Jerrod Carmichael ghosted Bill Cosby after receiving valuable advice from him

Jerrod Carmichael is reflecting on good advice he received from questionable sources.

In an interview with Late Night with Seth Meyers, the comedian discussed the difficulty of publicly sharing some of his more vulnerable or uncomfortable anecdotes as he creates his new series The Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. “It's hard week to week to have to relive some of these moments,” Carmichael said. “I stay out of the editing room 'cause I'll take out all the good stuff. Like, I'll be really precious and go, ‘I'll take out the things that make me look bad,’ but that – The show wouldn't be good.”

Host Seth Meyers asked him where he learned to stay out of the editing process, to which Carmichael shot back a surprising response: “Honestly, Bill Cosby,” he said. “It was advice I got from Bill Cosby, he said, ‘Stay out of the editing room.’”

To reassure the audience that he wasn’t still pals with the disgraced Cosby Show star, Carmichael said, “He told me that, and then I never talked to him again. I think he went to jail or something.”

In a 2017 interview with The Daily Beast, Carmichael had previously reflected on meeting Cosby in 2014 before the widespread proliferation of sexual misconduct allegations dominated headlines. “I look at meeting him, and he was very kind to me, so I won’t be disrespectful of that,” Carmichael said at the time. “But there are real, serious accusations and you have to be respectful of those as well. The mind is torn, but I think both can coexist, even within our own heart.”

Later, Carmichael’s sitcom The Carmichael Show grappled with Cosby’s complex legacy and the difficulty of separating the art from the artist in a 2017 episode.

Elsewhere in the Late Night interview, Carmichael recalled an off-color joke that he told on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that landed with a thud. “I actually recently realized in therapy that if a guy doesn't somehow remind me of my mom, I can't get hard,” he recalled joking on the show. "The audience went silent. The boom mic operator pulled the mic away from my face. I look over to Ellen for support. She was just like, 'Jesus Christ.' And then it got cut out from the show."

Watch the full conversation between Carmichael and Meyers above.

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