quips like “Evian is naïve spelled backwards.”The movie centers on an aspiring filmmaker played by Winona Ryder who is pursued by a responsible corporate striver (Ben Stiller, the film’s director) and a caddish poet who hates the right things (Ethan Hawke). She chooses Hawke. Klosterman writes that while Hawke’s character seems irresponsible to boomers and toxic to millennials, he was the right choice for Generation X. For them, and only them, Klosterman argues, “an authentic jerk was preferable to a likable sellout.”“Reality Bites” was released when I was in college, and most people I knew didn’t root for either of Winona Ryder’s options so much as against the movie, sensing a cynical attempt to capture the youth market, a major studio romanticizing indie credibility. Stiller screened it on campuses across the country, and at my school, he was received with hostility at the postshow Q. and A. One student questioned the filmmakers for mocking corporate greed while taking product-placement money from the Gap and R.J. Reynolds. Stiller bristled, saying it cost money to make a movie.In promoting “Reality Bites,” Garofalo took a cannier approach. Appearing on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” she short-circuited complaints about hypocrisy by criticizing Universal Pictures for trying to market “Reality Bites” as a Generation X story. It’s not, she said, dismissing the term as a buzzword, which was how I saw it at the time, too, and telling the flummoxed Letterman that she was uncomfortable following the script mapped out with his producers for their conversation. She sold the movie perfectly by performing contempt for selling a movie.The partnership between Stiller and Garofalo is an even better representation of the 1990s divide on selling out than “Reality Bites.” They dated briefly and worked together throughout the decade, starring on TV shows and appearing in movies, co-hosting the MTV Movie Awards and co-writing a self-help spoof, “Feel This Book.” Stiller was a bigger star, but Garofalo had more cachet. (On Entertainment Weekly’s 1997 list of the 50 Funniest People Alive, she came in 39th, five spots ahead of him.) While his fame has grown, her seismic significance to comedy has been forgotten enough to make a refresher necessary.Just as the 1980s comedy boom was going bust, Garofalo — along with Colin Quinn, Dana Gould and Alan Gelfant — put on a show at a bookstore in Hollywood that became a weekly magnet for talented young stand-ups looking beyond conventional club comedy. Stiller performed there and used some of the comics on his breakthrough television series, “The Ben Stiller Show.” So did David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, who met through Garofalo and went on to make another sketch comedy landmark, “Mr. Show.”This bookstore was one of the centers of a blossoming new comedy scene. Some called it alternative comedy, others balked at that term. The cool move was to embrace it ironically as Garofalo did in one of her early television appearances. When the host of “The Dennis Miller Show” made a joke about her Doc Martens, she deadpanned: “I’m the alternative queen.”Garofalo didn’t just help shift the comedy scene away from clubs. Her style represented a sea change from the polished, tight and desperately relatable bits ready-made to translate into a sitcom or a late-night appearance. In jean shorts and tights, she inched stand-up closer to the eccentric solo show, where a sharply honed point of view mattered more than accessible setups and hard punch lines. Her humor leaned on stories and a political sensibility, refracted through a culturally savvy lens. She fiercely skewered the fashion industry for giving women body image issues and fashionistas later pushed back by putting her on worst-dressed lists. Her jokes scoffed at cliché (“I don’t even speak during sex for fear of sounding trite”), and she dropped references in televised sets that not everyone would get (Antigone, Sub Pop Records) and continually teased the crowd.On her 1995 HBO half-hour, she walked onstage to applause that she immediately mocked: “You just did that because this is on television.” In the beloved “Larry Sanders Show” and the cult movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” she played sarcastic (and now very meme-able) misanthropes, becoming the rare comic who represented something larger in the culture. Original writers for “Friends” and MTV’s “Daria” have cited Garofalo as an inspiration for characters for their shows. In his recent memoir “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” Odenkirk argues that Garofalo’s early stand-up anticipated much of the ambitious work in our current scene. “Janeane was the spark of the big bang, of a comedy reinvention that still resonates.”Garofalo, with Chris Farley, left, and George Clooney, during her short tenure on “Saturday Night Live.”Alan Singer/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesWhereas Stiller shifted into blockbuster movies in the 1990s, Garofalo ran into choppier waters in the mainstream in ways that now seem clearly sexist. Her stint at “Saturday Night Live” was chronicled in an infamous New York magazine piece that included scenes of Al Franken yelling at her, Adam Sandler giving her the silent treatment and a writer unleashing his wrath after she called a sketch sexist. She compared her treatment there to “fraternity hazing” and didn’t last a full season. When it came to the big screen, she dismissed her one major leading role, a female Cyrano in “The Truth About Cats and Dogs,” as “not my kind of movie.”It’s hard to say if these experiences changed her view on establishment success or confirmed it. But at the end of the decade, in her book with Stiller, she gave this advice: “Being popular and well liked is not in your best interest,” before adding, “If you behave in a manner pleasing to most, then you are probably doing something wrong. The masses have never been arbiters of the sublime, and they often fail to recognize the truly great individual. Taking into account the public’s regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent on you to not fit in.”When The Times did a story on the new generation of alt comics in 1997, Stiller recalled that when Garofalo had a bit that killed, she would not repeat it out of fear of being hack. “It’s almost like she was going too far the other way, because she didn’t want to be accepted,” he said. Odenkirk hit similar notes discussing her in “We Killed,” an oral history about women in comedy: “Anything successful is something she’s not interested in,” he said. “That’s not a good thing in the long run.”That may be true if the goal is conventional Hollywood success. But what if you actually believed the 1990s discourse about selling out? Or short of that, just internalized it? Then some skepticism about success makes sense. And why not? Only a fool thinks the funniest comics are the most popular or that deeply respected ones don’t remain obscure. Moreover, it’s entirely reasonable to look at the state of popular culture and just roll your eyes.There has always been something off-putting about self-righteousness over selling out. Indie music snobs are easy to parody. And obsession with credibility can paralyze artists. “Nothing was more inadvertently detrimental to the Gen X psyche” than anxiety over selling out, Klosterman wrote, expressing a view darker than my own, so alert to cost that it gives short shrift to the benefits.Though it can seem otherwise, the ’90s critique of selling out was not only used to sneer. Besides directing a bit of shame at product placement, the most valuable thing it did was provide a powerful vision of making it that didn’t rely on money and popularity. A close read of early issues of The Baffler, a small, influential journal that at its inception that decade was something of a think tank for the dangers of selling out, offered hints at a positive ideal. It could be found in zines, indie music labels, offline.This utopian view of a culture independent of corporate interference was defiantly local, uncompromising and wary of fame. Today, when everyone is trying to go viral and artists are judged by the most soulless Internet metrics, the value of an alternative seems more important than ever. The current stand-up of Janeane Garofalo fits in nicely.Speaking of Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk once explained, “Anything successful is something she’s not interested in.”Roberto Ricciuti/Getty ImagesThat doesn’t mean she sees it that way. Her current comedy is filled with self-deprecating jokes about her failures, flaws, projects that didn’t get picked up. After the ’90s, she helped start Air America, the influential liberal radio station that collapsed but not before giving early platforms to Rachel Maddow and Marc Maron. She has taken scores of acting jobs in film and television, but they have little bearing on the one constant: her stand-up, the rare form where you can have near total control over your art.We live in an age of dumb demographic stereotypes. Millennials, we’re told, are entitled snowflakes and boomers are selfish egotists. Describing huge groups of people in a few traits is absurd, but that doesn’t mean those reductionist ideas don’t shape us. The water in which you swim matters. I was reminded of this at a birthday party for my daughter’s friend. A dad my age told me of being in a band in the ’90s that signed to a major label and how he still talks to his therapist about selling out. Back then I never identified with Generation X, but now I do. When I watch “Reality Bites” today, not only do I like it more, but I can find something to relate to in every character, too.In movies and plays from the 1990s (“Clerks,” Eric Bogosian’s “subUrbia”), the slacker could be a goofy kind of hero. Compare that with the ethos today summed up by Bo Burnham in his special “Inside,” which features his song “Welcome to the Internet.” The refrain goes: “Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime/anything and everything all of the time.”Garofalo’s stand-up always made apathy and boredom look cool, glamorous and, most important, sensible. About boomers, she joked: “They got married and worked hard so their kids didn’t have to, and guess what, we don’t.” There’s a performance in this, of course, since she has always worked hard, but the hustle and grind has never been her brand, to use a word she probably wouldn’t.Garofalo isn’t that different today than she was three decades ago, less likely to skewer those who promulgate unrealistic body standards than to confess her own. Her hair is longer, more tangled, but her clothes remain darkly colored, rumpled. “I’m not ready for Eileen Fisher,” she said in characteristic deadpan. “I can’t cross that Rubicon.”Her affect remains wry, offhanded; she walks onstage holding papers and uses references more highbrow than your typical joke slinger, but she is also often disarmingly personal and self-loathing.The main impression you get from her act is of a restlessness that is physical, as she roams into the crowd, but also intellectual, as she repeatedly entertains new ideas, following them down rabbit holes even at the expense of the joke. There is a real excitement and unpredictability about her sets that can be captured only in live performance. She never tells a joke the same way twice. Her comedy always seems resolutely present, frequently vulnerable, challenging and delighting her audience in equal measure.It would be easy to see Garofalo performing with comics half her age to a sparse Brooklyn crowd as a portrait of decline. But to my Generation X eyes, it looks like a kind of triumph. More

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      ‘S.N.L.’ Takes on the Trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard

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      In an episode hosted by Selena Gomez, “Saturday Night Live” tried to distract itself from a dire news week with a celebrity lawsuit and whoopee cushions.After a particularly challenging week of news events, “Saturday Night Live” took refuge in the defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.This weekend’s broadcast, hosted by Selena Gomez and featuring the musical guest Post Malone, was introduced by Kate McKinnon, playing the MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace. After rattling off other headlines — “political fallout from the recent Jan. 6 subpoenas, updates on the Russian helicopter taken down by Ukraine, plus a nationwide shortage of baby formula” — McKinnon explained to viewers that her network would instead be covering the celebrity trial.“I know it’s not the most pertinent story of the moment,” she said, “but with all the problems in the world, isn’t nice to have a news story we can all collectively watch and say: ‘Ooh. Glad it ain’t me’?”Inside a courtroom, Depp (Kyle Mooney) sat in a witness box, being examined by his lawyer (Aidy Bryant), who was asking about an incident in which Heard was accused of leaving fecal matter in Depp’s bed.Despite the objections of Heard’s lawyer (Heidi Gardner), the presiding judge (Cecily Strong) said she would allow Depp’s team to play a surveillance video that supposedly confirmed his version of events. “Because it does sound fun,” said Strong, “and this trial is for fun.”In the scene from the videotape, Kenan Thompson played a property manager who was the first to make the unpleasant discovery in Depp’s bed. (“Aw, hell no!” he exclaimed.)Gardner lodged another objection, but Strong told her she was once again overruled. “I’d like to see more of this video,” Strong said. When Gardner asked why, she responded: “’Cause it’s funny.”As the videotape played on, Thompson and a second household staff member, played by Ego Nwodim, argued about who would be responsible for cleaning the bed. They both said it was possible Heard could have made the mess, following an accusation from Depp that she had severed a part of his finger in a fight.Asked how much longer they had to keep playing the tape, Strong replied: “We don’t have to watch any of it. But we want to. So hush.” (After which she took a swig from a glass of wine.)Back in the bedroom, Thompson and Nwodim continued their argument, joined by a housekeeper played by Melissa Villaseñor and a laundryman played by Chris Redd. (Redd, surveying the scene, had assumed that Thompson was the culprit. “So you really did it, man,” he said. “You finally quit.”)Strong addressed Mooney and the rest of the courtroom. “This trial has given me a lot to consider,” she said. “On one hand, I believe Mr. Depp’s story. But on the other hand, your constant little smirk lets me know that this is not the first woman you’ve made so mad that she pooped in your bed.”Netflix sendup of the weekOne sign of a successful parody is that you don’t have to be familiar with the source material that’s being satirized to appreciate it.Case in point: If you’re already a viewer of the Netflix reality series “Old Enough!,” a long-running Japanese program that follows toddlers as they try to run errands on their own, hey, good for you. If not, you can still appreciate this would-be American remake, which instead is about long-term boyfriends who try to complete real-world tasks for their significant others, like buying shallots and night mist eye pencils (a thing we only just learned existed because of this sketch).All the world’s a stage of the weekTwo recent and not especially humorous developments on New York stages that may better inform your understanding of the following sketch: Many shows continue to be disrupted, postponed or canceled by Covid; and the theater company presenting “Take Me Out” has increased security measures after video of a nude scene performed by the actor Jesse Williams was circulated online.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 6In the courtroom. More

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      Michael Che Is Still Trying to Crack the Code

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      As he readies a new season of his HBO Max series, “That Damn Michael Che,” the Weekend Update anchor contemplates his future at “Saturday Night Live.”Michael Che tries not to impose too many rules on his fellow writers when they’re creating sketches for his HBO Max comedy series, “That Damn Michael Che.”“We’ll write what we think would be the funniest chain of events,” he explained recently. Yet for all the paths this would seem to leave open, their sketches — about the tribulations faced by a fictionalized version of Che — inevitably end at a similar destination.“I always come out looking bad,” he said. “I’m never the winner.”With a chuckle, he added that he understood why having his own series required these outcomes. “When you invite people to your house, you always eat last,” he said.In the sketch that opens the second season (due May 26), our star tries to help a man getting beaten up on a subway platform. But when the victim starts spouting bizarre obscenities, Che becomes the target of an internet backlash that threatens to wreck his career.The episode that ensues is (among other things) a parody of the “John Wick” movies and a satire of now-familiar rituals of so-called cancel culture as Che fumbles to restore his reputation.In contrast to the rapid-fire, headline-driven setups and punch lines that Che has delivered for eight seasons as a Weekend Update anchor on “Saturday Night Live,” “That Damn Michael Che” offers a looser blend of standup and sketch that gradually becomes a story or riff on contemporary themes.Che said of his future on “Saturday Night Live” that “my head has been at leaving for the past five seasons.”Andre D. Wagner for The New York TimesThat his streaming series has arrived at this broad formula — applied to quotidian annoyances, social injustices and high-class celebrity problems — was “not necessarily on purpose,” Che said.“I think that ended up being what happened,” he explained. “When you start a show, you’re looking to find its identity.”It’s a process that Che continues to navigate, not only on “That Damn Michael Che” but also in his standup and on “S.N.L.,” where he is learning to balance the demands of these intersecting assignments. He is still discovering the individual benefits of these formats, the best ways to work on them and even what he wants to say in them.While Che projects a certain unflappability in his live comedy, he can be self-scrutinizing offstage and openly unsure about his choices. If you squint a certain way, you might even see a guy at a crossroads, who has at least teased — then quickly laughed off — the idea of ending his productive “S.N.L.” tenure.As with developing a new series, Che suggested that figuring himself out professionally had also required trial and error. “Everything looks easy till you start doing it,” he said.On a Tuesday afternoon this month, Che, who turns 39 on May 19, was sitting in his “S.N.L.” dressing room, a darkened chamber lit by a TV silently playing “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.” He was initially quiet and hidden under a hoodie — still reacclimating after a trip back from the Netflix comedy festival in Los Angeles, he said — but he became more gregarious as the conversation turned to his work.Though the cycle of another week at “S.N.L.” was underway, Che said he wasn’t stressed. “I like the dirty part of the game,” he said, by which he meant composing material: “Trying to crack the code, solving the puzzle. The part nobody sees is what’s really interesting to me.”That work ethic caught the attention of his colleagues at “S.N.L.,” where Che started contributing as a guest writer in 2013 and joined Colin Jost on the Weekend Update desk in the fall of 2014.Jost, who helped bring him onto the show, said that Che quickly became one of its best writers despite his lack of previous sketch-writing experience.“He just worked at it and figured it out,” Jost said in an email.Che, with his fellow Weekend Update anchor Colin Jost. If an audience doesn’t like a Che joke, Lorne Michaels said, “you don’t get the sense that he’s not going to sleep that night.” Will Heath/NBCLorne Michaels, the creator and longtime executive producer of “S.N.L.,” said he didn’t see any neediness in Che’s coolly confident stage presence. For most performers, Michaels explained, “it’s all about being loved or wanted, and he doesn’t seem terribly interested in that.”He added, “If he believes in the joke, he’s doing it. And he’ll acknowledge the audience’s response, but you don’t get the sense that he’s not going to sleep that night.”Jost said that while working with Che on Weekend Update, it “definitely took a while for us to figure it out, individually and together, and that’s why it’s satisfying now to be out there and get to enjoy it after years where it felt like a struggle.”“Che’s thing was always that he didn’t want to tell a joke that someone else could tell,” Jost said, adding that he believes Che had accomplished this: “Even a random joke at the end of Update that anyone could technically tell, he finds a way to do it that’s unique to him.”From one perspective, Che’s ascent has been rapid: after playing his first open mics in 2009, he was performing on David Letterman’s “Late Show” in 2012 and working as a correspondent on Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” two years later.But for many years prior, Che cycled through other vocations: drawing and painting, designing T-shirts, working in customer service at a car dealership. All he wanted out of a career, he told me, was that it “wasn’t illegal or a gigolo.”His upbringing as the youngest of seven children raised in public housing on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is rarely far from his mind, and he frequently looks for ways to give back to the community that forged him.When I asked him, somewhat frivolously, what he’d do to keep pace with Jost’s recent investment in a retired Staten Island ferryboat, Che thought for a moment. Then he answered that he’d use a hypothetical windfall to renovate a community center at the Alfred E. Smith Houses that he frequented in his childhood.“Having more places and programs for kids to go would help them a lot,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t just go home. Sometimes there’s 12 people living in a three-bedroom apartment. Sometimes there’s bad things happening in your apartment.”He drew a breath and said to me, “That’s a very odd question.”When the opportunity arose for Che to create his own series with HBO in 2020, Michaels encouraged him to pursue it in tandem with his “S.N.L.” duties. “It’s in my interest for people to keep growing,” said Michaels, who is also an executive producer on “That Damn Michael Che.”But working out what the new show would be was a challenge. Che said he originally thought it would be an animated narrative — an idea he said he might still return to — then leaned back to sketch comedy, which is faster and more familiar to him.Che doesn’t buy into so-called cancel culture: “To me, there’s risk in everything you say and you have to take responsibility no matter what.”Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times“As the scripts started to come in, HBO started saying, it’d be great if you were on camera a lot more,” Che said. With his existing commitment to “S.N.L.,” Che said the questions he faced were, “What could we shoot? What could we do without having to miss work here?”Hiring a writing staff for “That Damn Michael Che” wasn’t difficult; the star just turned to the cadre of stand-ups he regularly hangs out with in comedy clubs.“Those late nights, talking about nothing, goofing off, turned into Mike getting his own show and saying, ‘Hey, come write,’” said Reggie Conquest, a comedian and actor (“Abbott Elementary,” “Scream”) who has written for both seasons of the series.As Conquest described them, those writing sessions “felt just like hanging out at a comedy club and talking like we normally do.”“It was very therapeutic,” he said, as they spoke “from real places, real experiences. And no matter how awful it might sound, you try to make it funny.”In Season 1, that strategy yielded sketches on topics like police violence and hesitancy around the Covid-19 vaccine. Reviewing the show for The Daily Beast, Kevin Fallon wrote, “The comedy and the intimacy of Che’s personal experience create a show that feels funnier, more resonant, and more current than he could ever hope to be on ‘S.N.L.’”Gary Richardson, the head writer of “That Damn Michael Che” and an “S.N.L.” veteran, said that the first season reflected the interests and preoccupations of its star. “He really wanted to make sure it was his show,” Richardson said. “It was a lot of pressure-testing his ideas.”On Season 2, Richardson said that Che “let other people cook more — he felt more comfortable opening it up and letting other folks add their flavor to the pot.”Che himself said his approach this season was to aim “more on the side of funny than on the side of making a point.” That has led to episodes where he tries to organize a brunch party honoring Black excellence and struggles in his shameless efforts to populate it with top celebrities; and where he confronts the repercussions of cancel culture, a phenomenon that Che said he doesn’t regard as meaningful or particularly new.“I don’t buy into it,” Che said. “To me, there’s risk in everything you say and you have to take responsibility no matter what. It’s funny for me to see people learn things that I had to know as a survival tactic my entire life.”In his own work, Che said, “I constantly think my career is over after a bad set or a bad Update. You always think, this is it, at any moment, I’ll be found out.” By having it happen to him in a sketch where an attempt at altruism leads to his downfall, he said, “I just thought it would be a very funny way to lose everything.”Not that Che expects to give up his habit of using social media to antagonize journalists who have criticized him or who he feels have misrepresented him or his friends.“I haven’t turned over a new leaf,” he said. “There is a power that I think writers know they have, that they won’t admit they have, in making perception a reality. I just like to make fun of that. It’s like, I see you — you see me.”Che admitted to a certain professional jealousy of peers like Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Michelle Wolf, whom he sees as especially polished stand-ups who can devote their time solely to honing their live acts.It would be understandable if Che were contemplating a life after “Saturday Night Live,” where he is the first Black person to become a head writer and the first to be an anchor on Weekend Update. He holds the second-longest tenure in the show’s history (behind his desk partner, Jost).When Che made a pop-up appearance at a Minneapolis hair salon in March, the Minneapolis Star Tribune quoted him as saying, “This is my last year.” But in comments he later posted to his Instagram account, Che said that he wasn’t leaving the show.(In the post, which he has since deleted, Che wrote: “to comedy fans; please stop telling reporters everything you hear at a comedy show. youre spoiling the trick.”)“There’s people who hate me who can tell me every joke I’ve ever done on the show,” he said, referring to “S.N.L.”Andre D. Wagner for The New York TimesIn our conversation, Che continued to play his remarks off as a joke. “Who doesn’t say they’re going to quit their job when they’re at their other job?” he said. “I’m sure Biden says that twice a week.”In a more sincere tone, Che said, “My head has been at leaving for the past five seasons.”He added, “I do think that I’ve been here longer than I’ll be here. This show is built for younger voices and, at some point, there’ll be something more exciting to watch at the halfway mark of the show than me and dumb Jost.”(Jost said he construed that as a term of endearment. “Now I’m excited to pitch ‘Dumb Jost’ to Apple,” he responded.)Michaels said that “a year of change” was possible after the current season of “S.N.L.” but he hoped Che would not be part of that turnover.“If I had my way, he’ll be here,” Michaels said. “And I don’t always get my way. But when you have someone who’s the real thing, you want to hold on as long as you can.”Though the comedian hopes his work on “That Damn Michael Che” will stand on its own, Che recognized that his time at “S.N.L.” confers a unique status that no other program can duplicate.“There’s people who hate me who can tell me every joke I’ve ever done on the show,” he said.He added, “Even when it’s not exciting, people are like, when’s it going to be exciting? No one says it was never exciting. You understand that, at any moment, something cool could happen.”Speaking as a guy who already has two sketch shows and a standup act to choose from, Che said, “I got really lucky in my career. When I get bad stuff, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m due, I can’t complain.’ I didn’t complain when it was good.” More

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      ‘S.N.L.’ Imagines the Origins of Abortion Law

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      On an episode hosted by Benedict Cumberbatch, “Saturday Night Live” contemplated the possibility that the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade.“Saturday Night Live” dug deep for its opening sketch this weekend, far into the text of a leaked draft opinion indicating that the Supreme Court has voted to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision, at the section where the draft opinion’s author, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., cites legal theory from 13th century England.As an introductory voice-over described the scene, “We go now to that profound moment of moral clarity, almost a thousand years ago, which laid such a clear foundation for what our laws should be in 2022.”Within the stone walls of a medieval castle, wearing period costumes and wigs, the cast members James Austin Johnson and Andrew Dismukes were brainstorming with a third character, played by the show’s guest host, Benedict Cumberbatch.“While I was cleaning the hole on the side of the castle where we poop and then it falls through the sky into a moat of human feces, I started to think about abortion,” Cumberbatch said, adding, “Don’t you think we ought to make a law against it?”“Exactly. Something fair and reasonable like those laws. We should make a law that will stand the test of time, so that hundreds and hundreds of years from now, they’ll look back and say, no need to update this one at all — they nailed it back in 1235.”Dressed as a medieval woman, Cecily Strong interrupted the men’s discussion. “I was outside watching the sheriff throw left-handed children into the river and I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about a new law,” she said.Strong asked them, “I was just wondering since I’m almost at the childbearing age of 12, shouldn’t women have the right to choose, since having a baby means like a 50 percent chance of dying?”Cumberbatch answered, “Yes, but that’s why we’re also offering maternity leave. When you’re done with 20 years of continuous maternity, you can leave.”When the three men all voted in favor of their new law, a fourth man, played by Chris Redd, attempted to vote against it.“I’m just playing,” Redd said. “I know I can’t vote. But you know, Moors gonna be Moors.”Kate McKinnon entered the room wearing long gray hair and a pointed hat, and Cumberbatch recoiled: “An ogre!” he exclaimed.“No, no, just a woman in her 30s,” McKinnon replied. She explained that eating a weird mushroom had given her the power to see far into the future, when this oppressive law would be overturned and then that outcome would itself be undone.McKinnon tried to offer some words of encouragement. “No matter how many choices they take away from women, we’ve always got the choice to keep fighting,” she said.“That’s really inspiring,” Cumberbatch responded. “And after hearing your perspective, I suddenly realize — you’re a witch and we’re going to set you on fire.”Hidden Talent of the WeekOne potential upside of hosting “S.N.L.” is that you might get to show off a skill or talent the audience doesn’t know you have. In the case of Cumberbatch, the Oscar-nominated star of “The Power of the Dog” and the “Doctor Strange” films, he demonstrated that he’s a pretty decent singer when he assumes the guise of a prison inmate on a chain gang in 1950s Georgia.While fellow convicts played by Johnson, Redd and Kenan Thompson smash rocks and lament their long internments, Cumberbatch is the one enjoying cherry pie and boasting that he’s the prison snitch. (He also put his pipes to use in a later sketch playing half of a 1980s New Wave rock duo that finds itself playing a gig at Chuck E. Cheese.)Weekend Update Jokes of the WeekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on the Supreme Court’s draft opinion and its potential impact on abortion access.Jost began:Well, guys, tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Whether you wanted to be one or not. In an unprecedented move that could cause lasting damage to the Supreme Court, a draft opinion was leaked which indicates that they intend to overturn Roe v. Wade. So the Court is usually careful, but they slipped up just this once and now they’ve got to live with it forever. Sounds really unfair.The opinion was written by Justice Samuel Alito, and he bases his arguments on laws from the 1600s. So it’s an outdated opinion from an angry 70-year-old? This shouldn’t be a Supreme Court decision; it should just be a Facebook post. The opinion also seems like it was written in a weird conservative bubble. Here’s how you know: He quotes his own colleague Brett Kavanaugh six times. One for each beer in the pack. He even cites Kavanaugh on civil rights, which is like citing Amber Heard on how to make a bed. Chief Justice John Roberts said that the leak was “the work of one bad apple.” One bad apple is also another legal argument used in Alito’s opinion [his screen shows a picture of Eve in the Garden of Eden].Che continued:As a man, there’s no way I can understand the full impact of this issue. But I asked a bunch of women around the office what their personal experience was with abortion, and I’ve got to admit, I learned a lot from the HR meeting they made me go to.But I do know this ruling will have a disproportionate effect on poor people. I mean, most Americans don’t have access to the same resources that I do. The average person can’t just text Lorne in the middle of the night and say, “Yo, it happened again.” I just don’t get why Republicans are so against this. Maybe don’t think of it as an abortion. Think of it as a patriot storming a uterus to overturn the results of an unfair pregnancy.Weekend Update Desk Segment of the WeekMcKinnon, who for many years was “S.N.L.”’s resident impersonator of the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appeared this week at the Update desk to play her conservative successor, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.Playing Barrett in a comic back-and-forth with Jost, McKinnon tried to tamp down the perception that she was pleased about the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “I don’t know what would make you think that, other than everything I’ve ever said,” she explained.McKinnon also emphasized so-called safe-haven laws that allow parents to give up custody of an infant.“Give it to a stork and the stork will give it to a lesbian,” she said. “I would think that lesbians would be happy because now there’s more babies for them to adopt. Until we ban that, too.” More

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      In ‘I Love That for You,’ Vanessa Bayer Sells Out

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      The “Saturday Night Live” veteran’s new sitcom draws on her experience of childhood cancer and her obsession with home shopping TV.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.According to Vanessa Bayer, being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia as a 15-year-old wasn’t all bad.It got her out of gym class. The attendance lady at her high school never marked her as tardy. She told a boy she didn’t like that she couldn’t be his date for the homecoming dance because she had chemo that weekend. (She didn’t). Her father talked his way out of a speeding ticket by using her illness as an excuse, a tactic he referred to as “dropping the L-bomb.”Bayer survived the L-bomb. The experience didn’t change her, she said, but it did intensify characteristics that were already inherent — determination, resilience, a borderline delusional sense of optimism. Who receives a diagnosis of cancer and accentuates the positive? Bayer does.“I was always a person who loved attention,” Bayer said chirpily. “This allowed me to get so much attention.”Bayer is getting attention now. On Sunday, Showtime will premiere the first episode of “I Love That for You” (the Showtime app will have it on Friday), a sitcom that draws on Bayer’s pediatric cancer and her longtime obsession with home shopping shows. She stars as Joanna Gold, a sheltered young woman and leukemia survivor who auditions to become the newest host on the Special Value Network. Nearly fired after her disastrous first hour on camera, she saves her job by telling her colleagues that her cancer has returned. (It hasn’t.)Bayer’s character pretends to have cancer in order to keep her job at a home shopping network.Tony Rivetti Jr./ShowtimePlaying Joanna isn’t cathartic for Bayer — she doesn’t seem to need catharsis — but it does offer her a chance to work through her past, this time with even more jokes. “It’s really nice to be able to have some distance from that time and to be able to laugh at it even more,” she said.Bayer grew up in a Reform Jewish family in the suburbs of Cleveland. A star student and a cross-country runner, she decided that she wouldn’t let her illness mess with her G.P.A., even when teachers told her she could coast.“It lit this fire under me,” she said. “It was important to me that everybody saw me as someone who wasn’t weak.”Diagnosed in the spring of her freshman year, she spent time in the hospital, then in outpatient treatment, completing chemotherapy just before her senior year. She graduated on time. As prom queen.She first performed comedy as a member of Bloomers, an all-female troupe at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, she moved to Chicago and studied and performed at various improv theaters, which eventually led to a spot on “Saturday Night Live” in 2010. There she created characters such as Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy and Dawn Lazarus, an anxious meteorologist. But long before she got paid for it, Bayer had relied on jokes as a coping mechanism.“I had to use humor to make everyone, including myself, feel OK,” she said, speaking of her time in treatment. Here comes that optimism again: “I also think it made me funnier.”She was speaking, from a bench on the fringes of Central Park, on a recent Friday afternoon. The temperature had climbed to nearly 70 degrees, but Bayer, who had just flown in on a red-eye from Los Angeles, was bundled against the spring in a belted coat, a knit beanie and Rag & Bone fleece sneakers. She had a green juice in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. A medical-grade mask had left a red mark high on each cheek.Even sleep-deprived and apparently very cold, Bayer radiated positivity. She smiled approvingly at the gamboling dogs, the sweating men, the woman who had arrived for a constitutional in high heels and full makeup. “Nothing like New York birds!” she said, when a flock of pigeons flew over, Hitchcock close. In high school she was voted Most Likely to Succeed. Most Likely to Bake a Mean Casserole would have tracked, too — even sitting in the middle of Manhattan, she emanated Midwestern normalcy and niceness.Over seven years on “Saturday Night Live,” Bayer (with Michael Che) was a dependable utility player with many memorable appearances on Weekend Update.Dana Edelson/NBC“She almost doesn’t seem like an actress,” said Molly Shannon, an “S.N.L.” veteran who now co-stars opposite Bayer as SVN’s superstar host. “She’s very steady and calm and grounded.”The comedian Aidy Bryant, who worked with Bayer in Chicago before they both found their way to “S.N.L.,” noted that Bayer has a way of turning that mildness into a strike force. When it comes to comedy, Bryant said, “She is a quiet, smiling assassin.”“Vanessa has a real reserved, polite, wonderfully Midwestern energy,” she added. “Then she hits with a punchline or a funny reaction or her truly incredible smile, which she can weaponize as a force of pain.”On “S.N.L.,” Bayer became a dependable utility player, often infusing characters (football widow, early career Jennifer Aniston) with a manic intensity — eyes overbright, speech a tick too fast. Taran Killam, another “S.N.L.” co-star, noted how calm the offscreen Bayer seemed, a composure he attributed to her history.“It must have given her incredible perspective,” he said. “‘S.N.L.’ is a very passionate job, a dream job. It feels like it matters more than anything in the world. She would always be the first one to say: ‘Who cares? No big deal. So they didn’t like the sketch? Move on.’”“S.N.L.” has a famously punishing schedule. But Jeremy Beiler, a former “S.N.L.” writer who joined around the same time Bayer did, noted how she met the stresses of the job with buoyancy.“She only looks in one direction,” he said. “It’s only forward.”In 2017, after seven seasons on “S.N.L.,” Bayer moved on. Another comedian might have worried about what would come next. Unsurprisingly, Bayer stayed positive. “My attitude is just that stuff kind of works out,” she said. And it did work out, more or less, with guest spots, voice work, supporting roles in a few movies.“I had to use humor to make everyone, including myself, feel OK,” Bayer said, speaking of her time in cancer treatment as a teen. “I also think it made me funnier.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesAs she was leaving “S.N.L.,” her management team asked her about dream projects, and her mind somehow flashed on home shopping TV. She had watched the channels often as a child: The peek into adult life fascinated her, and she loved the elegance of the hosts and the ways in which they would spin seemingly extemporaneous stories in their attempts to entice buyers.She described the hosts’ particular rhythms and vocabulary as “the first foreign language I ever learned,” and the network most likely provided her first taste of improv, too. (In college, when it came time to write her first sketch, she wrote one set in the world of home shopping, in which the host was selling cardboard with a hole in it. It killed.)A few months later, over brunch, Beiler mentioned that he had, by coincidence, begun a series pilot set in the world of home shopping. They began to collaborate, even arranging a field trip to QVC’s headquarters in West Chester, Pa., where they met with two hosts, Jane Treacy and Mary Beth Roe, whom Bayer had idolized as a child, and also managed to score some free soft pretzels. (Everyone I spoke to mentioned Bayer’s enthusiasm for snacks, and most of them mentioned her gift for scamming her way into free ones.) In the gift shop, they bought matching QVC mugs.Back at work, with Jessi Klein as showrunner, they began to build out a back story for Bayer’s character, Joanna, that would give her stakes and drive. They decided to borrow from Bayer’s own story, particularly her diagnosis and treatment and the way that those years of chemo and radiation stunted her emotional growth for a while.“I didn’t understand dating at all,” she said. “It was just playing catch up. Even out of college and into my 20s, I always was trying to fake being an adult.” In an hour’s conversation, this was the closest she ever came to acknowledging that pediatric cancer hadn’t been entirely a walk in the park.Bayer didn’t mind lending Joanna her medical chart — she has never been shy about her diagnosis. As a teen she used it to win her family a trip to Hawaii courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. (She had thought about asking to meet Jared Leto, but she eventually decided she would prefer to meet him as a peer. Years later, she did.) Colleagues at “S.N.L.” have heard her introduce leukemia into the conversation just to get free ice cream, which jibes with advice she offered during our interview: If you are sick, use it to get whatever you can.Bryant said, “She always takes the things that are hard and makes them something that she can use to empower herself or use to her advantage.”Gradually, Joanna took shape, a woman more guarded than Bayer and more stunted, with her same love of snacks and her same gift for antic improvisation but none of her obvious success. A woman who lies about having cancer shouldn’t be a woman you root for, but Bayer has a way of communicating a kind of desperate brightness that makes terrible things seem less terrible, just because she does them with such enthusiasm.What the camera recognizes is what Shannon, who also survived a major childhood trauma (her mother, youngest sister and a cousin were killed in a car accident), identified as a shared joy and determination to wring the utmost out of life.“We don’t take it for granted,” Shannon said. “We feel so lucky that we’re alive. For real.”There are many stories about illness. (Admittedly, there are fewer of them set in the world of home shopping.) But this is one — with its snacks and its sunniness and its heroine’s determination to exploit her fake diagnosis for all she can — that seemingly only Bayer can tell.“I always wanted to do something about when I was sick,” she said contentedly, as the gentle chaos of Central Park swirled around her. “Specifically, the fun I had.”Audio produced by More

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      ‘SNL’ Offers Easter Wishes From Elon Musk, Donald Trump and More

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      The host and musical guest was Lizzo, probably the first “Saturday Night Live” guest to get audiences cheering for a flute solo.The Easter holiday is a period for rebirth and renewal — and also an opportunity for “Saturday Night Live” to pack as many celebrity impersonations as possible into a single sketch.This weekend’s “S.N.L.,” which featured Lizzo as its host and musical guest, opened with its cast members performing a grab-bag of impressions, starting with Bowen Yang as the Easter bunny.He explained that although he may not be the most popular holiday mascot, “I am the freakiest: a man-sized bunny with no back story.”Yang added that, unlike Santa Claus, “I don’t use enslaved elves to make my Easter baskets. I get them on Etsy. Because I support women.”Yang was followed by Kate McKinnon, in her recurring role as Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. “Trust me, I’m not here to give you any more Covid guidance,” McKinnon said. “I’m not stupid enough to think you’re actually going to follow it. All I’ll say is that Covid cases are a lot like Jesus: They’ve risen again.”Cecily Strong played Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who said she had been aggressively wishing a happy Easter to her Jewish and Muslim colleagues. Chris Redd played Mayor Eric Adams of New York, who shared some good news with the audience:“We got him: We got the shooter,” Redd said, a reference to the man accused of opening fire in a subway car in Brooklyn on Tuesday. “Sure, it took 30 hours, and the suspect turned himself in, but we got him. Case closed. Subway’s fixed. Ride without fear.”Mikey Day appeared as the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and announced that he planned to buy Easter. “I am offering 43 billion Peeps,” he said. After some stilted laughter, Day added: “That was a joke. Ha ha ha. Do you get it? That’s why, afterwards, I say, ‘That was a joke.’”Chloe Fineman portrayed Britney Spears, who was celebrating her recent release from a yearslong conservatorship. “Don’t worry; I’m finally free, and I’m having a baby,” she said. “I just pray my baby is born happy, healthy and with the power of attorney.Next, Kyle Mooney appeared in long hair and a beard, identifying himself as Jesus Christ. “Just kidding — I’m Jared Leto,” he said. He added that his Easter message this year was to encourage positivity. “So if you go to see my new movie, ‘Morbius,’ please don’t review it,” he said.Just as Yang appeared to be wrapping up the sketch, he was interrupted by James Austin Johnson, playing former President Donald J. Trump. Johnson, as Trump, complained that his omission was “another example of how whites are being treated horribly in this country.”He went on to give a rambling, discursive monologue about Cap’n Crunch, Seabiscuit and Little Caesar (whom Johnson claimed he taught to say, “Pizza, pizza”). He then marked the holiday by observing: “I’ve told America Covid would be over by Easter. I just didn’t say which one.”Nostalgia plays of the weekThis was the week that “S.N.L.” realized it had the ideal distribution of cast members to play the members of the Black Eyed Peas for a sketch in which two producers in 2008 (played by Lizzo and Aidy Bryant) help the bandmates (Kenan Thompson, Strong, Redd and Yang) spin their none-too-complex insights and emotions into hit singles like “Boom Boom Pow” and “I Gotta Feeling.”And if that sketch wasn’t enough to satisfy your desire to be transported back to a more innocent time of, like, 13 or 14 years ago, there was also this segment in which several performers played Mr. Six, the inexplicably spry former mascot of Six Flags theme parks.Lizzo performances of the weekLizzo’s musical talents were put to productive use in a few sketches this week, most notably this filmed segment in which she and the Please Don’t Destroy team frantically attempt to brainstorm a new hit single for her in 10 minutes, resulting in the hilariously disastrous song (and music video) “Horny Zookeeper.” (A close runner-up would be this sketch that casts Lizzo as a twerking flutist whose unconventional methods inspire an entire orchestra.)Lizzo was pretty successful, too, when it was time to be a legitimate, non-comedic musician: Her performance of her new song “About Damn Time” is probably the first time we’ve seen the “S.N.L.” audience go nuts for a flute solo.Weekend Update jokes of the weekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che riffed on President Biden’s political woes and Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter.Jost began:A new poll shows that President Biden’s approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 33 percent. For a perspective, that’s less the half the approval rating of “Sonic the Hedgehog 2.” “Sonic 2” features the characters Tails and Knuckles, which are also the names of two gang members Joe Biden claims he fought in the 1960s. A video has also gone viral of President Biden finishing a speech in North Carolina, then apparently turning to shake hands with an invisible person. Hey, her name is Kamala.Che continued:President Biden, seen here trying to remember where he left his mask, announced new federal regulations for ghost guns. I mean, look, I don’t like the idea of people having ghost guns, either. But if there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call? [His screen showed the cast of “Ghostbusters.”] Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for over $40 billion so he can loosen its free speech rules. That’s how badly white guys want to use the N-word.Jost added to this thread:Honestly, I don’t understand why Elon even wants to own Twitter. It used to be something that seemed important and even fun, and now you look at it and it’s confusing and depressing. It’s the Giuliani of apps. And come on, Elon built electric cars, he’s going to Mars. Why is he even involving himself with Twitter? It would be like if the prince of England gave it all up just to marry an actor from “Suits.” Plus, I’ve got to say, Twitter’s not even profitable anymore. It just feels like a bad business decision. And I say that as someone who bought a Staten Island Ferry with Pete. More

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      Jerrod Carmichael Comes Out in ‘Rothaniel,’ but It’s About More

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      In “Rothaniel” on HBO, the stand-up grapples with secrets that defined his upbringing, the toll silence has taken and the price he’s paying to break it.In his 2014 debut special, “Love at the Store,” the stand-up comic Jerrod Carmichael offered advice to gay people about the right time to come out of the closet. “Save it until you need it,” he said, quipping: “I would come out of the closet when a friend asked me to move.”It’s one of many of his old jokes that hit differently after “Rothaniel,” a riveting new special from Carmichael who, sitting onstage at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York, reveals that he is gay, has been lying about it for years and wants to now tell the truth. Coming out of the closet will be the headline, especially in a stand-up scene historically rife with homophobia, but the most fascinating, charged material in this hour (premiering at 9 p.m. Friday on HBO) grapples with the roots of his silence — and the price of breaking it.Stylishly directed by Bo Burnham, who staged Carmichael’s last special, “8,” with similar idiosyncrasy, “Rothaniel” begins with a street-level shot looking up at snow falling, then follows Carmichael walking toward the club, but from so far away that you can’t make him out. As a director of specials, Burnham specializes in claustrophobic close-ups, which he employs here too, but he begins at a distance.As soon as Carmichael starts talking, you realize that he has kept us at one, too — until this reintroduction. While he has the same charming smile and supremely relaxed conversational style, he sounds different here: melancholy, earnest and poetic, direct. He’s now sitting, encouraging the crowd to talk back, speaking in an intimate tone, leveling with us and himself. Those old provocative stand-up premises only hinted at this new man, especially when they dug into family matters. “I want to talk about secrets,” he says early on here. “I felt like I was birthed into them.”This is a work about the complexity and ubiquity of secrets. It’s a word he has used before in similar ways. In his last special, he looked at a white woman in the front row who came with a Black boyfriend and said: “If his grandma were alive, you would be a secret.”Now he isn’t joking. Or he isn’t only joking. This special doesn’t feel like stand-up but it is. Carmichael is masterful at disguising punch lines in a thought so as not to interrupt its flow. The jokes are ultimately ornamental, decorating the emotional core: a story told through confessions. The initial one reveals that his first name is actually his middle name. The special’s title is a reference to his real one, a conflation of two of the names of his grandfathers. He explains in detail how much he hated the name, how he bribed yearbook editors in school to change it and got the bank to remove it from cards. It’s one of many biographical moments that illustrate how he developed the tools for the closet, how to live with things that, as he put it, “exist but don’t exist.”Much of this has to do with family history, which he has always talked about in his work but glancingly. Now he is blunt, detailing lives that also held secrets people knew but didn’t at the same time. Carmichael is alert to how pervasive they are, showing us the normal ones we don’t think much about. For example, he digs into the irony that we all are a product of our parents having sex, but none of us can stand to talk with our parents about sex.Carmichael is an incredibly poised, even chilly performer, comfortable in silences, seemingly unflappable. But what he does in this special is deconstruct this persona, reveal it as a useful mask, even an inherited one. He doesn’t just show us the roots of this façade, but also why he clung to it — and what it cost him. Some of this, like his explanation of why he smiles so much, is brutally frank. Other times it’s really funny. Being in the closet, he says, made him overcompensate: “Sometimes we’re making out,” he says about a boyfriend, “and just whisper ‘no homo’ to each other.”The heart of this show is about the painful tension between family ties and personal growth, and the most searing segments focus on his relationship with his mother. Her reaction to his sexuality, rooted in her faith, leaves him cold. The fact that he has such love for her, that he describes himself as an echo of her in some ways, makes this even more poignant. This special, which at its climax finds its star hunched in a nearly fetal posture, hits jarring notes that have never been matched in this form.It’s not just emotionally raw, but present and immediate in a way that a polished joke will never be. In one remarkable moment toward the end, he looks directly at the camera, and I physically turned away, as if it were so private that it would be impolite to watch.Art this uncomfortable tends to have rough edges, and this special does, too. But it’s artfully presented, almost to a fault. Burnham and Carmichael are such slickly skillful and assured artists that it can be hard to believe them when they get messy. Carmichael isn’t trying to tell an uplifting story so much as a real one, and “Rothaniel” does not build to a tidy resolution. It’s raw, and you might have some questions.I would recommend watching Carmichael’s lovely little 2019 documentary, “Home Videos” (also on HBO Max), shot in his hometown Winston-Salem, N.C., that features a conversation with his mother to give her some equal time. You can see the warmth between them, and his role as a needling son, asking her if she ever did cocaine or slept with a woman. When she says no, he tosses out abruptly that he hooked up with men. In a later interview, he downplayed the comment as just something he said in the moment.His mother has her story, too, though this special isn’t about that. Earlier this week, Carmichael performed at Union Hall in Brooklyn to prepare for hosting “Saturday Night Live” this weekend, an episode that will be surely dominated by bits about the Academy Awards. He joked that he was the least famous person to ever host “S.N.L.” and that all you had to do to get the gig was come out of the closet. He said he hadn’t talked to his mother in months though he once did every day.Once again, he was sitting, chatting with the crowd less than delivering a set, and seemed to be seeking something in the moment, a real experience, albeit one that could help him build a monologue. Carmichael asked the audience what he should talk about on Saturday. Someone yelled gas prices. “I’ve been rich too long,” he retorted.Another person mentioned the feud between Kanye West and Pete Davidson. Carmichael said he knew both of them through discussions about mental health and suicide. “But now,” he joked, “every time I hear about either of them I want to kill myself.”But when someone mentioned possibly doing a song, Carmichael shook his head, saying that was not in his performer’s tool kit. “I wish I was an entertainer,” he said. “My skill is I’m not afraid and I have a pocket full of matches.” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Promised Land’ and a Janet Jackson Special

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      ABC debuts a new drama about a wine-country power struggle. And a four-part documentary about Janet Jackson debuts on Lifetime and A&E.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Jan. 24-30. Details and times are subject to change.MondayMARCH 8 p.m. on CW. This new, eight-part docuseries takes a close look at the prestigious marching band at Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black university in Texas. Some of the more than 300 band members share the sacrifices they make to be a part of the group — which, in 2021, was ranked eighth among all H.B.C.U. Division I bands by the ESPN publication The Undefeated — while balancing a busy college life.PROMISED LAND 10 p.m. on ABC. A wildly successful, family-run wine business is at the center of this new drama series, which is set in California’s Sonoma Valley region. Here, familiar power-struggle themes are paired with an exploration of immigrant experiences. The family that controls the vineyard is led by a self-made patriarch (played by John Ortiz) who has achieved an archetypal American dream. The show also follows a group of new immigrants who, in Monday night’s episode, cross into the United States from Mexico in search of their own version of that dream.TuesdayWAIT UNTIL DARK (1967) 6 p.m. on TCM. Looking for a suspenseful heart racer that might make you gasp or shriek? Audrey Hepburn earned her fifth and final best-actress Oscar nomination for her performance in this edge-of-your-seat classic, in which she plays a woman who, after being blinded in a car accident, takes possession of a doll that’s stuffed with heroin. A group of clever gangsters (played by Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna and Jack Weston) go through horrifying lengths to get it. “The tension is terrific and the melodramatic action is wild,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his 1967 review for The New York Times.WednesdayI CAN SEE YOUR VOICE 8 p.m. on Fox. Can you tell if someone can sing without ever hearing a single note? This music guessing game puts that deceptively complex question to the test. One contestant must tell the difference between good and bad singers using a lip-sync challenge, a series of questions and other unorthodox methods. Whichever singer the contestant picks reveals their vocal abilities in a duet performance with the episode’s special musical guest, which could result in either an epic collaboration or a laughable catastrophe. The comedian Ken Jeong hosts, and the actress Cheryl Hines and the TV personality Adrienne Bailon-Houghton serve as the show’s permanent “celebrity detectives.”ThursdayAna de Armas and Daniel Craig in “Knives Out.”Claire Folger/LionsgateKNIVES OUT (2019) 7 p.m. on Syfy. After directing “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” the filmmaker Rian Johnson wrote and directed this thrilling, star-studded whodunit. The mysterious death of an acclaimed novelist, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) at a sprawling estate leads a master detective (Daniel Craig) to investigate the members of the novelist’s flawed family. “‘Knives Out’ is essentially an energetic, showy take on a dusty Agatha Christie-style murder mystery with interrogations, possible motives and dubious alibis,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. In addition to Craig, the ensemble cast includes Ana de Armas, Chris Evans and Jamie Lee Curtis.GROWN-ISH 10 p.m. on Freeform. In this coming-of-age comedy spinoff of the ABC hit “black-ish,” Zoey Johnson (Yara Shahidi) and her friends come back to their fictional California university as upperclassmen. Expect a fresh take on the hardships that come with entering adulthood — student loans, work-life balance, bad breakups and the rest — during the current fourth season. This show was created by Kenya Barris (who created “black-ish”) and the comedian Larry Wilmore.FridayJanet Jackson in the new documentary “Janet Jackson.”LifetimeJANET JACKSON: PART 1 & PART 2 8 p.m. on Lifetime and A&E.The life and legacy of the powerhouse performer Janet Jackson is the subject of this new two-night, four-hour documentary special. Expect an intimate look at Jackson’s more than 40-year career, told through newly surfaced footage, home videos and interviews with Jackson’s friends and collaborators, among them Mariah Carey, Paula Abdul and Missy Elliott. The documentary’s creative team presumably had plenty of access: Jackson herself is one of its producers, alongside her brother Randy Jackson, who was a member of the Jacksons. “This is my story told by me,” Janet Jackson says in a trailer, “not through someone else’s eyes.” The first two parts will air simultaneously on both networks on Friday night; the second half will follow on Saturday night.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More